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Is Praise Of God A Fruit Or A Sacrifice?
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Scripture repeatedly refer to praise as a sacrifice. But it also refers to it as other, seemly contradictory things. For example, in a particularly important part of the Bible we read:
For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise — the fruit of lips that confess his name. (Hebrews 13:14 - 15, NIV)
The future city of God should be constantly before us — because nothing else has any lasting importance! Hence there should always be a real eagerness to praise God. It is our privilege to do so, not a burden to be undertaken as such. So praise is then seen as both the sign and expression of our love of God and the evidence of what we hope for.
It is because we do not look to the things of this world, which cannot endure, but because we look to what God has provided for us in the future, that we can praise him continually. Moreover, the writer of Hebrews tells us that praise is actually a fruit. Can our praise then be a sacrifice? How can fruit be a sacrifice?
Praise As Sacrifice
Notice that Scripture repeatedly refers to praise as a sacrifice. Yet it is also related to love. But real love has nothing to do with the typical Hollywood portrayal. Real love is less about gooey feelings and much more to do with commitment. Now, almost by definition, commitment involves effort and the unavoidable concomitant of effort is sacrifice!
Why? Because effort unavoidably means that something else is given up in order to make the effort. Whatever we could have been doing with our strength and will and time measures the sacrifice involved in praising God. Not that alone, but also a much greater degree of effort when we are feeling down, sad or depressed. To praise God is one thing, but to praise God in, say, the situation of Job involves quite a different degree of sacrifice.
It requires effort on our part, effort which we must be prepared to give. At those times when we feel down or depressed and things are not going well for us, the sacrifice involved is much greater, for we then usually have no natural inclination to praise God. Indeed, we might well feel just the opposite. But although the sacrifice is greater, so too are the benefits when we make that effort of will to praise God.
Sometimes we make that effort alone, but at others we also need to praise God along with fellow believers. That can sometimes impose an even greater degree of sacrifice when things seem not to be going too well for us.
Praise As Fruit
The Hebrews scripture quoted above also asserts that praise is a fruit. Now, there is absolutely no contradiction between seeing praise as a sacrifice and claiming it also to be a fruit.
How does a farmer produce fruit? He sacrifices land, manure and his phyiscal effort to produce apples, pears, grapes or whatever instead of devoting it to some other use. For example, the shortage of private homes in the England is so acute at this time that some farmers are being persuaded to sell their land for housing instead of using it to produce anything.
When we, to use a common phrase, live for the Lord, we sacrifice all manner of other things that we could have been involved in as alternatives. That is confessing his name. The latter is not the odd statement here and there that we are a Christian: it is the living out of our lives, every day and hour, as Christ desires us to live. In that way we enter into a much deeper relationship with God, come to appreciate and love him far more than otherwise. So praise is found naturally on our lips as a fruit of that kind of living.
This is why sacrifice and fruit amount to an indissoluble unity in the life of a Christian.
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