Worshipping God According to His Greatness

Psalm 150:2 –

1 Praise the LORD!Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty heavens!
2Praise him for his mighty deeds;
praise him according to his excellent greatness!

3Praise him with trumpet sound;
praise him with lute and harp!
4Praise him with tambourine and dance;
praise him with strings and pipe!
5Praise him with sounding cymbals;
praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
6Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!

How does one praise God appropriately? To think that it is possible is to make God small. But that does not mean that we can never praise God in a way that He accepts.

We cannot praise God to the degree that He is great. The version quoted above says praise God “according to” His greatness.  Other translations say “for” His greatness.

This is a call to praise God with an understanding that He is far above whatever we are able to attribute to Him. It is a call to praise Him from our hearts, in sincerity, in truth, without hypocrisy, without our minds wandering off somewhere else. But we simply cannot praise Him to the degree that He is great.

But we can praise God through Jesus Christ. Come to God through Christ. There is no other way to approach Him, either as a repentant sinner or as a blood bought child. God dwells, after all, in unapproachable light. If He is unapproachable, how can we approach in worship?

We approach through Christ. To praise God through Christ is to praise God according to His excellent greatness. We praise God through Christ, in Christ, by Christ. And God counts all that and more as if Christ was the One approaching .

That is the only way to worship God according to His excellent greatness. Lost people simply cannot worship God acceptably and far too many believers come to worship thinking that it is a matter of them being holy enough, obedient enough, or strong enough.

We certainly must not worship with wrong altitudes and wrong motives and actions. But we must never think that we are ever able to come into the presence of God on our own. We can only worship God through Christ. The only acceptable One is Christ Himself and we are hidden in Him and He is the reason we can approach God. This is a great miracle.

Today, when you pray,  marvel that you can. Because it took the death of the Son of God to enable you to do so, as it did for every act of worship. Oh what God has done.