Text by Justin Lim

If I can sum up how I felt after the service, it was that there was a renewed hunger to praise God. It’s not that I didn’t have the desire to praise Him in the past, but the hunger to especially want to do so was something I haven’t experienced in a long time.

Though only eight minutes long, the sermon Pastor Benjamin shared was without a doubt powerful from start to finish. The sermon may have spoken to you differently, but what was shared opened my eyes to the kind of life our God wants us, His beloved children, to live.

It is unfortunate that religion has taught us that the life that God wants us to live is a life of hard knocks and sufferings that eventually leads to some form of enlightenment. But is that really the heart of God for us?

A Christian life is not even about evangelizing or missions, as much as all that is good and needful. So what then is the kind of life that my God wants me to live? I believe that it is a life of being carefree; a life of casting all my worries and cares into the powerful hands of my God to whom nothing is impossible. When we take it deeper, it is a life of praising our God.

To the world, the notion of praising God is ridiculous. To the world, the importance of responsibilities, and even love and care, is expressed by worrying. By worrying, I am actually saying that only I can get things done. But when I do think about it, is there really a single thing in my life that I can do a better job than God at caring for?

We may have the best help in managing a certain area of our lives, but no one really manages our entire life. No one holds our entire life together the way He does. He is our loving Father and no one else knows us and cares for us the way He does. To believe that He doesn’t care for us or that He is unable to take care of certain areas of our lives is actually making light of the finished work of His Beloved Son.

At the cross, His perfect love for us was demonstrated because it was His Son carrying our sins and every single lack which could be the cause for our worries today. And this is the gospel: because of His finished work, we are set in the place of His favour and the provision for every single one of our needs is found in Him.

It is no wonder He wants us to seek first His kingdom (Matthew 6:33) because that is where our supply comes from. I realized that the this supply has been provided through the finished work of Jesus. So the real question is this – why is it that some of us go through the painful cycle of defeat while others seem to experience so much good success even as they go through trials, so much so that it’s almost as if God loves them more than the rest?

It really all comes down to what we choose to believe and say in the face of our giants.  Each time we praise Him even at the face of our adversities, we are not persuading Him to come through for us. He already came through for us at the cross, He is the giant slayer that has defeated every giant in our life. So when we praise Him, what are we doing? What happens is that we’re having a good opinion of Him. He wants us to not only know and believe, but also to praise Him for His goodness. But don’t get the wrong idea that He is some egomaniac who needs praises to feed His ego!

Each time we praise Him, we are casting our cares into His hands and taking our eyes from our challenges onto His finished work, where every victory we could possibly need has been bought for at the price of His Beloved Son. When we realise that, how can we not live life care-free?

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