What’s the Minimum Requirement to Praise God?
Psalm 150:6 Let everything that has breath praise the Lord .
The minimum requirement to praise God is not some massive results got; a house bought, marriage enacted, a child borne, scientific discoveries made, No. While those things are grand and worthy of spontaneous celebration, the barest minimum to praise God is breath! Yes, you read it right, breath. As long as you have breath in your nostrils, as long as you are still living, irrespective of who you are, where you are, the result you have , you have the right to praise God. Breath is what God in his infinite mercy gives freely and liberally to all humankind; good or bad, animals and plants. When God gives breath. Oxygen, it is absolutely free, but when/if human beings must administer same oxygen to one in an hospital, one pays heavily. Aside the cost, the process of administration of same if done by humans is so complex that it will take many professionals and much time and special gargets to get it in.
On average, a person at rest takes about 16 breaths per minute. This means we breathe about 960 breaths an hour, 23,040 breaths a day, 8,409,600 a year. Unless we get a lot of exercise. The person who lives to 80 will take about 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime. Wow, that is enormous And through all that , our hearts never stop beating, never stop pumping blood that circulates oxygen and other life nutrients. Our lungs never seize receive the air we breathe in, the complexities of our veins and nerves, arteries and capillaries never for once fail. This can only be the design of an extremely meticulous, calculative and efficient master builder, God. All for you to breath and stay alive, to read my materials today. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Don’t wait for the grand and massive miracle to happen before you find some room to praise God, being alive , being able to breath is enough! Therefore, don’t defer the praise, don’t delay the praise, do it now.
Thanksgiving and Praise
Psalm 100:4. Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name.
Praise and thanksgiving are highest forms of prayer. God takes delight in the praises of His people. God lives in the praise of His people. Humanity is created to show forth the praise of God. Thanksgiving therefore is what gives us access to God’s gates, and praise, to his courts.
If indeed it is thanks-giving , then we must give something, especially the fruit of our lips as gifts of appreciation to God.
When Johnson Oatman Jr of New Jersey USA wrote the hymn, “Count Your blessings, Name them one by one”, he knew exactly what he was saying. Unless we take an intentional pause and do a deliberate count of God’s blessings over our lives, we may think God has not been good to us. Some however ,rather than count their own blessings, are obsessed and depressed by counting other people’s blessings, and comparing themselves with others they perceive have been more blessed than them. Meanwhile , appearance is not always reality.
God has blessed us all, differently. God has shown everyone mercy and kindness, according our different abilities and capacities. There is no one on earth that God has not blessed in someway of the other, however different in size, magnitude , shade or color. The devil however sometime blocks our eyes from the many things God has done for us by making us focus on the few things we perceive from our understanding God has not done. He also makes us focus on other people’s projected blessings, and disallows us from seeing ours
If we look inwards, and around us, we will realise that there are blessings all around us, and within us, just like others have been blessed. Maybe we are seeing the blessings of theirs more because they choose to project and publicly acknowledge theirs in gratitude to God.