What is Praise For?

Praise, especially for God, is for my benefit far more than for His.

God does not need praise to make Him feel better about Himself.

However, He very much needs me to feel and think better about Him.

The problem of sin is not that God needs appeasing, softening up or flattered by showering Him with enough praise to get Him to relent and forgive me or even bless me. The problem of sin is that I do not know God rightly enough to trust Him fully. That is where praise works to transform my opinions about God and to work a change within my own mind and heart, to bring me into a greater awareness of how trustworthy God really is.

Whatever is not of faith (trust) is sin. (Romans 14:23)

Those who are overcomers are those who come to know God so well that they not only trust Him implicitly but they praise Him all the time for how good He is.

No, God does not need our praises, except maybe in the sense that as we praise Him by focusing on the real truth about His character we more and more accurately begin to reflect those very characteristics in our own lives and thus attract others to want to know Him better for themselves. In that respect, our praise to God works indirectly to increase the number of those entering into fellowship with Him.

Praise is intentionally focusing on good things about someone else.

Flattery is inauthentic and is a counterfeit of true praise.

Real praise is the very same thing in the mind as worship.

Whomever we praise, we are worshiping to some extent.

Worship is looking at and depending on someone or some thing or some activity to impart to us identity, life, pleasure or love. What we value as being able to bring these things into our lives, to help us feel satisfaction at a deeper level, becomes the object of our worship.

What we value we will tend to praise, for part of praise is recommending something we have found to be a source of life on to others as well as expressing appreciation directly to that source ourselves.