Praise in Prayer, Part 1

I will praise You, O Lord, with all my heart.

Psalm 9:1

Praise in prayer comes from grateful hearts, and gratitude comes from the revelation of God in our hearts of His many blessings. But praise is both deeper and higher than because it rests upon the limitless attributes of Almighty God, and gratitude rests more upon our experiences.

Over the next few days we will examine the role of praise in prayer — what it is and what it is not intended to be. We live in a world where there is confusion over praise, its role in our lives and in our prayers. Some have taken practices of pagan religions and copied their praise of their gods in their worship of Christ. Others have made praise everything, even replacing petitioning God, saying such non-scriptural things as, “We do not need to make requests. We just need to praise God.” Some have neglected praise all together, or given it such a low priority as they pray that they hardly praise at all. Here are some of the basic biblical principles we need to grasp as we praise God.

First, Christian praise is not like the praise of other religions. In the false religions of the world, they praise their god to get his attention, plying him or her with complements so that he will be impressed to pay attention and perhaps help. This is not Christian praise. Christ taught us, “When you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:7–8).

So we pray to the True God who loves us already, who is predisposed to help and to bless, and who already knows what we need. Praise is not some type of bribe to God to get Him to do what He would not ordinarily want to do.

Second, praise is the response of the heart to the greatness, the beauty, the holiness, the righteousness, and the goodness of God — and we could add every other attribute of God we learn from the Bible. It is the proper response of the heart of the worshiper who realizes in whose presence he stands and upon whom he calls.

An ignorant human does not recognize greatness when it is around him. He may stand beside a great composer, a great physician, a great inventor, or a great politician and be entirely unaware that he is in the presence of greatness. How differently we behave when we realize greatness, however. Suddenly we are different. We think differently. We see the person differently. We have a different set of expectations.

Praise of God stems from the realization of how great He is, and our response is humility, worship, and faith. This revelation can only come by the Holy Spirit’s illumination of our heart. “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord!’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3). The recognition and acceptance of the scriptural truths of the greatness of God can only come as God opens our minds and our hearts to understand, to receive, and to believe.

Third, praise is an expression of obedience and submission to Him. It is not merely to know that He is great — even the demons know that (James 2:19) — but it is also to bow before Him in humility and in submission. To submit to another means that we recognize that he is greater than we are.

Because of this, there is a rightness in the human heart whenever we praise God. He has all wisdom, all knowledge, all grace, all power, all holiness, and from this recognition we bow before Him. The Lord taught us to begin prayer with praise and to follow praise with submission of our hearts to His will.

Matthew 6:9–10: This, then, is how you should pray: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”

God does not need to hear this for the sake of His ego, not to feel good about Himself. Praise is not something that God must have to sooth some hurt feelings of rejection. Remember Christ left the praise of heaven to redeem us from our sin. Rather praise is something we need to acknowledge in our hearts and say with our lips and share with the world.

Praise God today in your prayer. Make it your habit to think of the attributes of God that are found in the Scripture and praise Him for who He is, and surrender to Him in your praise. You may be guided in your praise by passages like Psalm 103, Isaiah 6:1–9, Acts 4:23–31, and Philippians 2:5–11.