Dear Church,
Psalm 150:1 says, Praise ye the Lord. Praise him in his sanctuary. Praise him in his firmament of power.
The Psalmist is declaring our obligation to praise and worship God. We are to worship God in his sanctuary. We are also to worship God under the full expanse of the heavens – that is everywhere – as all of creation is under God’s dominion.
Ultimately, we will worship perfectly God in heaven:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages… they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God. – Revelation 7:9,11
The idea of spending eternity worshiping the Lord in Heaven can be difficult for some Christians. The following excerpt from Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms may be helpful:
If it were possible for a created soul fully (I mean, up to the full measure conceivable in a finite being) to “appreciate”, that is to love and delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme beatitude. It is along these lines that I find it easiest to understand the Christian doctrine that “Heaven” is a state in which angels now, and men hereafter, are perpetually employed in praising God. This does not mean, as it can so dismally suggest, that it is like “being in Church”. For our “services” both in their conduct and in our power to participate, are merely attempts at worship; never fully successful, often 99.9 per cent failures, sometimes total failures. We are not riders but pupils in the riding school; for most of us the falls and bruises, the aching muscles and the severity of the exercise, far outweigh those few moments in which we were, to our own astonishment, actually galloping without terror and without disaster. To see what the doctrine really means, we must suppose ourselves to be in perfect love with God—drunk with, drowned in, dissolved by, that delight which, far from remaining pent up within ourselves as incommunicable, hence hardly tolerable, bliss, flows out from us incessantly again in effortless and perfect expression, our joy no more separable from the praise in which it liberates and utters itself than the brightness a mirror receives is separable from the brightness it sheds. The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”. But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
The delight in praise, which here and now is fleeting and incompletely experienced, will in Heaven be perfectly and permanently ours.
Be encouraged,
Brother Dave
