Unsealed Lips
How freely do you praise God?
Verse of the Day
“Unseal my lips, O Lord, that my mouth may praise you.”
Today’s Devotional
Imagine that you are in a hotel room. You go to leave, and just as the door clicks shut behind you, you realize two things: (1) You left your wallet, keys, and phone inside… and (2) You don’t have a key for the door. What will you do? You could go to the reception desk, but you don’t have your wallet to prove that you are, in fact, the person who has rented the room for which you are requesting a key.
There’s only one way for your plan to work, which is to hope that the same person who checked you in is still on duty, and more importantly, that this person remembers you.
Your actions locked you out. Now you need help to get back in.
There are times in our lives when our actions lock our hearts away from God and seal our lips from being able to praise Him. David is familiar with this. His sins of adultery and murder fractured his close bond with the Father. But it doesn’t have to be “big” sins that have this effect on us. (Please know that God sees sin as sin, no matter how “big” or “small” from our human perspective.) Pride, misplaced priorities, apathy, jealousy, gossip, slander…all of these can have the same effect of breaking our bond with God and sealing our lips from praising Him.
We need help. And thankfully, God is ALWAYS at the reception desk. And He remembers each and every one of us.
Just like we can pray for God’s help to obey, we can ask God for help to praise Him. We just have to go to Him. A sincere desire for the ability to praise God will not go unnoticed.
Praising God is an active part of our spiritual journey. It reminds us that He is God and worthy of our praise. Praise turns our attention toward God, which naturally removes our attention from our circumstances. Praising God is part of our purpose. God says in the book of Isaiah that we are “the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.” (Isaiah 43:21) Psalm 22:3 tells us that God inhabits the praise of His people. So where there is praise, God is there.
My daughter sent me a video of a little boy, probably around 3 or 4 years old, who was meeting his new baby brother for the very first time. He was SO EXCITED! Physically, he could not stay still. He was jumping around in front of the couch where his newborn brother was. His dad asked if he wanted to hold his new brother. Of course he did! And then the adults simply could not move fast enough to get this tiny human into his arms. But once the little boy was holding his baby brother…he got really still. And then…he started to sing: “Waymaker, Miracle Worker, Promise Keeper, Light in the Darkness…My God, that is who you are…” That little boy had unsealed lips to praise the Father. He knew exactly where his new little brother came from. And he couldn’t do anything but praise.
That’s probably a really good example of how Jesus wants us to be like little children.
If you need help to know how to praise God, ask God to unseal your lips so that you can praise Him with abandon. He remembers you, and if you want to get back into the place where your heart is full of praise, He will help you.
Journal Prompts
Answer only the questions that seem relevant to you today.
Have you experienced a time when praising God was difficult? Or foreign? Or weird? Are you in that place now?
Do you know someone who is comfortable with praising God? Ask that person what they did to get there.
Are you willing to ask God to unseal your lips so that you may praise Him? Today is a great day for that.