A few weeks ago, I was struggling to put together a songlist for a worship event I was doing. For those who don’t know, the songlist is the song and order of songs for a worship set. I was having a pretty bad week and was not feeling like I wanted to worship at all, which wasn’t helping with creating the songlist.
At around the one-hour mark of wrangling (or strangling) my songlist, I felt the Lord say “[Bring a] Sacrifice of Praise.” I felt so convicted, but I also didn’t want to do it.
You see, the thing with praise and worship is that you can’t just pretend to sing along. You have to be present and focused on Jesus and mean what you sing/say to Him. It’s easy to praise God when everything’s great and you’re seeing God show up everywhere. Conversely, it’s very hard to praise God when everything is going wrong and you feel awful.
The phrase “sacrifice of praise” appears in Hebrews 13:15, which says
“Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess his name.”
The “continually” in this verse doesn’t exclude our bad times, and therein lies the sacrifice.
Can we give the Lord what little we have in us to praise Him even in the midst of our trials, troubles, and pain? It’s very counterintuitive, as my normal response would be to avoid worship and God.
Would the Lord even want my angry, sad, worship? Apparently, the answer was yes. I ended up dragging my feet but eventually completing the songlist and worshipping with it. It turned out to be a time of raw, heartfelt praise and worship where God felt closer than He had in a while. In one of my worser moments, the thing I needed the most, even though I tried to avoid it, was to just worship and be in the presence of God.
I know many of us are dealing with a lot right now and one of the last things we might want to do is worship God. I know it’s hard, but I encourage you and give it a try. It can be a simple as playing a worship song on YouTube, but it can really change things. I’ve included a couple below that’s really spoken to me over the weeks. May we be able to focus on God and give Him our praise in bad times as well as the good times.