“Praise” appears on Elevation Worship’s 2023 album CAN YOU IMAGINE? and features Brandon Lake, Chris Brown, and Chandler Moore. The song was written by Chris Brown, Steven Furtick, Brandon Lake, Chandler Moore, Pat Barrett, and Cody Carnes. It subsequently became one of Elevation Worship’s biggest songs.
The Protestia rubric starts with an important premise: churches do not need any particular contemporary song. Every song chosen excludes another, so merely being catchy, popular, or technically orthodox in parts is not enough. The song should justify its place through doctrinal fidelity, specificity, focus, associations, and musical usefulness.
Note: For a full explanation of the rubric and a primer on our scoring methodology, click here.
Doctrinal Fidelity and Clarity:
There is plenty here that is unobjectionable. The song exhorts the believer to praise God in varying circumstances, whether confident or doubting, whether on the proverbial mountain or in the valley. It confesses that God remains sovereign, reigning, faithful, and true, and explicitly celebrates that Christ “rose and defeated the grave.”
Those are good truths. Then Elevation cannot resist turning praise itself into a mechanism of spiritual warfare.
The first questionable line describes praise as the water in which the worshiper’s enemies drown. Later, the song becomes substantially clearer about the idea: the worshiper’s praise is called a weapon, followed by the claim that his shout brings Jericho down.
The Jericho reference is particularly careless. In Joshua 6, Israel did not discover a universally applicable spiritual technology wherein sufficiently enthusiastic shouting causes spiritual strongholds to collapse. God gave Israel a specific command concerning a specific city during the conquest of Canaan. God brought the walls down. The point of the account is not that human praise possesses intrinsic destructive spiritual power.
Yet “Praise” takes that historical act of God and turns it into first-person methodology: my praise, my weapon, my shout, Jericho comes down.
This is exactly the sort of language that fits comfortably inside modern charismatic “praise is warfare” theology, where vocal declaration, atmosphere-changing worship, and spiritual breakthrough become quasi-sacramental techniques. Even if the writers intended nothing more than energetic metaphor, the lyric itself teaches more than Scripture warrants.
Compare that with the genuinely biblical portions of the song. “Praise the Lord, O my soul” is essentially Psalm language. “God is sovereign,” “God reigns,” and Christ “defeated the grave” are straightforward Christian affirmations. None of those require explanation. The Jericho material does.
Corporate worship should not require the pastor to add a footnote afterward explaining that the congregation’s singing does not actually knock down spiritual Jerichos.
Score: 14/25.
Doctrinal Specificity:
The strongest section comes late in the song. God is sovereign, reigning, faithful, true, incomparable, and the One who rose from the grave. That resurrection reference gives the song unmistakably Christian content.
But there is very little gospel substance beyond that.
Who is Christ? Why did He die? What is man’s problem? What is sin? What did the resurrection accomplish? What has God saved His people from? None of this appears. The resurrection becomes another reason for celebration without the song explaining the saving work that gives the resurrection its meaning.
Most of the song could be summarized as, “I will praise regardless of circumstances because God is powerful and deserves praise.” True enough, but doctrinally thin.
There is an interesting contrast here. The song becomes extremely specific when describing what our praise supposedly accomplishes, yet comparatively nonspecific about what Christ accomplished for sinners.
That is backwards.
A Mormon could not comfortably sing every line because the resurrection and uniqueness of God push toward orthodox Christianity, but a prosperity preacher or charismatic revivalist could sing the entire song with enthusiasm, especially the weaponized-praise language.
Score: 12/20.
Focus:
The title promises praise, and God certainly receives praise. The bridge gives actual reasons: His sovereignty, reign, resurrection, faithfulness, truthfulness, and incomparable greatness. That portion is properly Godward.
Unfortunately, much of the song is rhetorically about the worshiper praising rather than about the God being praised.
“I’ll praise.”
“I’ve got a reason.”
“I won’t be quiet.”
“My praise.”
