I’m working on a devotional to be used on a weekly basis. Because we should not ‘lean unto our own understanding’ (Proverbs 3:5), I’m having my priest give it a look to make sure it’s in good order.
The 1928 Book of Common Prayer was my resource for the devotional and I spent quite a bit of time in the Psalms. Doing this research and compiling made me aware of something that never occurred to me before – the manner in which ‘praise’ has changed. In the Psalms, of course, the praise psalms include all that God had done for Israel or Abraham and his seed or whomever – which is important, of course, but tends to be very ‘corporate’; “of or shared by a whole group and not just of a single member” (Cambridge English Dictionary). The same can be said of the Psalms of Thanksgiving – again, important but corporate.
Today, we think of praise as just thanking God for Who and what He is. We just want to tell Him how awesome He is, how important He is in our lives and that He is a constant friend. How He in the three Person Godhead is above and beyond and unique and wholly worthy to be praised. Just because He is.
The purpose of the devotional is that very simple, very personal praise that our hearts sing when we consider ‘all the worlds thy hands have made’. We know and understand what He has done since the Creation and revisit all that He has done whenever we read our Bibles. But we, the created, sometimes just want to reach out to Him from our singularity.
Perhaps I should have gone to the hymnal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc0QVWzCv9k
Words on the Word 