EVERY day???

I don't know about you, but I don't wake up every day feeling like "Little Mary Sunshine."

Okay. Truth. Most days, I do. Yep. I'm one of those gotta-hate-'em "morning people." But - just sayin' - that's not the case every single solitary day.

Yet, I look at this verse in Psalms 145 and realize the psalmist didn't say that he would praise God on the days he woke up feeling great and in a good mood. He said he would praise God EVERY day.

WOW. That's not always easy, is it?

When we're "up" and everything looks good, it's not too hard to remember to praise God. But what about those times when we're "down" and everything looks dark? It might not be easy to praise God on those days, but I've come to believe that offering praise is even MORE important in the difficult times... those times when praise becomes a sacrifice.

Praising God brings us into His presence. The comfort of His presence that comes through praise can sustain us in the darkest of times. A very godly young couple in our church lost their five year old son in a tragic accident a little over a year ago. In the emergency room where doctors had fought valiantly to save this child, the father, sobbing and broken hearted, stretched himself across his son's lifeless body and cried, "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. BLESSED be the name of the Lord."

BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD. Oh what praise! Easy? NO! A sacrifice of praise if there has ever been one. But right? Fitting? YES! For even in our darkest hours - even in the worst circumstances of our lives - Our great and awesome God is WORTHY of our praise.

The psalmist said: "I will exalt you, my God!"

The Hebrew word exalt means to set on high above all others. In the culture of the psalmist's day, the gods of the pagan world around him were being recommended as an alternative to the one true God. The psalmist said he would set his God - the One TRUE God - on high in contrast to all those idols being worshiped by the masses.

The world system we live in today has its own set of idols - "gods," if you will. And, like it our not, the masses worship at the altars of these false "gods." I wonder - if we - you and I - spent time daily contemplating how much greater our God is than the "idols" of our culture and lifting Him up - if we did what the psalmist did and praised Him EVERY day - wouldn't it possibly be effective to help us confront - and even overcome - the "idolatries" of our PERSONAL world?

We must view our days and our circumstances as a window through which we can see God. If we don't, they will become a mirror in which we see only ourselves. I don't know about you, but for me, SELF is one of the most difficult idols I've ever attempted to dethrone.

Pride sneaks in so insidiously! Oh my sweet sisters, if we could only recognize that pride prevents praise!

Let's join the psalmist today and lift high our wondrous God and PRAISE HIM - PRAISE HIM - PRAISE HIM - not just today but EVERY day!