Bring to your mind your favorite hymn or praise and worship song. Pull it up on your phone and play it, or even hum it and reflect on the lyrics for just a moment. Think about where it brings you. By that I mean, what is your physical reaction? What is your spiritual reaction? What does it do to you emotionally? How does that song impact your entire being? These are not just rhetorical questions, but questions that I hope that you will think about and answer before you continue reading this post as I will come back to why I have laid them out. I will tell you how the current song that I am listening to is impacting me even writing. The Heart of Worship is the song currently playing on my Spotify, and I am catching myself pausing in typing, closing my eyes as tears fill them as I lift my face towards the heavens and sing the words from my heart to my Savior. I have to purposefully pull myself back to the keyboard as I unintentionally slip away into praise. This song is one that has always been a cry of my heart as I want my heart to always be a heart of worship, and even though I don’t always succeed, to make my life and every post I write all about Yeshua-Jesus.
My husband is a police officer and has been in law enforcement since 2006. His passion lies in training and trying to equip both officers and the public. As it would literally take up the majority of this post to try to list all of the different types of classes and instruction he has put together; I am going to focus on just one area. He is a reserve academy coordinator, and I have had the opportunity to sit in some of the different blocks of training he has taught, one of them being Interview and Interrogation. This class talks about the difference between the two, as well as confessions. When working a case, LEOs would love for whomever commits crimes to simply come forward and confess, but as real life isn’t like an episode of CSI or NCIS, it doesn’t usually happen that way. While conducting an interview or and interrogation, officers also have to be very careful in how they ask questions or try to get information out of a suspect so that a defense attorney will not come back and get it tossed from court due to coercion. One of the biggest blessings for an officer however is the spontaneous utterance, which is when information if offered up out of the blue without any type of question or prompting whatsoever. Now, you might be wondering where I am actually going with all of this and why I am talking about law enforcement in a post about praise, and to answer that question, we have to look at our next Hebrew word for praise, toda (tow-dah).
A psalm of thanksgiving:
[1] Shout for joy to Adonai, all the earth! [2] Serve Adonai with gladness. Enter his presence with joyful songs. [3] Be aware that Adonai is God; it is he who made us; and we are his, his people, the flock of his pasture. [4] Enter his gates with thanksgiving, enter his courtyards with praise; give thanks to him, and bless his name. [5] For Adonai is good, his grace continues forever, and his faithfulness last through all generations. Psalm 100
As I was studying the word toda, I discovered that it is a word that has much depth concerning praise. The first thing I read was that it was a song of thanksgiving, which we see so beautifully portrayed in Psalm 100. It starts out saying “A song of thanksgiving” or toda. Thankfulness is such an interwoven part of praise, and one that goes back to the book of Leviticus.
[11] This is the law for sacrificing peace offerings offered to Adonai: [12] If a person offers it for giving thanks, he is to offer it with the thanksgiving sacrifice of unleavened cakes mixed with olive oil, matzah spread with olive oil, and cakes made of fine flour mixed with olive oil and fried. [13] With cakes of leaved bread he is to present his offering together with the sacrifice of his peace offerings for giving thanks. [14] From each kind of offering he is to present one as a gift for Adonai; it will belong to the cohen who splashes the blood of the peace offerings against the altar. [15] The meat of the sacrifice of his peace offerings for giving thanks is to be eaten on the day of his offering; he is not to leaveanay of it until morning. Leviticus 7:11-15
When reading these scriptures, knowing that songs of thanksgiving were offered along with the sacrifice and with matzah and olive oil, it made me think about a couple of things. Matzah and olive oil hold strong spiritual symbolism. During the Passover meal, three pieces of matzah are stacked upon each other on a plate, and then the middle piece is removed from it. That piece is broken and wrapped in a cloth which is then hidden. A search is then made from the missing matzah, and once it is found, the Passover can come to conclusion. The symbolism here is remarkable. First, the characteristics of the matzah itself bear witness to Yeshua as promised in Isaiah 53. At the Passover Seder, the matzah is pierced, striped, bruised and broken just as Yeshua was for us. Olive oil is extracted through a very intense process, that again mirrors what Yeshua did for us. Olives are crushed or pressed in order to tear the skin to release the oil. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Yeshua was crushed and pressed as He prayed as the weight of our transgressions bore down upon Him. I do not believe that it is a coincidence that the peace offering, coupled with thanksgiving is made with matzah and olive oil.
[4] In fact, it was our diseases he bore, our pains from which he suffered; yet we regarded him as punished, stricken and afflicted by God. [5] But he was wounded because of our crimes, crushed because of our sins; the disciplining that makes us whole fell on him, and by his bruises we are healed. Isaiah 53:4-5
The second aspect of toda means confession. I spoke earlier of my husband’s profession and confession in the context of law enforcement. Like an officer waits for a confession from a suspect in a case, Yeshua is waiting for each of us to confess our sins to Him, but unlike a judge in a courtroom, when we make that confession, and accept Him as Savior, our heavenly judge will declare us “not guilty” and cast our sins as far away as the east is from the west. If you acknowledge publicly with your mouth that Yeshua is Lord and trust in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be delivered. For with the heart, one goes on trusting and thus continues toward righteousness, while with the mouth one keeps on making public acknowledgement and thus continues toward deliverance. Romans 10:9-10 It is then that we are able to toda or confess the greatness of what He has done for us. This is that song of thankfulness, as we confess with a thankful heart how wonderful our Lord truly is. In sharing about my husband, I also mentioned “spontaneous utterance” which is when information is freely volunteered. When we live a life of praise, and a life close to Yeshua, there will be times that we have moments of “spontaneous praise”, praise that pours out of us freely, at times before we are even aware that it has happened. There are times that our praise is on and with purpose, and then there are those times when we least expect it that praise will shoot forth from the inner most part of our being, like those rivers of living water.
At the beginning of this post, I asked you to think of a hymn or praise song and reflect upon it. This morning, I made a list of the songs that came across my playlist which included: I Could Sing of Your Love Forever, For This Cause, Waymaker, The Cross Has the Final Word, The Alter, Praise You in This Storm, Agnus Dei, and Your Love Oh Lord. Each of these songs conveyed a specific message that the writer was expressing from their heart, but each of them are a toda, a confession of praise and thanksgiving, of love and adoration. Each time you lift your voice in song, when you close your eyes and lift your face and hands to your creator, when your heart is full of thanksgiving and you confess and convey that thankfulness from your spirit as you sing, you are offering toda to the Lord.
[1] Come let’s sing to Adonai! Let’s shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation! [2] Let’s come into his presence with thanksgiving; let’s shout for joy to him with songs of praise. [3] For Adonai is a great God, a great king greater than all gods. [4] He holds the depths of the earth in his hands; the mountain peaks too belong to him. [5] The sea is his – he made it- and his hands shaped the dry land. [6] Come, let’s bow down and worship; let’s kneel before Adonai who made us. [7] For he is our God, and we are the people in his pasture, the sheep in his care. Psalm 95:1-7
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