Really?

“Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.”

Psalm 63:3-4, NIV

You know when you read a bible verse - and you’ve read it before - but this time, it catches you differently? I recently read the passage above and it snagged on my mind like a hang nail on a sweater. Hm. Do I really believe that God’s love is better than life? That’s an easy thing to say, especially in the strange little bubble I live in where the path of least resistance is to walk with God. Most of the people I know expect me to say those kinds of things. But I know, when I pause long enough to honestly consider what it means, that my life would be different if I truly grasped the magnitude of His love and the mystery that He chooses to love us at all.

In the next verse, the psalmist says that he will praise God as long as he lives. The more I thought about the preceding verse, the more the connection became clear. If His love is better than life, then what else would I do with that life than praise Him with it? He’s given me the gift of life and He has loved me with a mind-blowing, extraordinary and completely undeserved love. The only response that makes sense is to spend the time that I have been given - by Him - trying to live a life of praise in my words, actions and attitudes.

And now here’s a funny thing about praising God that completes this circuit even more fully: the more I praise Him, the more open I am to His love. Praising God, especially when my circumstances are not blissful or inspiring, brings me to a place beyond myself. By transcending my circumstances, even the good ones, I transcend myself and for a few brief moments, I am free. And it is in that space that the love of God is able to reach me and fill me and utterly have its way with me. In those moments, I know that I know that I know that God loves me (absolutely adores me, in fact) and that my love for Him means something significant to Him.

It’s a simple concept, but the application of it eludes me on a daily basis. My lack of praise keeps me from experiencing God’s love, which keeps the illusion alive that perhaps there is something out there that is better than His love. So I hold back, keeping myself at a slight distance from the only source of unconditional love in existence. There are many ways that God can break this cycle, but there is something that I can do, although I need His grace to do it: I can choose to praise Him. I can put myself in a position to receive His love. And by His grace, He will accept my praise (faltering and inconstant as it is) and “my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods” (Psalm 63:5).