A Lifestyle of Praise

Happy Thursday! 

I hope everyone is having a great week. I apologize again for not posting much this week. Time has been going by so fast. My summer is coming to an end as I will be heading back to Tulsa pretty soon for school. Times like this are always bittersweet for me because with all the packing and the goodbyes to everyone I start to get excited, but also sad. I am usually an emotional person so leaving even for just two months can be a really big deal for me. ORU is an amazing university and I am so blessed that I have the opportunity to go there. However, I do still miss my friends and family back home a lot. 

One thing I noticed about these times of getting down and feeling depressed are that they can easily turn around if you choose to focus on something else. These last couple of days I have been seeking the Lord about this and I this is what is on my heart to talk about today. I want to talk about praise being a lifestyle change for you. No matter who you are or what you've been through I am sure you have been through a season of change in your life that brought sadness. The truth is, however, we are not to accept this sadness at all. It's a negative emotion. Instead I believe that the Lord wants us to praise Him through every situation and that brings us joy. 

Psalm 8:2 is an amazing verse to describe the power of praise and it says, "Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger." We can see from this verse that praise stills the enemy and makes him powerless in our situations. As we shift our focus to praising God we no longer view the situation as disheartening because we know that God is working on our behalf. This has been so encouraging to me and has given me a lot of hope this week. 

I want to choose to live a lifestyle of praise to my King no matter what the circumstances have been like. I want to wake up and praise Him. I want to praise Him before I go to bed at night. I want to praise Him every moment of every day with my thoughts and my actions and believe He makes all things work together for my good because I love Him and I'm called according to His purpose. God has been so faithful to me every year I have been at ORU and I keep reminding myself of that. He will continue to be faithful to me as I enter my junior year. No matter how tough it is, I will choose to praise Him constantly. 

Photo Source: Joshua Stannard Blog

I believe that the Lord is calling us all to choose this lifestyle of praise and to turn to Him each day. If you've been going through a hard situation and can't seem to find a way out of the feelings you have been dealing with, just praise God. Your Spirit is already full of joy, you just need to get your natural body in line with the joy that is already yours. It is a blessing to know that I can wake up everyday and have joy because I don't have to be depressed. God is so good! Psalm 30:11 says,"You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy." Be strengthened by this today and choose to be clothed with joy! Thanks for reading!