I will praise You with my whole heart; before the gods I will sing praises to You. Psalm 138:1 (NKJV)
Can you say, “With my whole heart, I trust in the Lord”? What about, “With my whole heart, I will follow Jesus”? If we’re not doing those things, it’s hard to fully praise Him.
There was a time when my whole heart wasn’t consumed with trusting in and following Jesus and His path for me.
Sure, I would easily tell you that I had given my heart to Jesus and that I was a Christian, but I still worried about a lot of things. Top of that worry list was my weight. I let the world plant seeds of doubt about who I was and how God had created me. That worry plagued me from my elementary school years until I was 40 years old! My heart was divided. Pursuing weight loss had become an idol. I praised the number on the scale when it was good, the diet when I lost weight, and myself when I succeeded in those endeavors.
The writer of this verse says he will praise the Lord with his whole heart “before the gods.” The gods indicate idols. For me, it was the idol of weight loss. Other idols in our current society could be the number of followers we have on social media, money, a relationship, success. Anything that consumes our time and attention and distracts us from Jesus is an idol.
If we want to praise the Lord with our whole hearts, we must acknowledge and then turn from the idols in our lives. We must stop listening to the negative chatter around us and start listening to the voice of God. He speaks to us through His Word and through Christian friends. We can hear Him in the beauty around us if we’ll quiet our hearts and listen.
After I surrendered my weight loss worries to the Lord, I was able to praise Him with my whole heart and look at my fitness differently. That idol went tumbling down, and I started building my health on a foundation of faith. I listened to the Spirit for guidance, and I found direction in the Bible. When I did that, God took care of the worries, and He took care of the weight. There’s so much peace and freedom when this happens, and that’s certainly something to praise the Lord about!
Action Step
Can you say that the Lord has your whole heart? If you’ve become distracted, you can get your eyes back on Jesus today. Surrender to Him and then praise Him with your whole heart.
