Sometimes we don’t feel thankful and don’t want to worship God. Our heads tell us we love him and owe him thanks, but our hearts are dry. God understands dry hearts, and he waits for us as we deal with our confused emotions. He wants us to understand the healing that comes from confessing our sins and then praising him, even when we are frustrated. God is OK if we cannot sing praises for a season, or if we initially only praise him because our minds tell us that is right, even if our hearts don’t feel like it. Our feelings can catch up after we heal and after we do begin praising him again. Please join me as I explore our willingness to praise God, initially by making a logical choice, and later from genuine joy over God’s love for us.
Job may offer the most amazing experience of praising God. All of his children died, and all of his wealth was destroyed, yet we see him rise up in praise in Job 1:20-21, “Job stood up and tore his robe in grief. Then he shaved his head and fell to the ground to worship. He said, ‘I came naked from my mother’s womb, and I will be naked when I leave. The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away. Praise the name of the Lord!” Job praised, even though he lost everything. This does not mean he did not weep with gut wrenching anguish. Paul and Silas did something similar when they were unfairly beaten and then thrown into a dank jail. At midnight, these bloodied, despised, innocent men began to sing praises to God (Acts.16:25-26.) Clearly these men praised God despite their pain and despair.
These men learned to praise God, because they had seen God’s greatness. Job had seen God’s faithfulness in his life, and Paul knew God had been faithful to him and to his fellow Israelites for many centuries. They knew God is good. Some would question how God could be good when he allowed so many bad things to happen all at once to Job, and over time to Paul. Yet both men realized that God is good, as a giver, and we get to be the receiver. God does not need us to give him anything, yet we need to receive everything we have from him. In the first and last chapters of Job (1:21 and 42:11) we see that God gave to Job all that he had. Job acknowledged that God had a right to give to him and to take it back (1:21).
Some people miss the truth, that God gives us everything we have, and that God neither owes us, nor is wrong when he withholds some things from us. As a result, they can neither thank God nor worship him. These people say, “God, you didn’t give what I wanted, so I won’t give you thanks.” Yet this phrase is evil. God is always good, never evil. All God does is good.
Many, many people turn from God, because bad things happen to them or others. But God is good, even when bad things happen. God’s main goal is not for our prosperity in this life, but in eternity which lasts forever and not briefly like a human life of 100 years or less. Nothing is random but fits into God’s eternal plan for all of us. God’s “Hesed” (Hebrew for faithful/loyal love) never ends. Our taste buds react to yummy food and say, “this is good,” and our born-again hearts react to God and say, “God is good, and my mind will follow the truth, and my heart will worship in spirit.”
God invites us to worship, not to shame us, but to welcome us to cling to him. To cling requires humility the way a toddler clings to a parent who holds her. That toddler can put her whole self into her parent’s arms, even as we can do that with the Lord. We find our true peace and rest in Him. Our Christian response comes from God’s love filling us first. We praise God because of all the ways he already helped us.
We can tell God the difficult things that others might not want to hear. What a relief that God can hear our harsh words and still love us. Korah’s ancestors did that in Psalm 88. That whole Psalm is full of anguish and woe, yet these sons of Korah had the courage to write these words and apparently even sing them in worship to God. Some may question how such a Psalm can be in the Bible when this Psalm ends in sorrow. But this shows us that God can handle our hard emotions, even our anger and confusion. We may not end a session of prayer or even a worship session having all the answers. God is Ok with our not being OK, especially if distractions cause us this sorrow.
Sometimes Jesus has to take away our desire for other things, so we feel sorrow. We may not feel fulfilled in our work, in relationships, even in food. This might not mean we have fallen into full, clinical despair or depression. It might mean that Jesus is temporarily clearing out the fog of distractions so he becomes all we need and want. He can get into our pain with us as our sympathetic high priest (Hebs.4:15-16, “This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.”) For a season, he may need to take away our pleasure in everything else so only he pleases us. This is only a season. God wants our thankful and worshiping hearts, and at times he has to use what feels like harsh measures.
Jesus does not expect us to figure out our faith and troubles on our own. He has not left us on our own. He wants a personal relationship with us and not our “performance.” So if we cannot praise God with singing, we can praise God by choosing to trust him, despite our dry and frustrated feelings. There may be times when we cannot sing, and God understands this too. Just telling Jesus, “thank you,” is a start. Later, as we heal, we can also choose to sing praise songs even if only our logical minds tell us to do this. God welcomes us when we feel like the Sons of Korah and can only tell God the sad things (like singing the blues to God.) If we are honest with Jesus, as he works in our hearts, eventually we will again sing with joy and cheerful feelings.
God will work with us and enable us to do what we need to do. We can trust God as we stumble to him in honesty with our dry hearts. God is faithful.
I pray we have blessed you with this post and you can be gentle with yourselves as you deal with sorrows and frustrations in life until your hearts can return to praise. Thanks for joining us today!
Debbie, yet another article that edifies and corrects!