It’s a common lyric heard in churches across the globe.
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow…”
It is an expression of joy and love for a Creator we credit with delivering all the good we experience in life. It is an expression of gratitude.
But, what about those times when life is dealing us those troubling moments. What about when we experience the death of a loved one or a divorce or a job loss. What about when there isn’t enough food in the house to feed our children, or when the car is repossessed because we can’t make the payments.
What about those times? Do we still praise God when it seems He is letting us down? Does God need our praise? Does He have an insatiable ego or derive His power from our praise?
Why should we praise God?
Like many of the subtleties of our search for understanding faith, the concept of praise has a deeper, richer meaning than we ordinarily attribute to it. If we were to reflect upon it, we would probably recognize that anyone we have praised in the past has been a recipient of a feeling of love. We might not be quick to put such a label on it, but if we really think it through, we would recognize that this emotion is attached to our praise.
When we view the link between praise and love in light of other evidence, the value of praise of God becomes clearer. Testimony of those who have experienced a near-death experience (NDE) commonly describes their brief encounter with the spirit world as “unconditional love.”
Therein lies the answer we seek. The Bible contains the phrase “God is love.” (1 John 4:16). By praising God, we are tapping into the ultimate power of the universe. We are strengthening our bond with the Creator by engaging in the practice that drives all of creation.
Even with this understanding, we still need to confront our question about praising God when things aren’t going so well for us. How do we justify that?
Once again, we need to visit the reports of those who seem to have had some exposure to existence after death. Whether it be those who have had NDE, or the rare medium who seems capable of relaying messages from beyond, the prevailing understanding is that earthly experience for a spirit being is something like a learning process. While in human form, we all enjoy the experience of being human, along with all that such an adventure has to offer. While some human experiences can be unpleasant, they all contribute to the growth of the ultimate spirit-being, until death frees us from the bonds of the human form.
Our human experiences are ultimately inconsequential, except for the valuable lessons that contribute to the growth of that spirit being inside each of us. With that in mind, we can embrace that phrase – “praise God, from whom all blessings flow.”
Chief among those blessings is the gift of being human.
Ultimately, we recognize that God doesn’t require our praise, as much as we require that effort to connect us to the universal source of that powerful energy – love.