I was in church one Sunday morning recently, after a long and difficult week that had left me weak, broken, and beaten down, longing for the Lord’s refreshing touch of Life. I came before Him knowing my spirit would be revived with His hope that springs eternal. As I began to worship, praising my great and glorious God, I wept from the pain of it. Not from the pain of the week or of my brokenness, but from the pain of praise. Praising Him literally hurt. As I turned my face upward and gazed into His blazing eyes of Love, it was like I could feel my flesh dying, like a knife was gently slicing away layers of my heart.
There’s a passage in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a book in the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, that offers an image of what I felt that morning. Through a series of events involving an island and hidden treasure, Eustace has turned into a dragon—the result of his own greed and fear. Scared and wondering what to do next, Eustace has this encounter with the ferociously gentle lion Aslan, who begins removing the dragon scales:
“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And…it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone…”
The thing about sacrifice is that it involves death. And death is always painful. I think this is true of the sacrifice of praise that David talks about as well. Praise is a sacrifice when it requires death: death of the self, death of the flesh, death of our independence and self-sufficiency in the face of His greatness. And whether we’re entombed in scales of our own making—the results of our own sin—or in those piled on by others—the results of a fallen world—praise gives God the opportunity to make us tender and new again as He cuts through these hardened layers. Praise in the midst of darkness creates space for Him to move.
It’s a pain that brings perfectly delicious freedom when praise is a sacrifice, when blood is spilled as the flesh dies on the altar of His grace, in the fellowship of His suffering. It’s in those times when praising God is heart-wrenching, to the very core of our souls, that He can peal off our scales, freeing our spirits to see, to know, His surpassing greatness and indelible beauty. It is in those times that He gathers our tears of brokenness and trial and turns them into tears of joy. Yet another expression of the resurrection and redemption of Jesus Christ, He uses our pain poured out in a moment of surrender to sooth and to heal; He washes us with the Light of his Life to make us new once again.
