WORTHY OF PRAISE

 

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PSALM 150:1,2,6:  Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power. Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness. Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.

One of the dominant themes of the Book of Psalms is praise. The entire book ends with it. Ancient scripture shows us plainly that praising God was very much a part of religious worship.

The various heavenly beings that John the Beloved saw on the isle of Patmos in his Revelation, were all worshipping the Father (Revelation 4:8-11). John also taught that exalted beings will continue to worship Heavenly Father in the eternities to come because He will always be our God (D&C 76:21; 92-93). In response to John’s vision, Elder Neal A. Maxwell affirmed that “we will go on praising the Lord for ever and ever”.  (From Whom All Blessings Flow, Ensign, May 1997, 12).

The practice of praising God seems to be a foreign one in our day and age. All our prayers consist of is thanksgiving and requests. Rarely in our prayers do we praise God for who He is and what He does.

One of my favourite scriptures of all is what I call a modern-day psalm recorded by Joseph Smith:

“Let the mountains shout for joy, and all ye valleys cry aloud; and all ye seas and dry lands tell the wonders of your Eternal King! And ye rivers, and brooks, and rills, flow down with gladness. Let the woods and all the trees of the field praise the Lord; and ye solid rocks weep for joy! And let the sun, moon, and the morning stars sing together, and let all the sons of God shout for joy! And let the eternal creations declare his name forever and ever! And again I say, how glorious is the voice we hear from heaven, proclaiming in our ears, glory and salvation, and honour, and immortality, and eternal life; kingdoms, principalities and powers!”  (D&C 128:23)

Whenever I read this scripture my heart swells with admiration of our God and His immense power. So well did Joseph understand this power that he felt the very nature should shout praise to Him who created all things, the greatest of which is God’s work and His glory to bring about eternal life and immortality of man (Moses 1:39). This is thanksgiving veiled in praise.  

Something important to remember. We have to know what we praise in God: who He is, what He does, His involvement in our lives, His love, His constant care, His greatness. We have to know God. If we do not glean this from our own lives, we need to do so from the scriptures. Our knowledge of His greatness needs to be so great that we struggle to find mortal words to express it. This knowledge needs to be so ingrained in our hearts  that no amount of adversity can take it away from us.

Until we find utterance for the deserving praise of Him who lives our souls to save, may we allow our desire to grow until such words flow from the very depths of our hearts:

I long to praise Thee

With magnitude of words I cannot find

That tell the glory that is Thine.

As I can do so little this desire to meet,

I place my loyal love at Thy holy feet.

 

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

THE INNER PRESENCE

Advocate With the Father by LDS Bookstore

PSALM 139:1-7:  O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether…such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

We are told in our ‘me, myself and I’ world that the greatest thing we can do is to know ourselves. Most of us are not aware that there is someone who knows us much better than we can ever know ourselves. I had a very unusual experience once which proved this truth to me. As I was reflecting on my joyless life one day, I found myself in my mind in front of the great Judge, God the Father. He asked me three questions: How did you enjoy your mortal probation? What do you think you learnt from it? How do you think you did overall?

An understanding like no other flooded my being that there was nothing I could hide or tell half-truths about because He knew the very essence of my being: my innermost thoughts and intents, my sins, my rebellious moments in response to my sufferings, the times I had questioned Him and His goodness, my dislikes and likes, my conduct, my earthly indignities, my ingratitude, everything that made me tick….there was nothing, absolutely nothing about me or in me that He did not know. Every time I opened my mouth, nothing would come out. I knew with every fibre of my being that He knew the answer to every question before I could form it in my mind.

I felt like I was transparent before Him. He was not watching me but looking into the very depths of my soul. It was as if He was the inner presence inside me. I understood clearly as I understand that day follows night because I can see it, that God is so inter-connected with His children that it defies our mortal understanding. We, here and now, do not know and cannot fathom our spiritual origin or the Father’s connection with His children. God is beyond our understanding.

Then hope flooded my being. I had nothing to say and would not need to. There was someone else who saw into the very depths of my soul during the greatest moment of suffering known to man. He who absorbed the totality of my life could and would answer all the questions the Father would have of my conduct on Judgment Day: my intentions, my achievements, my failings. He, the Advocate who suffered for my soul would with His strength make up for my frailty (D&C 45:4-5). And He would do it with mercy.

