Is God Loving to Exalt Himself?

Our small group started doing a study on worship this fall. It has been an incredible study, so challenging and eye opening. Even though I've grown up in church, I realized just how little I have known and experienced about true worship. My real problem is not just knowing the truth, but living it out. Instead of just cliche sayings of "it's not about me, it's all about God" I've been seeing how much God cares about His glory. In our human minds, God desiring all the glory seems like a prideful sort of thing, yet it's not pride if it's something that you really do deserve because you are worthy of it...and God is!

I read this quote in John Piper's study "Gravity and Gladness" --  a quote from C.S. Lewis. I thought he explained things so well I wanted to share it with anyone willing to read through it...it's worth it. =]

"But the most obvious fact about praise...strangely escaped me.... I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise....The world rings with praise-lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game-praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least . . .

I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise what ever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: "Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?" The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed."

C. S. Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms