“Wherever the soul of man turns, unless towards God, it cleaves to sorrow, even though the things outside God and outside itself to which it clings may be things of beauty.”- Augustine, Confessions
As Timothy Keller begins Chapter 12 of Prayer, he states that another reason for the primacy of praise is that it has great power to heal what is wrong with us as well as create spiritual health. If we don’t praise God, C. S. Lewis once wrote, we will live in unreality and poverty.
Praise prayer directly develops love for God. And what we love establishes the foundation for our most fundamental identity and life behavior. Our main human problem, however, is that, because of our sinful nature, we misidentify what makes us happy. The result is “disordered loves.” We are miserable because we aren’t loving God supremely, as Pastor Keller explains:
” . . . quite simply, if you love anything at all in this world more than God, you will crush that object with the weight of your expectations, and it will eventually break your heart.”
The result of our “disordered loves” is excessive anger, anxiety, and discouragement. Only worship and adoration of God can re-engineer our very inner being, our personality structure. Only through praise and adoration can we cultivate loving God supremely.
Today’s question: Following your vocation loss, what worldly things have interfered with loving God supremely? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Countering spiritual self-sufficiency”