“My enemies.”
“My shout.”
The congregation spends considerable time singing about its own act of worship. This is a persistent weakness of modern worship music. Rather than simply extolling God, we sing about how loudly, persistently, sincerely, and powerfully we are going to extol God.
That problem becomes particularly acute when “my praise” acquires supernatural utility. Now the worshiper is not merely describing his worship. His worship has become the weapon doing things.
The bridge rescues the focus somewhat by finally answering the essential question: Why exactly are we praising Him? Unfortunately, the song spends considerably more lyrical energy referencing the experience of praising than supplying doctrinal content about the object of praise.
Score: 14/20.
Association:
Here the song collapses.
This is not merely a Brandon Lake song that happens to have a questionable collaborator buried somewhere in the credits. It is an Elevation Worship song, released by Elevation Worship, from an Elevation Worship album, connected directly to Elevation Church, whose founder and lead pastor is Steven Furtick. Elevation’s own website identifies Furtick as the church’s founder and lead pastor and specifically connects his ministry expansion with Elevation Worship.
Furtick is also one of the songwriters.
Under the rubric, this is precisely the sort of association that matters. Our existing review of Phil Wickham’s “This Is Our God” gave 0/20 for association substantially because Furtick was a co-writer, concluding that his involvement constituted dangerous associational baggage. See this review of “Do it Again” for the disqualifying issues with Furtick. Having an easily-verifiable false teacher as one of the songwriters is the essence of dangerous association.
And “Praise” presents an even stronger case. Here, Elevation is not peripheral. It is the source.
Brandon Lake brings additional baggage rather than relieving it. He has substantial past ties to Bethel Music and Maverick City Music and extensive collaboration with Elevation Worship. The relevant point is not guilt by accidental proximity. Worship songs function as ministry products. Congregational use funnels familiarity, credibility, licensing attention, and influence toward the ministries producing them.
And in this case, the questionable “praise as spiritual weapon” theology found in the lyrics is not disconnected from that ecosystem. The association actually helps explain why the questionable language should not simply be waved away as an innocent metaphor.
Score: 0/20.
Musical Value:
Musically, “Praise” accomplishes exactly what it was engineered to accomplish.
It is fast, infectious, easily learned, rhythmically energetic, and constructed for a large room. At roughly 127 BPM, it trades the usual ambient Elevation swell for a more upbeat gospel-pop worship sound.
Congregations will remember it. They will probably enjoy singing it. But catchiness is not synonymous with musical substance.
The arrangement leans heavily upon escalating repetition. “Praise the Lord, O my soul,” “I won’t be quiet,” and the closing Psalm 150 refrain are repeated until the musical energy itself becomes much of the song’s persuasive force. This is particularly unfortunate because the lyrical material is not dense enough to justify the runtime. A short, energetic praise song gets stretched into the familiar contemporary worship experience where repetition substitutes for additional truth.
Still, compared with some seven-to-ten-minute atmospheric exercises emanating from the same industry, “Praise” is undeniably more singable and musically effective.
Score: 8/15.
Total Score:
48/100.
Pick Something Else. Not recommended for corporate worship.
There is a decent Christian praise song buried inside “Praise.” Psalm-like exhortations to worship, God’s sovereignty and faithfulness, and Christ’s resurrection could have formed the backbone of something quite usable.
Instead, the song turns the worshiper’s praise into a weapon, appropriates Jericho as a model for spiritually potent shouting, gives us little gospel content, spends too much time singing about our own praising, and comes directly from Elevation Worship with Steven Furtick’s name sitting in the songwriting credits.
And that final point is not incidental. Under the rubric, losing more than ten points in either doctrinal fidelity or association is grounds for automatic non-recommendation. “Praise” manages both.
There are hundreds of songs that praise God’s sovereignty, resurrection, faithfulness, and greatness without teaching your congregation that their shouting knocks down Jericho and without importing Elevation Church into your Sunday repertoire.
Use one of them.
