Praise God Anyhow

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.

At Cornerstone Pentecostal Church on a Sunday afternoon in October 2022, Jacob Phillips reads the whole of Habakkuk 3 aloud and preaches from its last movement. Habakkuk is a prophetic dialogue: in chapter 1 the prophet complains that iniquity, violence, and perverted judgment rule while God seems silent, and God answers that the Chaldeans are coming in judgment; in chapter 2 the prophet objects that the Chaldeans are worse than Israel, and God answers that He will deal with them in turn. Chapter 3 is the prophet's response — a prayer on Shigionoth that asks God, in wrath, to remember mercy, and then watches the theophany roll out: pestilence, scattered mountains, the sun and moon standing still, until the prophet's belly trembles and rottenness enters his bones. Then comes the inventory of total loss in verse 17 — no blossom on the fig tree, no fruit on the vines, the olive's labor failed, no meat in the fields, the flock cut off, no herd in the stalls — and against all of it, verse 18: yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation, who makes my feet like hinds' feet and makes me walk on my high places.

Phillips's argument is that Habakkuk stops trying to understand God and stands instead on what he does know: God is faithful, just, righteous, and on the throne. Believers stall their miracles, he argues, because they are trying to solve the why — why the backsliding, why the wreck, why life in the church hurts the same way life in the world did — and blaming the preacher, the program, and the evangelist for what is simply life happening. You don't need to know the why; you know the Who. Praise was never designed to be about the praiser or his situation, and it was never designed as a response to what God has done — that is worship. Praise is what gets God's attention while everything is still wrong, the way Bartimaeus made noise until Jesus stopped. Habakkuk's arithmetic preaches it: seventeen verses of bad news need only two verses of praise to answer them, because praise doesn't take much paper once you understand God's good and that's enough. And the wrath itself is an opportunity: when judgment makes people bow the knee, mercy follows repentance, and the mess of the Northwest — like the mess of Mississippi — is the setup for the greatest Apostolic revival the area has ever known.

The application turns practical and loud. The problem in a great church, Phillips tells Cornerstone, is not the church, the pastor, or the praise team; it is members who have not learned to open their mouths — people who get emotional about everything except God and sit like bumps on a log while their pastor watches. He testifies of a COVID-era revival in Mississippi where he and the pastor shouted in near-empty aisles, a visiting couple's broken marriage was exposed and restored at the altar, and the husband's baptism two weeks later drew seventy watchers who stayed — some 160 souls baptized, he reports, because one man decided to praise God anyhow when there was almost nobody to praise with. The close defines God's will from 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 — rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks — and dissolves into a led praise movement: everybody out, everybody praising anyhow, spouses and families together, with a word for the house that forty-two backsliders are coming home.

Scripture index: Habakkuk 3:1-19; Habakkuk 1; Habakkuk 2; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18.