Chapter Four: Praise That Costs Something

The night before His crucifixion, Jesus ate Passover with His disciples. When the meal was finished, before they left for the garden where He would be arrested, they sang together. Matthew records it in one sentence: "And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives." The hymn was a collection of psalms — Psalms 113 through 118 — that Jewish families had sung at Passover for generations. Jesus knew every word. He sang them while knowing what was about to happen.

They sang of the Lord as help and shield. They sang of souls delivered from death, eyes from tears, feet from stumbling. They sang of the Lord as strength and defense, who had become their salvation.

He sang all of that. Then He walked to Gethsemane.

That sequence matters. The praise came first. Not after the resurrection, not after the garden had passed. He sang it knowing what was coming, and then He walked into it.

This is what the New Testament means when it speaks of "a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, acknowledging his name." (Hebrews 13:15, NET) It is called a sacrifice because it costs something. The praise that flows easily when everything is good costs nothing. What Jesus sang at the Passover table was a different thing entirely: praise offered by someone who knew exactly what was coming. That kind of praise costs everything.

The Structure of Psalm 22

Psalm 22 is the paradigm for praise that costs something. Read how it begins:

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? I groan in prayer, but help seems far away. My God, I cry out during the day, but you do not answer, and during the night my prayers do not let up.

You are holy; you sit as king receiving the praises of Israel.

In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted in you and you rescued them. To you they cried out, and they were saved; in you they trusted and they were not disappointed. — Psalm 22:1–5, NET

Three verses of unrelieved darkness. And then — not resolution, not rescue, not even a turn in feeling — but the declaration: you are holy. You sit as king. The ancestors trusted and you did not fail them.

Nothing in the circumstances has changed. Nothing in the feeling has changed. The theology has been allowed to speak into the circumstances. The psalmist does not wait for the darkness to lift before declaring what is true about God. He declares it from inside the darkness, on the basis of what he knows about God's character — received from his community, tested across generations.

By the end of the psalm, through the physical extremity of verses 14 through 17, through the encirclement by enemies and the casting of lots for the garments, the writer arrives at the doxology that the opening darkness was always building toward. The praise is not cheap because the darkness was real. That is the structure of praise that costs something: it goes through the dark, it does not skip the dark, and it arrives at the other side because of what the psalmist knows about God, not because of what changed in the circumstances.

Building the Capacity

The person who has only ever praised God from good circumstances has not yet been tested. When the hard circumstances arrive, the question of whether honest speech before God can include praise alongside the honest acknowledgment of darkness will matter enormously.

The curriculum builds the capacity before the test comes. You pray the psalms that arrive at praise through darkness when you are not in the darkness, so that when the darkness comes you already know the path. Jesus sang Psalms 113 through 118 with His disciples on the night He was betrayed. The singing did not prevent the anguish of Gethsemane. What it did was locate the anguish inside a frame — the frame of the God who delivers. He had that frame because He had been praying the curriculum His whole life.

That is what you are building when you pray the whole Psalter, year after year. Not immunity from darkness. The frame that holds inside the darkness.