Praise and Thanksgiving

This is a privilege of the highest nature, and an exercise of the highest delight; for glory in the highest perfection is due to the Holy Name of the LORD. “O bless our God, ye people, and make the voice of His praise to be heard;” (Psalm 66:8); and all nations are called to bless and adore Him; that is, so many as it shall please our God to call to the faith of His Son Christ Jesus, for they that love the LORD, can never cease from this work. “I will extol Thee, my God, O king; and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever. Every day will I bless Thee; and I will praise Thy name for ever and ever” (Psalm 145:1-2.)
 

Everyone that honours the Father, honours the Son, for their glory cannot be divided; no glory can possibly be given to the one, that is not given to the other, for they are one; and to render thanksgiving and praise is the most direct and immediate way of confessing the God of all grace. In this way we confess the sensible feelings of our hearts, and breathe out the very joy, admiration and gratitude of our souls; declaring our intellectual conceptions of the LORD of glory, and the deep impressions thereby made upon our innate powers, and exert all the faculties of our minds to show forth the excellency, the blessedness, the greatness, and the goodness of the Holy One. 
 

In ascribing the glory due to His excellent greatness, or His essential perfection; herein we confess the absolute Majesty and Glory of the Father, His eternal, infinite, immutable blessedness; His righteousness and holiness, His wisdom, power, truth and love; and that we confess the going forth of 
all these perfections in the Man Christ Jesus, or the opening of the Divine bosom in the Son of His Delight; so that all the ineffable, inconceivable glories of the LORD God omnipotent; which from the beginning of the world have been hidden in God, now shine in the greatest luster in the Person of Jesus Christ. 

 

For Emmanuel is the brightness of the Father’s glory, the express image of His Person; and in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; or all that is in the incomprehensible Jehovah, is in the Man of His right hand. “I and My Father are ONE” (John 10:30.) Thus, all the saints adore and bless, magnify and extol the Father in the Son, and the Son in the Father; whilst they confess the Holy Ghost to be the very life, light, spirit, truth, and power of the Father and the Son, proceeding into the hearts of all that believe; to come by the knowledge of the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent; to introduce them into the fellowship of the Father and the Son; and fill their hearts with clear conceptions of the glory of God in Christ. 

 

—preacher J. Johnson (1781 A.D.)

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