I wonder how you respond when someone praises you. Perhaps you are praised for your excellent work, your sporting skills, your kindness or your reliability. The writer of Proverbs makes the interesting observation that such praise is as critical a test of a person as fire testing precious metals. Praise will expose the kind of person that you really are.

There are three things you can do with praise. The first option is to open wide and drink it all in. This is a dangerous path because it is likely to go to your head. It could inflate your opinion of yourself to the point that you become arrogant and unbearable to live with. The second option is to do everything you can to deny the plaudits and suggest that they have got it all wrong. This might sound like a humble approach, but it could easily come across as rude.

The best way to handle praise is to acknowledge it gratefully and to use it as an opportunity to review your life and your relationship with the Lord. It could be that the praise will help you to understand where your gifts really are. When I first started preaching, I was a teenager and was totally unsure of myself. The response from the people who heard me preach was crucial, and if they had been negative and critical I probably wouldn’t have preached another sermon. However, their praise has encouraged me to keep doing it!

Above all, praise needs to encourage us to look to the one who gave us our gifts in the first place. Any gift, flair or ability we have has come to us as a gift from God, and we need to make sure that he is the one who gets the main credit for anything that we achieve.

How do you respond when people praise you?

Lord God, I thank you for the abilities and strengths that you have given me. Help me never to forget that they have all come to me as a gift from your hands. Amen