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"HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come. … You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created."
Revelation 4:8-11, NRSV

MAN IS ONE of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you. He bears about him the mark of death, the sign of his own sin, to remind him that you "thwart the proud." But still, since he is part of your creation, he wishes to praise you. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.
Augustine, Confessions

IF WE HAVE no real interest in praising him, it shows that we have never realized who he is. For when one becomes conscious of who God really is, and when one realizes that he who is almighty, and infinitely holy, has "done great things to us," the only possible reaction is the cry of half-articulate exultation that bursts from the depths of our being in amazement at the tremendous, inexplicable goodness of God to men.
Thomas Merton, Praying the Psalms

FAITH IN GOD is an experience that lives and grows by praise. There is continual spiral reinforcement: praising God helps us to appreciate what one is praising God for.
David F. Ford and Daniel W. Hardy, Living in Praise: Worshipping and Knowing God

GOD MADE US, redeems us, provides for us. The natural, honest, healthy, logical response to that is praise to God. When we praise we are functioning at the center, we are in touch with the basic, core reality of our being.
Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

GOD INHABITS, the praise of the people.
Robert Webber, Blended Worship

WHEN LIFE, is seen as the gift of God, praise and thanksgiving are inevitable. … [A] constant attitude of gratitude is life-giving. In the face of such amazing grace and generosity, the only possible response must become that of continuing and ever-deepening praise.
Esther De Waal, The Celtic Way of Prayer

GLORY BE, to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings:
Landscapes plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty"

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August 2008, Vol. 52, No. 8