Wake Up From Your Sleep

My New Year’s Resolution for 2016 is to take one step at a time. I hope you will join me on my journey.

January 4, 2016

Day four, step two: Wake Up From Your Sleep.

How easy it is to become distracted and at times even lazy. I teach piano and voice lessons. However, at what cost. Time to improve my voice and piano skills and that poor flute is sitting in its case for years. In the past, I even wrote a hymn inspired by a retreat in the Swiss Alps. 

I studied for years, yet it is so much easier not to practice, not to play, not to sing, not to write – except when required by teaching.

The readings from the Revised Book of Common Prayer the last few days have encouraged me not to let my gifts become sleeper gifts. To wake them up and use them not only to provide our needed extra income, to build others gifts, but to praise God with them and for them.

Good people, cheer God!
    Right-living people sound best when praising.
Use guitars to reinforce your Hallelujahs!
    Play his praise on a grand piano!
Invent your own new song to him;
    give him a trumpet fanfare. (Psalm 33:1-3 MSG) January 2

And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way. (Colossians 3:17 MSG) January 3

Sing songs from your heart to Christ. Sing praises over everything, any excuse for a song to God the Father in the name of our Master, Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:20 MSG) January 4

Step two for 2016 is to carve out time each day to play the piano, to sing 
praises, to carve out Wednesday in such a way I have enough energy to attend choir rehearsal, to begin each Sunday helping to lead worship. Even set aside time to write – words and tunes. Set a priority. Create a schedule for regular practice.

However, start with baby steps. All at once and I am sure to fail.

·         Look at the calendar. Save enough energy to go to choir practice. Plan in a nap. Stay up past my usual bedtime this one day. Can I do it? I do not know. However, if I do not try, I will never know.

·         Sing the warm ups I assign to my voice students every day.

·         Get out the scale book. Play one scale on the piano six times each day for a week, just like I ask my students.

·         Play one hymn or praise song until I can play and sing it at tempo mistake free, just for God and me.

The gifts are God’s. Wake up! How we use them is entirely up to us. Wake up! What a shame to waste our gifts through disuse. Wake up! What gifts  are rusting from disuse? Wake up! Do not let your gifts be sleepers. Wake up! Share your plan.

The Message (MSG)

Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson
Photo: Matt Malloy - Time Lapse Sunset

Be Still

Daily Readings Book of Common Prayer

Sunday,  January 6, 2013

http://www.crivoice.org/epiphany1.html

Psalm 46 : Trust the Lord's saving presence in the midst of cosmic upheaval and geopolitical uproar. God is our refuge, our sanctuary. God calls us to "Be still and know that I am God."

Psalm 97 :  A song extolling God's glory. His incomparable greatness motivates praise. "For you, O Lord, are most high over all the earth."

Psalm 96 : A call to praise and worship God in the sanctuary where God's presence can be experienced powerfully.

Psalm 100 : A call to give thanks in the temple. A call to come into His presence and celebrate God's goodness.

Isaiah 52: 7-10 : "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, 'Your God reigns.'"

Revelation 21: 22-27 In the New Heaven and the New Earth the role of God, the Lamb is to be the temple and the source of all light.

Matthew 12:14-21 Jesus fulfills Isaiah's prophecy of God's chosen servant's desire for secrecy, and foreshadows and becomes key to the great commission where Jesus commands his disciples to carry the Good News to Gentiles and Jews alike.

The  Wesley Study Bible, New Revised Standard Version, Abingdon Press, 2009

Three gentile kings seek and find the King of the Jews, the holy child. They follow a new star that stops over the place where they child was. When they saw the star stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. We too can follow the Lamb who is become our light. His righteousness is become our righteousness, and we are called to "be still" and know that we are in the presence of God.

They knelt and paid him homage. They opened their treasure chests. They offered him gifts of gold frankincense and myrrh. God's incomparable greatness motivated their praise. In the temple, the sanctuary of the presence of the holy child, the Son of the Trinity, the magi were called into God's temple. They came into God's presence and celebrated God's goodness. We, too are called into our sanctuaries, our holy of holies, into Jesus who is become for us the temple. 

In Herod's court, the kings created geopolitical upheaval. The kings were perceptive enough not to return to Jerusalem. Joseph once again heeded the words of the angel of the Lord and fled with Mary and Jesus to Egypt. He must have pondered the angel's words that Jesus would save his people. That once again God would "call his son out of Egypt."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHf1p3C8iVw

We are called out of our places of exile, our positions of enslavement, our habitations of pain, back to the high hill. We are commissioned with all disciples to be the messengers of the Father to share the Good News of the Son, Jesus, King of Kings, the sacrificial Lamb. By the power of the Holy Spirit we are sent to the mountain tops to declare peace, good news, and salvation.

"Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember I am with you always, to the end of the age." Matthew 28: 16-20 (NRSV)