Worthy to be Praised

“Then, as He was now drawing near the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works they had seen, saying: ‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!’ And some of the Pharisees called to Him from the crowd, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples.’ But He answered and said to them, ‘I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out.”
Luke 19:37-40

The Lord deserves to be praised. Part of the reason He created us was to bring Him glory. Christ was praised when He was here on earth, and He should still be praised today.

This is easy to agree with, but also easy to truly live in defiance of. Too many of us sit in worship services across the world ignoring the words of the songs being sung. We don’t even notice that we are singing that there’s power in the blood of the lamb, or that our God is great. When our preacher speaks we write on bulletins instead of paying attention to the words that are being spoken to glorify Christ. We refuse to say amen, to sing loudly, or to express our praise of Christ because we will be embarrassed.

It is illogical that one should be embarrassed to praise the Lord when in His presence, but most of us are. This is because, just as the Pharisees rebuked the proper praise of Christ in this passage, many sneer at the idea of one praising God properly today. Many people praise in different ways, but most try to avoid praising Him altogether.

Many of us do not even sing to the Lord because we don’t like the song. Why should that matter? We are to praise the Lord, not complain about the words used to do it. Many people like to jump or raise their hands to worship. How many of us look at people who do that and think that they are being idiotic? Are we different than the Pharisees when we do so?

We should never insult others for praising Christ. When we do it is a problem with ourselves. We do not know the proper way to worship, and we get embarrassed when we are in the presence of one who does. It is possible to praise the Lord without raising your hands. It’s possible to praise Him without jumping. Yet when we insult those who praise Him in such ways we are not expressing that we praise Him differently. We are expressing that we don’t praise Him. Those who do make us feel ashamed of our failure to praise Him.

Many of us have received the aid of Christ in numerous instances throughout our lives, but we still do not praise Him properly. This is not uncommon. Christ once healed ten men and only one returned to praise Him (Luke 17:11-19). Christ did even more for us. He died for our sins.

Christ is worthy of our praise. We should ignore lame excuses that try to stop us from praising Him, and do it. Praise the Lord, for He is worthy to be praised.