Great God Great Praise

Kurt Carr opens with a spoken command rather than a sung line: "clap those hands! I serve a great God! He's a great, big God! So he deserves a great, big praise!" The song announces its own logic before the choir ever comes in — size of God, size of the response.

"We bring you grateful hearts for the love and joy overflowing" pairs praise with gratitude rather than treating them as separate categories, and the repeated "you deserve it" that follows keeps the reasoning simple on purpose: not that praise feels good, but that it's owed.

The psalmist's declaration that the Lord is great, and greatly to be praised, and Revelation's picture of worship around the throne declaring God worthy to receive glory and honor and power, both sit behind a song that spends most of its runtime repeating the same conclusion rather than building a new argument for it. Some claims, this song seems to believe, are worth saying sixteen times instead of once.