Study Time to Psalm 47 with Lena's Journalin'

Come whoever feels like it. Clap your hands with joyful shouting, only if you feel as good as you do when you are at a sports event and your team is scoring or wins.
Express your love for God in exuberant loud praise, only if He has done something really big for you - personally. If you’ve seen something miraculous with your natural eyes and have experienced some awesome feat, like seeing a dead man raised, at that time, jump up and down with glee and spin around showing the world and every good and evil angel, how very much you love God based on what He does for you.
Love Him when you feel like He’s done something such as that, something to “deserve” your outward pride stomping on praise.
If you visibly see God come out to defeat your enemies, the ones you don’t like to be bothered with. If He makes people you don’t particularly care for stop saying bad stuff about you, or if He changes them, or if He makes them move far away from you so you don’t have to interact with them everyday anymore, then call Him great with your own mouth in a song.
If God miraculously fixes all of your mistakes and does not have you live with the consequences of any of your wrong choices and if he helps you become responsible to choose what is right or wrong, according to His standard, if He lets you make your own standard and not ever have to own up to anything, only at that time, stand up in church and lift your hands and praise Him, acknowledging Him as God.
If He shows up visibly in your church service and has a processional, where you can see Him wearing His royal robe and extending His royal scepter, at that time, bow to Him in homage willingly, ok?
Let the people trained to sing at church, do the singing. Let the ones who feel especially happy that day, do all the singing and express themselves willingly before God Let the ones who have no struggles sing today. Let those who have seen miracles sing, and join in with those who have no needs at all. Let the ones who are closest to God, sing His praise. All of the others are excused somehow, right?
Oh, no, let people who hold positions as though they were chosen special by God, let those who have appointments and titles praise Him and honor Him by stepping outside of the comfort zones of their own personalities, those are the ones who should praise and be thankful to God for His great love and the power of the work of that love extended to man willingly.
All of the above is as hogwash!

I see men and women rationalize praise, excuse themselves, from their personal participation in it, observe it as though it is a spectator sport.
I hear words like this,
Oh clap your (own) hands together EVERYONE who is alive on earth.
Somehow I know that means me, and also is specific to every other person, who is standing in a church service being given the same word of God we have all willingly come to hear.
There’s no one alive on earth that this word is not speaking of and is giving an excuse to, to not clap unto God, except for me. I make my own excuses. I excusing myself from offering Him praise.
Praise, like any other Christian expression is offered from one who so chooses to offer it.

One thing I have learned recently is that every word I hear, either from reading God’s word, or from a preacher preaching to me, or a being taught by a teacher, is an offer to me by God My Father, the LORD Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Every word given in the presence of my hearing ears is an opportunity I can accept or decline. It is an option to me, even though it is the very truth that is powerfully set up by God to help change me and make me one with His spirit. I can opt out of it, but in taking these words as options and in regarding them as mere suggestions, I lose out of a loving and obedient relationship with My Father. Obedience is the way to have a close relationship with the Father God. Obedience is the highest form of love any human can give. For they are freewill beings and do not have to, but can if they want to, If they want to, they can, and if they do, they have chosen to love - Him.
Praise is choosing to honor God.
It is choosing to exalt Him, when other things in life would love to have His place, especially where my affections are concerned.
It is a choice demonstrated in being thankful no matter what seems evident or true.
It is saying God is the Lord of me, no matter what kinds of smoke-screens have been set up to distract me.
It is willingly putting Him visibly on top even if I don’t see or feel Him in the natural. It is an act of faith, which oh so pleases Our Father.
It is a demonstration of service by faith.
It is willful obedience epitomized.
It is changing who I was, to become who He is, willingly!
It is earth in harmony with heaven, now, for me.
If I praise, I get off of the throne of my own heart and give that place to God, if I stay there as my own lord, I’ve already given place to god’s enemy in my heart, the enemy of my soul.
I give the enemy absolutely no place in me, because I purposely choose not to. I have to choose. If I don’t I’ve already chosen.