Derek Prince - Praise Gives Us Access To God
This excerpt is from: Thanksgiving, Praise and Worship
This is the second in a series of short talks... on the themes of thanksgiving, praise, and worship. Our first talk was on the theme of thanksgiving, and this talk will be on the second theme, that is the theme of praise. I suggested in the first talk, and I want to repeat it, that these three activities of the human spirit: thanksgiving, praise, and worship, enable us to relate to three different aspects of God's nature. By thanksgiving, we acknowledge God's goodness. All the kind, good things He does for us. By praise, we acknowledge God's greatness. It's our appropriate response to His awe-inspiring majesty. And then by worship, we acknowledge God's holiness.
Now in this second talk, we're going to focus on praise. In the light of what I've said about acknowledging God's greatness, I think it's appropriate to begin with Psalm 48:1. 'Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, in the city of our God, in His holy mountain.' So our acknowledgment of God's greatness is praising Him greatly. In other words, our praise should be in proportion to His greatness. Which means, really, it has to be measureless. We can never exhaust the power and the possibility of praise. Then we saw when we were speaking about thanksgiving, in Psalm 100, that thanksgiving is the first step or stage in our approach to God. Praise is the second stage. After we've been through thanksgiving, we pass on to praise.
Let me suggest to you that both thanksgiving and praise... have a very important psychological effect. If we're coming to God with great petitions, with things that seem very hard and difficult, the more we thank God for all He's already done, the easier it is to believe Him for what we want Him to do next. But if we don't come with thanksgiving, we don't have any psychological build-up to our faith. So let's look now in Psalm 100 again, these two verses, verse 4 and 5. 'Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.' And then it's not by any means wearisome to repeat the three unchanging reasons... for thanking and praising God: 'For the LORD is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endures to all generations.'
If you have your Bible open at any version that sound the least bit like that, why don't we all say it together as an act of faith? 'For the LORD is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endures to all generations.' Now let's say: Thank you, Lord. That's application of the lesson. Now there's another beautiful picture that I want to point out to you in Isaiah 60. This is one of these glorious passages in the later chapters of Isaiah. Isaiah 60:18. This is a description of the city of God. The city to which we have right of access through salvation and through the blood of Jesus. It gives a very beautiful picture of this city in Isaiah 60:18: 'Violence shall no longer be heard in your land, neither wasting nor destruction within your borders.'
We can come to a place in the presence of God... where violence and destruction are just faint echoes from a distance, but they have no reality in the presence of God. And then, how do we get there? 'But you shall call your walls salvation, and your gates praise.' The wall that surrounds the presence of God is salvation. But all the gates have one title, which is praise. In other words, if you want to get in through the wall, what's the gate you have to go through? Praise, that's right. No praise, no access. It's the only way into the immediate presence of God.