A sacrifice of praise

My class just finished up with an indepth Precept upon Precept (PUP) study of the book of Hebrews.  For those of you who do the PUP series of books, remember in our homework (of any study) that we are asked to ready the observation worksheets over and over throughout a study?    By the time a study has ended, we will have read the text a hundred or more times.   And even so, when we slow down and start doing the observations, we see things we missed?  And even more so, we start answering the questions in our homework and still see more things we missed?

This happened to me, again, while studying Hebrews.  Consider this verse:

Hebrews 13:15:  " Through Him then, let’s continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips praising His name.^"

It wasn't until I was watching Kay's video that I truly started to understand this verse.  The times I read through it, I realize now it was superficially.  I thought it just meant to give God praise.  But there's so much more to it.

First off -  what's does sacrifice mean?  According to the online 1828 Webster's dictionary, the first meaning for sacrifice is "To offer to God in homage or worship".  Another meaning is "To devote with loss."  A sacrifice costs you something.

So what can a sacrifice of praise mean then?  In Hebrews chapter 12, the author was talking about difficult times. There are times in every person's life that is hard.  A bad medical situation, financial hardship, family issues...  It's easy to praise God when life is good, but how hard is to praise God when life is hard?  It costs you something.  And when life is really hard?  that praise costs you a great deal.  

This is what the author of Hebrews was referring to as a "sacrifice of praise".  And we know that those sacrifices of praise are pleasing to God.  (Hebrews 13:16)