This psalm of thanksgiving and praise builds upon the language of preceding psalms. David previously asked God to deliver him from his enemies and other hardships.

A MAN was trying to teach his horse to obey and to stop and start on command. The man was a very religious man, so he came up with a couple of religious statements to use in training his horse. He trained the horse to go on the command words, “Praise the Lord!” He trained the horse to stop on the command word, “Hallelujah!”

One day he was riding the horse and it took off. He lost control of the horse and he forgot his words. The horse had been trained to only respond to the key words. Up ahead was a cliff, and the horse was headed there full speed. The man tried thinking of every religious word he’d ever heard of. “Amen! Jesus saves! Worthy! Holy!” Nothing worked.

Just as the horse approached the precipice, the man shouted out, “Hallelujah!” The horse stopped right there on the edge. The man wiped his head and said, “Whew, Praise the Lord!”

Praising the Lord is not some kind of casual meaningless activity. There is power in praise.698

Consider this when it comes to worship:

• Draw near and listen well, because God is communicating.

• Be quiet and stay calm, because God hears the inaudible and sees the invisible.

• Make a commitment and keep it, because God doesn’t forget.

• Don’t decide now and deny later, because God doesn’t ignore decisions.

When I was overseas, I was working with a man who was under great stress and great pressure. He was a maverick sort of a missionary. He didn’t fit the pattern or the mold of what you think of as a missionary. His ministry was in great part to the soldiers, who happened to be on the island of Okinawa by the thousands—in fact, it might be safe to say tens of thousands.

I went to his home one evening to visit with him, and his wife said he wasn’t there but was probably down at the office. The office was downtown in a little alley area off of the streets of Naha. It was a rainy night. And I decided that I would get on the bus and travel down to be with Bob. She’d mentioned his stress and pressure, so I expected to find the man folded up in despondency, discouragement, and depression, and just ready to finish it off.

I got off that little bus and I walked down the alley about a block and a half and I turned right, down a little smaller alley, to a little hut with a tatami mat inside. As I got away from the street noise, I heard singing, “Come,Thou fount of every blessing, / Tune my heart to sing Thy grace.” And then that next stanza, “Prone to wander—Lord, I feel it, / Prone to leave the God I love.”

Quietly I eavesdropped on his private praise service. As I stood in the rain and looked through the walls of that little cheap hut, I saw a man on his knees with his hands toward heaven giving God praise, with his Bible on one side and an InterVarsity Christian hymnal on the other side, his little spiral notebook, worn from use. And I saw him turn from page to page, where he would read it to God, then he would find a hymn and he would sing it to God.

And the remarkable thing is that that pressure that he was under did not leave for perhaps another two weeks, it seems. But that praise service alone before God absolutely revolutionized his life.

You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.

—John Bunyan

Prayer is surrender—surrender to the will of God and cooperation with that will. If I throw out a boat hook from a boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.

—E. Stanley Jones

Jim Elliot said, “God is still on His throne, we’re still His footstool, and there’s only a knee’s distance between!” He also said, “That saint who advances on his knees never retreats.”

—Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty

To preach the gospel to yourself, then, means that you continually face up to your own sinfulness and then flee to Jesus through faith in His shed blood and righteous life. It means that you appropriate, again by faith, the fact that Jesus fully satisfied the law of God, that He is your propitiation, and that God’s holy wrath is no longer directed toward you.

François Fénelon, a seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Frenchman, said this about prayer:

Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one’s heart, its pleasures and its pains, to a dear friend. Tell Him your troubles, that He may comfort you; tell Him your joys, that He may sober them; tell Him your longings, that He may purify them; tell Him your dislikes, that He may help you to conquer them; talk to Him of your temptations, that He may shield you from them; show Him the wounds of your heart, that He may heal them; lay bare your indifference to good, your depraved tastes for evil, your instability. Tell Him how self-love makes you unjust to others, how vanity tempts you to be insincere, how pride disguises you to yourself and others.

If you thus pour out all your weaknesses, needs, troubles, there will be no lack of what to say. You will never exhaust the subject. It is continually being renewed. People who have no secrets from each other never want for subject of conversation. They do not weigh their words, for there is nothing to be held back; neither do they seek for something to say. They talk out of the abundance of the heart, without consideration they say just what they think. Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved intercourse with God.

O thou who has given us so much, mercifully grant us one thing more—a grateful heart.

—George Herbert