Praising the Lord always

“I will extol the Lord at all times; His praise will always be on my lips.” Psalm 34:1
Take a moment to think about the things you can praise God for. You may be in a place of blessing and prosperity – praise God for this. Or you may be facing difficult times – but even there, you can praise Him for the good that He has done, for His promises to protect you, for giving you the Holy Spirit to comfort you, for the salvation He has freely provided to you. We can also praise God for what He has restrained from happening, and our foolish prayers that He chose not to grant.
The subtitle to Psalm 34 reads, ‘Of David. When he pretended to be insane before Abimelech, who drove him away, and he left.’ This was perhaps David’s most cowardly hour. You can read about it in 1 Sam. 21:10-15. He was fleeing from Saul, and sought refuge in the land of the Philistines. His reputation preceded him there, and he was afraid of what the king (which is what the title ‘Abimelech’ means) would do to him. So he pretended to be insane, drooling and twitching.
I believe God would have rescued David from that situation anyway, and would not have let the Philistine king hand him over to Saul – and spared him making a fool of himself. After all, God had promised David that he would be king of Israel. It wasn’t obvious at the time how He was going to do that. But through the whole thing, David remained a man of praise – and we can too.