Derek Prince - You Cannot Get Near To God Without Thanksgiving and Praise
This excerpt is from: Thanksgiving, Praise and Worship
This first talk tonight will be on the theme of thanksgiving. A lot of people have got the impression that prayer is simply a question of asking God for things. As it were, going to God with your shopping list. That is a very limited and inadequate view of prayer. Prayer is not just one instrument playing, it's a whole orchestra. There are many different instruments in that orchestra. We'll be dealing with three of them in this series of talks, as I've said: thanksgiving, praise, and worship. These are all essential parts of prayer. If you just have formed the habit of coming to God with your shopping list, without learning how to integrate with it especially thanksgiving and praise, I'm afraid many times you'll return from your shopping trips without the things you wanted. Because God has laid down certain conditions on which we can approach Him.
Let me say right at the beginning, there is no access to God, into His presence, without thanksgiving and praise. God has laid that down as an absolute condition. I was talking about a couple of years ago to a very senior Christian, he's about my age, he's been a Christian longer than I have. His name is well-known in this country, and a man I greatly respect. And, he heard me say that you cannot get near to God without thanksgiving and praise. He said: 'In all the years I've been a Christian, I never heard that before.' And it revolutionized his prayer life. So we're dealing with things tonight that are of tremendous importance... if you want a fruitful and successful prayer life.
Let me just give you a little way of distinguishing in your mind... between these three things: thanksgiving, praise and worship. Each of them is a way of approaching God and relating to God. But each of them relates us to God in a different aspect. This is very simplistic. You could find exceptions. But just take it for what it's worth. By thanksgiving, we acknowledge God's goodness. By praise, we acknowledge God's greatness. And by worship, we acknowledge God's holiness. So thanksgiving relates us to the goodness of God. Praise relates us to the greatness of God. Worship, which is the highest activity of the human soul, relates us to the holiness of God.