Growing Into Our Praise

Why is it that, if God made us for praise, we seem so often to find it so terribly difficult and unsatisfying? The answer is this: we praise God in the shadow of our fallenness. Our praise isn’t perfect and free, because we’re sinners, only slowly learning to praise God. Like everything else about us, praise is caught up in the process of our being transformed by the Holy Spirit, sanctified—that is, made holy and therefore made really human. Praise is one of the things that we have to learn to do as through the grace of God we are remade, changed from rebels into God’s docile and willing and obedient people. We’re fallen, and so we’re self-absorbed—our appetites are disorderly, our desire for God is sluggish, our delight in the things of God needs to be stimulated. We can only slowly grasp what it means to gladly acknowledge the truth about God because so much of our lives are hell-bent on repudiating that truth, or evading it, or trying to make it into something we find a bit more palatable. So praise involves toil, submitting to the process in which the warped framework of our lives is bent back into shape, reordered so that praise becomes once more our nature. —John Webster, Christ Our Salvation: Expositions and Proclamations