Dandelions and Praise
Ruth Ann Stites, Staff Writer
For Mother’s Day Sunday this year our church music team chose the song “Handful of Weeds” as a tribute to our mothers. The imagery of the song is of a little girl carefully picking her mom a bouquet of dandelions to show her how much she loved her. Although worthy of “an armful of roses” mom was “satisfied with a handful of weeds.”
Often are we in the place of the girl in the song when we offer God praise. We present the best we have, but it is only dandelions compared to the roses He deserves. Psalms 145:3 tells us how worthy He is, “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom.” We are but children, even the most mature Believers among us. Compared to the praise He deserves so often our offerings seem small and inconsequential. Yet what we can offer is pleasing to Him. As long as our offering is made out of the right motives of love, gratitude, hope, and thankfulness they will be pleasing to our Heavenly Father.
But we are not on our own in offering praise pleasing to God. The writer of Hebrews says,
The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.
Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess his name (Heb. 13:11-15).
We see how worthy God is of praise. We know we are not offering our praise ineffectually but through our heavenly High Priest, Jesus. Yet life is not always smooth. David captures the proper response of God’s people in all things, especially adversity, in Psalm 22. As he cries out in anguish to God who seems so far away and uninvolved in the need of the king and his nation, he comes back again and again to an acknowledgement of the human need to praise a worthy God:
Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;
you are the one Israel praises.
In you our ancestors put their trust;
they trusted and you delivered them.
To you they cried out and were saved;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame (Ps. 22:3-5).
Near the end of the Psalm David proclaims, “Those who seek the Lord will praise him” (Ps. 22:26). Thus, we can be assured that He loves it when we sincerely bring Him our praise, even our handful of weeds, because He knows they come from hearts that seek to honor and please Him.
(Photo credit: Sandra Edster)
