Psalm 69:30

"I will praise the name of God with a song, And will magnify Him with thanksgiving" Psalm 69:30

Pastor Edwin's irrefutable law number 121: If you blow air into a balloon, it will get bigger. That seems logical - and true. No one ever inflates a balloon just to make it smaller. Of course some balloon sadists inflate them just to see them burst, but that's beside the point.

Just like a balloon, something happens in the spiritual when we praise God with thanksgiving - He gets bigger! No, not physically - and how can the God of the universe get any bigger anyway? After all, He did create everything. But God does get magnified - in our hearts. You see, God doesn't need to get bigger for His benefit. But we need Him to be enlarged in us.

When we first become a believer, our God seems very large - we ask, He provides. It makes no difference whether it is a store front parking spot or a new house or lost souls. He seems to be able to pull them all out of the box. But sooner or later, we become more experienced in our faith and realize that God is too busy for all of our little requests. In essence, He becomes smaller to us. It may be because He finally said "no" to a request or two. Or it may be because we quit asking. Whatever the reason, we put God in a box - a very small box of our own making.

But we are never satisfied with a small God. We always remember the past with fondness. We frequently long for it to happen, but it never does. Why? Because we keep God in His box. He doesn't want to be there. We don't want Him there. But we never open the lid.

Eventually, we learn that praise and thanksgiving are good things to do. We begin to earnestly thank God for His goodness. Then, lo and behold, something happens. The door to the God box we made is opened a crack and God oozes out (not that God is gooey). That seems fine to us. We begin to see prayers answered. The more we see answers, the more we rejoice with thanksgiving. The more we rejoice with thanksgiving, the more God does for us and with us. He gets magnified in our eyes - in our lives - in the lives of those around us. Soon we find that God is bigger than any box we could build. We discover that He can do far more than the self-centered requests of our spiritual childhood.

We find that He is the almighty one. There is nothing too great for Him. He is the all powerful. Nothing can stand in His way. He is the King of kings. All powers have to - no absolutely must - bow before Him. See how God is magnified through our praise and thanksgiving? Hallelujah, Amen and Amen.