“He is with us, and He leads our praises” by Sinclair Ferguson
“Have you ever had this experience? You’re in church singing “How Great Thou Art,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” or perhaps something more modern, and the question pops into your mind: “Does God actually like this? Does this please God?”
We may not be very good singers. And God is eternal, the One without beginning or end or cause. So why should we think that our singing praise to Him would give Him any pleasure?
Scripture gives us some interesting reasons for believing that God loves it when His people praise Him. One reason is that Scripture itself urges us to praise Him.
When words breathed out by God and written down by men tell us to praise Him, then we can safely assume that He wants us to do it and that it gives Him pleasure-the kind of pleasure that a father has when his three-year-old daughter starts singing to him and tells him, “I love you, Daddy.”
Another reason is that the Bible contains an entire book, the Psalms, that is composed of songs of praises, requests, and laments.
That would hardly be the case unless God desired to listen to us. In fact, He has such a desire that He has provided us with the very words we need for every season and stage of life from beginning to end, from gladness to sadness. Yes, God wants us to sing.
There is a third reason. We know that the Lord Jesus, who always did the will of His Father and lived to please Him, sang praises to Him.
There is one place in the Gospels that tells us very specifically that He did so. At the end of the Passover meal, as He was about to go to the garden of Gethsemane, He and His disciples sang a hymn.
We know what they probably sang because the same praise was sung year after year at Passover. It was called the Hallel (like the word hallel-u-jah), and it begins:
Praise the Lord!
Praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord!
Blessed be the name of the Lord
from this time forth and forevermore!
From the rising of the sun to its setting,
the name of the Lord is to be praised! (Ps. 113:1-3)
If the Son of God sang praises to God, then we can be sure that God loves to hear and enjoys the praises of His people, just as a father loves the love of his children.
The upper room was not the last time our Lord Jesus led the praises of His children. Psalm 22 begins with an anticipation of Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (v. 1).
But the psalm concludes by looking forward to the resurrection and to another cry– this time a cry of delight. Our Lord Jesus says, “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you” (v. 22).
This is a lovely description of what happens when we meet together in worship. Jesus preaches His Word, and He stands in the midst of the congregation and leads our praises.
The author of Hebrews quotes this psalm in Hebrews 2:12. These words are not only a picture of what Jesus was doing with the Apostles in the upper room, but also a statement about what He is doing now as He is present with us in worship.
He is with us, and He leads our praises.
Think of it this way: when we lift our voices together in praise, assisted by the Holy Spirit to praise our Lord Jesus Christ, we’re brought into the presence of God. We’re actually sharing in the worship of heaven, and Jesus is with us. Or better said, we are with Jesus.
We surround Him, and He is leading our praises.
If anything should make you want to sing in worship, it’s knowing that He is the real praise leader.”
–Sinclair B. Ferguson, Things Unseen: One Year of Reflections on the Christian Life (Sanford, FL: Ligonier, 2024), 110-112.
