Persistent Praise – Our Story

A beautiful cathedral, musicians holding fine-tuned instruments, choir director ready to lead the church into congregational worship – these are some of the images that come to mind when we think about praising God. We’ve become so accustomed to attributing praise to Sunday morning church services. We usually think about praise when everything in life feels in sync. But psalmist David gives us a different picture of praise in Psalm 34.

Psalm 34:1 -I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth

All-Time Praise.
That word all is easy to read and ignore, but it actually changes our perspective. It doesn’t mean most times. It doesn’t mean when life makes sense. It doesn’t mean when prayers are being answered the way we hoped. It means all phases of life.

And when David wrote that, life was not steady for him.

The heading of the psalm points us back to a strange moment — David standing in front of a Philistine king, pretending to be insane. If you go back to 1 Samuel 21, you see how desperate things had gotten. He was running from Saul, completely out of options, and ended up in Gath — Goliath’s hometown of all places.

At some point, the servants start recognizing him. The same David who killed Goliath. You can almost feel the panic rising in that moment.

So he does something unexpected. He lets saliva run down his beard. Scratches at the gate. Acts completely out of his mind.

And it works. The king wants nothing to do with him and sends him away.

There’s also a small detail tucked in there — Psalm 34 calls the king Abimelech, while 1 Samuel calls him Achish. Abimelech wasn’t a personal name so much as a title, something like Pharaoh. So David wasn’t just in front of a random ruler. He was standing in front of a line of kings. And he walked away looking like a fool.

It is at that scary, confused, lost moment of life – somewhere in between sprinting away from a foreign court, and hiding in the Cave of Adullam (Chapter 22) – that’s when he sat down and wrote this song of praise.

Purposeful Praise

Psalm 34 is written in a special style called acrostic poetry. In Hebrew, nearly every verse of this begins with the next letter of the alphabet—from Aleph to Taw.

The Hebrew word for “bless” here is barak — and it literally means to kneel. David had just barely crawled out of a foreign king’s court. But his heart was still on its knees before the only King that actually mattered.

Our Story -Twenty-Six Years of “All Times”
This week marks twenty-six years of marriage for my wife and I. And we can testify that not all years fit into the beautiful cathedral type of praise moments. They are indeed filled with its ups and downs.

There were eight years of waiting — years of crying out to God for a child. Those years include pregnancy losses, heartbreaks and tears. Then we were blessed with our first miracle child.

There were years where we both had jobs and there were six years with just one income.

There was the miracle of the birth of our twins when doctors had said otherwise. There was a terrifying moment during that delivery when my wife’s heart flatlined for twelve seconds, and the God who holds life in His hands brought her back.

And there were nine years of watching our oldest daughter, Hannah, face a health condition that reduced her blood platelets, until June of 2024, when she went home to be with the Lord at the tender age of sixteen.

Twenty-six years. Eight years of childlessness. Six years without a steady paycheck. Nine years of battling a disease along with our daughter. Passing of our dear Hannah. Miracles and losses. Mountaintop blessings. Valleys we did not expect and did not choose.

And through every one of those seasons, we can’t say we were always praising. We went through our high and low seasons but God remained faithful.

What “All Times” Looks Like in Practice?
David writes in verse 18: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” The Hebrew word for “brokenhearted” is shabar — it means shattered, burst, broken into pieces. The Hebrew for “crushed in spirit” describes something beaten completely flat. David was not writing poetry about people who were mildly inconvenienced. He was writing as one who had nothing left. But even then David says: “His praise shall continually be in my mouth.”
David did not pretend the cave wasn’t dark. He did not post smiling pictures while going through pain. He’s telling us that he tasted the bitterness — and still chose to bless the Lord. The word continually in Hebrew suggests something without interruption, like a river that keeps flowing. This praise did not include his harp and musical instruments. All he had in the cave was a heart that was broken, but still willing to worship God despite his circumstances.

Life Application
If you are in a season that feels more like a cave than a cathedral, you are in exactly the right place for Psalm 34. You do not need to have it all together to praise God. You do not need to understand the season to bless Him in it. David did not praise from a throne — he praised from a fugitive’s hideout. And God heard every word.
Twenty-six years have taught us this: the goodness of God does not leave us abandoned in our hardest chapters. If anything, it is in those chapters that we have felt it most. Not always as answers, but always as enough peace and Presence of God for the moment.
So today, whether your home is full of joy or full of grief, whether this year has brought a miracle or a mystery — choose to bless the Lord. From the first letter of your story to the very last. He is worthy of it all, at all times – in the cathedral and the cave.