Elder Merrill J. Bateman taught that the Atonement was an intimate, personal experience through which Jesus Christ came to know us individually and perfectly:

“For many years I thought of the Saviour’s experience in the garden and on the cross as places where a large mass of sin was heaped upon Him. Through the words of Alma, Abinadi, Isaiah and other prophets, however, my view has changed. Instead of an impersonal mass of sin, there was a long line of people, as Jesus felt ‘our infirmities’ (Hebrews 4:15), our griefs…carried our sorrows…and was bruised for our iniquities’ (Isaiah 53:4-5).

“The Pearl of Great Price teaches that Moses was shown all the inhabitants of the earth, which were ‘numberless as the sand upon the sea shore’ (Moses 1:28). If Moses beheld every soul, then it seems reasonable that the Creator of the universe has the power to become intimately acquainted with each of us. He learned about your weaknesses and mine. He experienced your pains and sufferings. He experienced mine. I testify that He knows us. He understands the way in which we deal with temptations. He knows our weaknesses. But more than that, more than just knowing us, He knows how to help us if we come to Him in faith” (A Pattern For All, Ensign or Liahona, Nov 2005, 75-76).

We will come to know fully the meaning of grace and mercy when we are face to face with the justice of the Father. We will know then who the Saviour truly is…a sacrifice that none of us could give, a hope of salvation, another God we are yet to comprehend.

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

THE REJECTED STONE

And Israel's Daughters Wept Around by Rose Datoc Dall

Psalm 118:21,22: I will praise thee: for thou hast heard me, and art become my salvation. The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.

“There is none other nation on earth that would crucify their God….For should the mighty miracles be wrought among other nations they would repent and know that he be their God. But because of priestcrafts and iniquities they stiffened their necks against him and crucified Him.” ( 2 Nephi 10:3-5)

The rejection of Jesus as the Messiah came from the Jewish Council of Sanhedrin who levelled three accusations against the Saviour that led to His death:

1.      THEY CLAIMED THAT HE WAS A SINNER because He wouldn’t conform to the rabbinical laws and traditions of the elders and the convoluted law of Moses (Mark 7:1-9)

2.      THEY SAID HE WAS THE INCARNATION OF SATAN and that He performed His miracles by the power of Beelzebub (Matt 12:24-27)

3.      THEY SAID HE WAS GUILTY OF BLASPHEMY in claiming equality with God, that He said He was the Son of God and that He WAS God (John 8)

-          Bruce R. McConkie, Mortal Messiah 2, p 394-8

This is what blows my mind: the mortal life of Jesus was prophesied in such detail that it is hard to believe the Jews were so blinded that they ‘looked beyond the mark’ (Jacob 4:14) awaiting another Messiah. The mark that they looked beyond was the Saviour Jesus Christ. Among many here are some details of His mortal life contained in ancient prophecies: he would be born in Bethlehem; He would be preceded by a forerunner; His ministry would begin in Galilee; He would teach in parables; He would perform miracles; His message would be rejected; He would enter Jerusalem in triumph on the back of an ass; He would be sold for thirty pieces of silver; smitten, spat upon and rejected. And the details of His crucifixion in ancient prophecies are staggering:

-          Psalm 22:1,7-8,16-18: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”; “they pierced my hands and my feet”, and “They parted my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture”

-          Psalm 69:21: “in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.”

-          Zechariah 12:10: “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced”

-          Isaiah 53:3-12: “wounded for our transgressions”, “with his stripes we are healed” and “he was numbered with the transgressors”.

All this foreknowledge could not have been given to the children of men unless it had come from God who knows all things from beginning to the end and who had revealed it to the  prophets throughout the ages by the power of the Holy Ghost.

And so Judah, the law giving branch of the House of Israel (Genesis 49:10), “despised the words of plainness” and “sought for things that they could not understand”, looked past the direct path which Christ was giving them missing what mattered the most and crucified their King (Jacob 4:14), not knowing that they sacrificed the ultimate sacrificial lamb of God that would save their souls.  

It is significant to note that the Messianic Psalm 118 begins with four verses emphasising that the Lord’s mercy ‘endureth forever’. Psalm 136 carries that theme of mercy in all 26 verses. The Lion of Judah, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, is “the stone which was set at naught of builders, which is become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:10-12; Matthew 21:42; Ephesians 2:19-20; Jacob 4:15-16).

This rejected stone which the builders refused has indeed become the head stone of the corner through His mercy which will in the end “redeem Israel from all his iniquities” for He hath “chosen Jacob unto himself, and Israel for his peculiar treasure (Psalm 129:7,8; 15:4).

- CATHRYNE ALLEN