My name is Tony Ranky, host of the Asper Pastor John, a podcast with John Piper.

It's an honor to be here with you all to look at praise and what we just did.

We just sang praise.

Why do we praise?

Why do Christian hedonists get together to sing loud?

That's what we're going to look at tonight.

Well, Franz Kafka wrote some very bizarre stories. One of his most bizarre story was the short

story called the Metamorphosis, which was built around the haunting premise that a young man in his

bedroom, in his family's home, goes to sleep one night, and he awakens in the morning as an enormous pest.

A man-sized insect.

We're never given precisely what the description was,

but we read that he has a hard armor-like back and spindly, little pitiful legs

that wave helplessly in the air as he lays in his bed.

Something like a giant beetle.

This is what he woke up as.

The former man can no longer speak words.

He now only lets out a painful chirping.

That's all he can say.

A loud, high-pitched, squealing sound that's unintelligible to his entire family.

He continues to have lucid thoughts internally, but he cannot share them. He can't speak. He is, Kafka tells us, speechless, no longer in

communication with humans. He is horrified, and his family is horrified. They slam him in his door

into his bedroom in disgust. His father grows harsh to him. This pest hides inside of his house wherever he can find a place to hide. Mostly in his bedroom, he becomes a burden to everyone. His sister brings him food and cleans his room at first, but that kindness ends very quickly.

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