August 22, pleased to praise.

Let the peoples praise you, O God.

Let all the peoples praise you.

Psalm 67, 3 and 5.

Why does God demand we must praise God?

C.S. Lewis,

just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join

them in praising it, isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that

magnificent? The psalmist in telling everyone to praise God

are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

My whole more general difficulty about the praise of God

depended on my absurdly denying to us as regards the supremely valuable,

what we delight to do, what we indeed can't help doing about everything else we value.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses,

but completes the enjoyment. It is its appointed consummation.

It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are.

The delight is incomplete till it is expressed. There is the answer.

The solution to the apparent egot mania of God in demanding us to praise him. It is a demand for our greatest happiness. We praise what we enjoy because the delight

is incomplete until it is expressed in praise. If we were not allowed to speak of what we value and celebrate

what we love and praise what we admire, our joy would not be full. So if God loves us enough

to make our joyful, he must not only give us himself, he must also win from us the praise

of our hearts. Not because he needs to shore up some weakness in himself or compensate for

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