How much have you praised God today? In the last week? You might be surprised how little actual praise Christians give, often confusing praise with thanksgiving. In this message, Pastor Clark clearly differentiates between the two – and gives helpful pointers to help us praise more!

<p>How much have you praised God today? In the last week? You might be surprised how little actual praise Christians give, often confusing praise with thanksgiving. In this message, Pastor Clark clearly differentiates between the two – and gives helpful pointers to help us praise more!</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Dalton SDA Church

Chester Clark

Praying with Praise

Father in heaven, today we are so grateful that you've given us a chance to rejoice with heaven.

We thank you that we have this opportunity to see Adam commit his life.

And Lord, there may be someone else here who is also in the valley of decision, and I just pray, Lord, that Adam's testimony might be an encouragement to them.

They might know that You're coming soon and You are calling for their heart and their life.

We want to pray that you'll continue to bless Adam as he walks with you.

May he grow from strength to strength to become more like you.

There are a few things that I've learned about children, and I don't know much about children.

I have to say that, you know, I was an expert about marriage until I got married and now sometimes I feel like I'm an expert on children, since as you know, I don't have any.

But 1 thing that I've appreciated learning from those who have more experience than I is that there's a way to build up a young person's self-esteem in a positive way.

You know, you don't want to make someone egocentric and narcissistic and so self-centered and full of themselves that they become a little terror brat, right?

But you want them to have a healthy self-esteem.

And 1 of the things that I've been taught at least is that you want to praise children for the good decisions they make.

The good decisions they make and the good character that they form.

In other words, if I tell a little child, if I tell a little child, you know, you have such beautiful brown eyes.

That child had nothing to do with their brown eyes, right?

And so there's not really anything that they had to do with having brown eyes and there's not really anything, well they might just become proud of their appearances.

But if I tell a person, you know, I appreciate a child.

I appreciate how honest you are in telling daddy or mommy what happened, what really happened.

You see, now I'm affirming their choices and their character.

You see, there's something in life that's very important.

It's not so important what you say, what you can say.

It's not even so important what you can do.

It's not so important what power you have.

Now if we think about that for just a moment, we realize that praise is the essence of who God is.

We're going to talk about that for just a moment today.

We're going to talk about praying with praise as we discuss God's Word together today.

You know, this week we had pastors' meetings at Cudda Springs.

And 1 of the takeaways that I came home with was realizing that sometimes I confuse thanksgiving with praise.

Do you know the difference between thanksgiving and praise?

Now praise is important and Thanksgiving is important.

Both of them are given in Scripture as something that we ought to do.

Thanksgiving acknowledges what God has done.

Thanksgiving says, thank you God for helping me through the day, for giving me a safe trip, thank you for providing for my needs this month, thank you for giving us this food that we can eat today.

That's Thanksgiving, that's giving God gratitude or thankfulness for what He has done.

On the other hand, praise acknowledges who God is.

1 is to say, thank you God for doing, The other is thank you God for being.

And God is not just interested in hearing what he has done, he's interested in hearing our hearts expressing praise for who he is, because remember, More important than what we can say or what we can do or what we can have power to accomplish, most important is who we are.

And the most important thing about God is not that he can speak and life comes into existence, not that he breathes worlds and stars into existence.

The most important thing about God is not what he can do, but who he is.

Pray, Thanksgiving fills our hearts with gratitude, while praise fills our hearts with what?

With awe as we think about what kind of a God God is.

You know I want to just pause here in this comparison between thanksgiving and praise.

I want to just mention a little bit of theology, I guess.

Do you realize that how we worship reflects our view of God?

Now don't get me wrong in what I'm about to say because I realize that God, God, God knows we're all in our growth, we're all in a different place in our experience and God uses different means to reach different people and bring them to know Him.

But if we look at church history, I'm a historian, if we look at Christian church history we will notice that when there was an extremely transcendent view of God, You know what that means?

It means God is very, very, very, very high.

He's way up there, very different from us, which part of that is good, right?

Because God is a holy God And we shouldn't forget that he is a holy God.

But if God is so far removed, for example, that the church decided we need to have intermediaries between us and him because he's so far removed, right?

If he's so far removed that we cannot contact him directly, we're just, you know, sinners down here and God's way up there, then we have a worship that is very filled with awe.

And if you look at medieval, the medieval church, if you look at the church during the Middle Ages, how did they worship?

I mean, besides intermediaries and so forth, they had grand cathedrals.

Because they remembered the transcendence of God.

I personally believe that we can come to Jesus as we are, and Jesus is our intermediator, our mediator, let me just say it that way, Jesus is our mediator, but I also believe that our God is a holy God.

Now what you see today, and again I'm not criticizing either what happened in the past or what's happening today, but do you notice today you see what we might call big box churches?

I'm going to stereotype them a little bit here, okay, just for illustration's point.

Again, It's not to say that God isn't working, God doesn't use them.

But big box churches where it doesn't even feel like a church, it just feels more like a big room, you know, and it doesn't have the acoustics and the grandeur and the stained glass and the awesomeness, the silence, the sacredness that we used to have in the churches of the Middle Ages, and you have more come as you are and dress as you please, and it's a very relaxed, casual.

And Jesus, God, is very much more become in their thinking more of a 1 of us.

Now somewhere I think there's a middle ground for us to be at.

The point I'm trying to make is this, God is an awesome God and when we think about praise it ought to fill our hearts, overwhelm our hearts with awe as to who God is.

And Thanksgiving, on 1 hand, will make us more positive.

Thanksgiving is a wonderful thing, but Thanksgiving can't do what praise can do.

Thanksgiving makes us more positive, but praise is transformative to make us more like God.

If you have your Bibles, we're going to spend some time in God's Word here right now.

So go ahead and pull out your Bibles or smart phones or less smart phones or whatever you have that you have your Bible on.

And we always assume that people are looking at the text and not texting in church.

So 2 Corinthians we're going to look at first, chapter 3 and verse 18.

This is the principle that makes praise so powerful in our lives.

This is what it says, But we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror, or the King James says a glass, a looking glass, The glory of the Lord.

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Praying with Praise

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