Hearing the Music

Taste & See

As 2023 is coming to a close, I want to share some of my own reflections on one of my favorite passages: Psalm 34. It’s a fitting Psalm to close out the year for a few reasons:

Wilderness. The first verse of the Psalm is actually the superscription (or the title), and it reminds us that it was written by David in the midst of a real, historical moment, one we heard about back in July when Andrew preached on 1 Samuel 21. We saw how God often meets us with his unexpected grace in the confusion and chaos of the wilderness. How have you experienced wilderness moments in 2023? And how has God met you in the midst of them?

Praise. Right after the title, David begins with praise. God’s gracious provision should drive us to wholehearted worship, both in our daily lives and when we gather together. Yet this sort of praise doesn’t come naturally for us. It’s not our default move, at least not without cultivating rhythms and habits. Do you find yourself boasting in your own accomplishments or in the Lord? What can you stop and praise him for right now?

Savoring. Verse 8 invites us to “taste and see that the LORD is good!” We know that God is good, but this calls us to go beyond head knowledge to the experience of intentionally savoring God’s goodness. The busyness of life, the hardships we experience, and even God’s good gifts all around us can distract us from sitting with Jesus and savoring him. This year have you been weighed down, distracted, or numb to God? What would it look like for you to move beyond head knowledge of God’s goodness to actually tasting and seeing that He is good?

Presence. While hardships can distract us from God, they can also drive us toward him. Verses 15-18 show us that, in the midst of our darkest valleys, God turns his eyes and his ears toward us and has a special closeness to those who are brokenhearted and crushed in spirit. We have an amazing church community, and yet loneliness can still hit hard for many of us, especially around the holidays. The promise of God’s presence here provides us with real comfort, lasting peace, and the freedom to practice radical honesty and vulnerability instead of pretending life is perfect. And it reminds us to be his hands and feet and move toward those who are hurting.

I pray that 2024 brings each of us (myself included) to a place where we can honestly say, “Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling.”

Photo by Arwin Neil Baichoo on Unsplash

Labor Unto Glory

In Ephesians, we’ve been considering some of the roles and relationships that make up our vocation. We all long for rich meaning in our work and in our lives, yet we are often frustrated by the mundane and monotonous tasks we face each day. More than that, sin and conflict and tragedy creep in and drive a wedge between us and the people that make up the fabric of our lives this side of heaven. In the midst of this, how do we find God-glorifying meaning in our often-disappointing work and vocations?

Steven Garber, in his book Visions of Vocation, says this: “The word vocation is a rich one, having to address the wholeness of life, the range of relationships and responsibilities. Work, yes, but also families, and neighbors, and citizenship, locally and globally – all of this and more is seen as vocation, that to which I am called as a human being, living my life before the face of God. It is never the same word as occupation, just as calling is never the same word as career. Sometimes, by grace, the words and the realities they represent do overlap, even significantly; sometimes, in the incompleteness of life in a fallen world, there is not much overlap at all.”

There’s a lot in there, and even more that could be said about our vocation as Christians. Romans 12:1 calls us to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” How do we take our entire vocation, each of the various tasks and roles and relationships and spheres we’ve been placed into by God, and surrender them to him as worship? Here are some resources I have found helpful:

• The album Work Songs by The Porter’s Gate, some of which we have sung at Christ Church. My favorites are “We Labor Unto Glory” and “Father, Let Your Kingdom Come”.

• The album Here Are My Hands by A New Liturgy, is a mixture of songs and prayers designed for reclaiming your commute. The first half (for commuting to work) helps you surrender your work to God, and the second half (for commuting home from work) helps you reflect on the day and practice confession and forgiveness when necessary.

• Every Moment Holy, which is available as physical books and downloadable liturgies, offers prayers on a variety of everyday pieces of life (like work, changing diapers, preparing meals, medical providers, and more) to help you offer each moment to God.

• A “Prayer for Vocations” by Steven Garber (which you can both read and watch), helps us pray that God would “Give us eyes to see that our work is holy to you, O Lord, even as our worship this day is holy to you.”

The simple act of surrendering the work of our hands in worship to God will not fix all the frustrations of life in a fallen world. But it will reorient us to the ways that God is faithfully working in all of it, perhaps most of all in us, to conform us more and more into the image of Christ. Pastor Andrew will be preaching on Ephesians 6:5-9 this Sunday, which touches on some of these themes of honoring God wherever he places us. I look forward to worshipping together!

The Gift of Community

In his classic work on Christian community, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes this:

“The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer…It is easily forgotten that the community of Christians is a gift of grace from the kingdom of God, a gift that can be taken from us any day—that the time still separating us from the most profound loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let those who until now have had the privilege of living a Christian life together with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of their hearts. Let them thank God on their knees and realize: it is grace, nothing but grace, that we are still permitted to live in the community of Christians today.”

Many of us haven’t experienced the total isolation of imprisonment or the need to take our faith underground for fear of persecution like many Christians around the world today. However, we have likely all experienced both the richness of Christian community and the loneliness of feeling disconnected. And it often comes in seasons. God has blessed me with several seasons in my life of rich, daily Chrisitian community in the church, in college, and in my summers working at a Christian camp. I’ve also tasted seasons of loneliness where God has met my isolation and doubts with reminders of his constant presence. The seasons of plenty teach us what to long for during the seasons of want.

Whichever season you find yourself in, God calls us, as much as we’re able, to gather together with other believers around prayer and the Word, sharing our lives together and bearing each other’s burdens. We’re relational beings, after all, created in the image of a Triune God. Bonhoeffer goes on to explain the importance of Christ-centered community, what it looks like, how spending time alone with God fuels us for it, and how we can care for one another through things like listening to one another, praying for each other, encouraging each other with gospel truth, and actively looking for ways to meet each other’s physical needs. This type of community is hard. It takes work. It requires us to be vulnerable, even confessing our sins and failures to each other. And yet, it’s the very thing God created us for.

Why am I telling you all this? 3 reasons.

1. The most immediate avenue to practice all of these things is in C-Groups. These groups typically meet twice a month in homes or at the church. We eat together, share our lives together, pray for one another, and spend time applying God’s Word to our everyday lives, asking the hard questions and allowing space for wrestling and doubt. As we’re working to create new groups and more space in groups, we wanted to get a sense for how many people at Christ Church are not currently connected to a C-Group but would like to be. If that’s you, please fill out this short survey to help us plan for how to connect people to C-Groups this Fall.

2. I will also be teaching an Adult Institute class this Fall on Life Together that will help us more deeply appreciate and participate in Christian community. I encourage you to attend!

3. I want to encourage you, even now, that God sees you in your loneliness and will never leave you or forsake you. I’ll end where Bonhoeffer starts: Psalm 133:1 - “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!”

This Sunday as Pastor Andrew preaching on 1 Samuel 27-30 we’ll get to hear how God provided for David when he spent time away from Israel, living amongst the Philistines. We’ll see you Sunday!