Why we love to praise what we enjoy

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This week I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between praise and joy. Have you noticed that we, as humans, love to praise? We were built for it. Praise is the outcome of what, or who, we enjoy. It is the eruption, and completion, that inevitably results in response to the joy we experience in someone or something. In other words, our joy and our praise are directly related; we praise what we enjoy and enjoy what we praise. God calls for our praise, not as a detached, isolated act, but because he is the most-to-be-enjoyed of all things we enjoy. Do you enjoy him? The best measure is your praise of him. I love how CS Lewis brings this point to life...

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“We do not approach people to call them out of happiness and assign them to a ritualistic, grim existence in which they please God by mere duty. We reach out to lost people to tell them that they are letting their inferior principles drive their appetites and passions, and that if they continue to do so, this pattern will lead them infinitely and unalterably far from the presence of God. It is not pleasure and happiness that they need to give up; it is sin, and the sinfully oriented pleasures that they seek. We call them to repent of these ways, to forsake sin, and to trust Jesus Christ, the Savior who waits to lead them into pleasures evermore (Psalms 16:11).”
— Owen Strachan and Doug Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards: On the Good Life, p70.
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“God [has] not made mankind to be miserable. Being a Christian [does] not mean the absence of pleasure. Much to the contrary, God [has] made mankind to experience unending delight and joy in Him, to be happier and happier as knowledge of God increase[s], and to constantly soak up the sweetest pleasure the world affords in the life of faith - all of which flow together to constitute “the good life”…any life created by the majestic, undomesticated, loving god of the Bible [can] not be mundane or boring.”
— Owen Strachan and Doug Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards: On the Good Life, p25.