Staff Meeting with David Crowder

To start, David Crowder wasn't in our staff meeting! For the past several weeks, we as a pastoral staff have been learning from a Catalyst workbook. Today's lesson was from an article by David entitled "Praise Habit: Becoming Who We Are." I thought I'd share highlights with you. (Click on the graphic to check out David's book).

David insists that praise is something we all do. In fact, we are wired for it. We instinctively praise something, a favorite toy, certain food, an athlete, or a celebrity. He writes, "Remember how effortlessly we sang the praises of things we enjoyed? It was so easy and fluid and natural. What if this kind of praise freely leaked from us in delightful response to God?" Good question!

Our life should be filled with the presence of God upon us, which causes people to take notice. Because our Great God promises to "in-habit our praise(s)," the core of our existence should be to priase Him naturally and habitually. "A habit is an act aquired by experience and performed regularly and automatically...and involve no conscious choice among alternatives," Crowder says. Meaning, we as Christ followers have no other choice but to develop our "praise habit", and allow no distractions to interfere with our meeting time with God!

Even so, "praise habits" can become stale and require constant monitoring. Therefore, "we must continually seek ways to place ourselves in this (His) embrace."

Our personal praise habit is to literally put on Christ every day, so that the culture we live takes notice of Christ in us and reacts with unbelievable awe and holy reverence. David describes it this way, "To wear the rescue of Christ into every moment is for every moment to become alive with the possibility of revelation... our habit is the Christ. He covers us. He is what identifies us. We wear Him into every moment, and when we live with this awareness, we praise Christ."

Did you put on the "garment of praise?" (Is. 61:3) today? Is it showing in your actions and attitude? Why not take time right now to get fully dressed.