I believe with all my heart that praise is a choice we make. We choose to praise God. It’s nothing to do with personality or happiness; it’s all to do with obedience.
Many of the worship songs we sing have been birthed in tragedy and pain. Matt and Beth Redman wrote ‘You Never Let Go’ when Beth suffered yet another miscarriage on her 30th birthday. They were determined, in their grief, to hold on to God and to worship God despite their pain. Darlene Zschech, who wrote ‘Shout to the Lord’, writes about miscarrying a child and feeling a ‘depth of sadness that was too heavy to bear.’ She writes that as she came from the hospital and sat in her car:
‘I heard the Holy Spirit whisper, ‘Sing’. In that moment it was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. Sing? I couldn’t think of anything that I felt less like doing… My head didn’t sing, and I do not even know if my heart sang, but my soul sang.’ (‘Extravagant Worship’, P 57)
God knows our heartache and our griefs better than we do, but He still asks us to praise Him. There will be times when that costs us, when it is truly a sacrifice to sing. Do not think that those who sing do so always from a place of joy. Jeremy Camp, another Christian songwriter, lost his first wife to cancer in her early twenties. He is candid about how that felt, about the hurt, disappointment and frustration her death brought him: ‘I would read about how God healed in the Gospels and I would throw my Bible across the room. I questioned whether God is a loving God. In frustration I would say, ‘I don’t want to share in your faithfulness because I don’t think you are faithful.’ So many times I would pound on my bed because I wanted to punch something. The hardest part was trying to understand why she had to suffer. We would watch her cringe and cry because of the pain.’ (see here).
His father told him, only minutes after she had died, to get up and worship God, because that was the only place he would find victory. Jeremy’s song, ‘I Still Believe’ has the line ‘even when I don’t see, I still believe’ and his song, ‘Walk By Faith’ says ‘this broken road prepares Your will for me.’ It’s not easy to bring a sacrifice of praise in times of grief, bereavement, trouble and pain, but when we shout to the Lord and sing to Him from our brokenness, we find blessings and victory we cannot gain any other way. It’s a mistake to think that praising God comes only from happy hearts. Sacrificial praise comes when we refuse to let our circumstances or feelings have the last word, but choose to obey God and praise Him for who He is and what He has done even when there seems to be no current evidence for praise.