Giving thanks lead to praise and worship

Again, why were we taught to give thanks first when we begin to pray? This blogger couldn't have explained it better. In this post, I also liked how the structure of the temple (which was designed in different degree of holiness) was used to describe the flow of praise and worship:

Do you know what happen when you give thanks? You start to look in your life, and in your world, where God is, where his blessings are, where you have received grace upon grace. And for all that God has given to us, we give him Thanks! And as we give thanks, we "enter through the gate" into what God is doing, into the kindness and the love of God. And only with this awareness, can we start to Praise God for who he is. We praise God because he deserves our praise.

Ps. 147
[1] Praise the LORD!
For it is good to sing praises to our God;
for he is gracious,
and a song of praise is seemly.
The psalmist says we enter His gate with thanksgiving, and so we start from our worries, our world, our self-centredness, and we turn to what God does for us in our lives. We learn to see what we have received: Love, kindness, grace, and blessings. And for these we give thanks to God. And as we give thanks to God, we start to see who this God is. We started to see the Love that he has for us. And we move on from "the gift" to the "Giver". If in thanksgiving we look into "our lives", then in Praise, we fix our eyes on THE "God".

Read more...