To Start the Day

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” (Mark 1.35-37)

Awakening to Holiness

For a number of years I attended the Edwin Hawkins Music & Arts Seminar, a weeklong convention of the nation’s finest gospel singers, songwriters, and musicians. Although my meager musical abilities could never compare to their genius, they welcomed me with open arms, and I was grateful for the chance to soak up everything the experience offered. Now there are a couple of things you should know about gospel artists before I get to the nub of my story. They are, by nature, an extremely friendly, high-spirited bunch that honors the sacredness of their calling by not taking themselves too seriously. If you weren’t clued into who they are, you’d never guess the people laughing and joking together wrote and recorded countless songs that changed millions of lives. The second thing to know is gospel musicians are late-night folks. Next to making music, they love nothing more than hanging out into the wee hours, swapping stories. Having been to similar events, I expected long nights of table-hopping in jammed coffee shops, oversleeping the next day, and dragging into afternoon workshops and rehearsals. But the usual M.O. didn’t fly at the Seminar. On my first night, I was surprised that everyone made hasty business of the post-concert “afterglow” and scooted off to bed. When I asked what the rush was, they said, “You don’t want to miss Walter. If you’re late, you won’t get a seat.”

“Walter” was Edwin’s brother and pastor, Rev. Walter Hawkins, the most prolific songwriter—and by far the most progressive Bible teacher—in the gospel sphere. At the top of each morning, he hosted “To Start the Day,” a brief session during which he gave seminar attendees a portion of Scripture, a few comments on the text, and led them into a time of prayer. It was simple, pure, and inspiring. It set the tone for everything that followed—and set the Seminar apart from others like it by awakening us to the holiness of what we would accomplish as the day progressed. “To Start the Day” subsumed the musical aspect of the event with a higher purpose. Classes, rehearsals, and performances became the day’s tasks. Its mission, however, was seeing them as windows for holiness, open and alert to God’s voice and Spirit—invitations to obey rather than do, to create rather than complete. Beginning each day with a few moments to settle our minds with a guiding thought and prayer made all the difference, such a difference “To Start the Day” was not to be missed.

Habits and Disciplines

It’s remarkable how so many will rally for Church-prescribed undertakings like Lent or training for sacramental milestones, while paying little heed to habits and disciplines that Jesus practiced in daily life. In Mark’s opening chapter, which reads like a breathless dispatch filed under deadline pressure, our first glimpse of Jesus’s personal faith regimen occurs in verse 35: “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” With all that transpires in the preceding 34 verses—Jesus’s baptism, wilderness temptation, declaration that the Good News is near, calling the disciples, and numerous healings and exorcisms—Mark gives the impression that everything happens so swiftly Jesus hardly has a moment to breathe, let alone ponder what He should do next or take time to pray about it. And what follows seems to back this up.

After waking to discover Jesus is gone, Simon Peter and his buddies scout Him out. “Everyone’s looking for You!” they say. Jesus knows who “everyone” is. The night before, after an exhausting day of preaching and healing Peter’s mother-in-law, Jesus is met by townspeople—“the whole town,” Mark says—crowding his door with sick and disturbed people they want Him to cure. Apparently those He wasn’t able to reach have returned. Had He not got up early to pray, He’d have been obliged to help them. Yet starting His day with prayer not only releases Him from being inundated with demands, it gives Jesus directional clarity. He replies, “Let’s go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” (v38) And this is the first time Mark shows us Jesus taking charge of His ministry. Before this, He avails Himself to opportunities to preach and work miracles. Is it a coincidence that we see Jesus begin His day with prayer and then turn from doing what’s expected so He can obey God's higher purpose? While Mark doesn’t call out the connection, it’s there. Otherwise, why even mention Jesus’s morning prayer? If it didn’t influence His decision and reorient His thoughts on His mission rather than His tasks, why not skip the episode entirely and simply report Jesus and the disciples moved on? “That is why I have come,” Jesus says.

At This Hour, In This Place, With These Gifts

To start the day with prayer is to reorient our thoughts from what’s expected of us to consider why we’ve come to this day. The same sense of consecration, gravity, and duty that brings us to Lent’s desert, sacramental moments, and high holy days should greet us with every sunrise. Just as we’re able to set aside the previous day’s chaos and sequester our thoughts from mundane tasks on these “special” occasions, can we not also discipline ourselves to begin each day spending a few moments alone with God? It’s then we can focus on the purpose God has for us today—to contemplate why we are present at this hour, in this place, with the unique gifts God places in us. Rising to pray before we’re inundated with demands awakens us to holiness. It sets the tone for all that follows, enabling us to obey rather than do, create rather than complete. It provides clarity that guides us to people and places that need us. It reminds us why we’ve come to this day. If Jesus found disciplined, habitual morning prayer necessary, can we possibly question its importance and value?

Morning prayer turns our thoughts to why we’re present at this hour, in this place, with the unique gifts God places in us.

Postscript: “What Shall I Do?”

And when we rise to pray, what do we say? The late Walter Hawkins gave the world a masterpiece that, if spoken, would constitute the perfect prayer to start the day. Here is his wife, Tramaine, singing “What Shall I Do?”

Sweet Words

How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! I gain understanding from your precepts; therefore I hate every wrong path. Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path. (Psalm 119.103-105)

New Tastes

One of the earliest lessons pastors’ kids learn is proper behavior when dining in parishioners’ homes. As it was, good table manners were drilled into my brother and me from the day we left our high chairs. But a home-cooked meal with church people raised my parents' expectations several notches. They impressed on us that we were honored guests and our hosts—many less fortunate than we—deserved our utmost gratitude for their hospitality. Dinners they served us represented their finest efforts, which called for our most gracious behavior however unappetizing or irregular the fare might be. (I could tell you stories…)

Before we went, we reviewed the standard protocol. Take some of everything that’s offered; our hosts must never feel they prepared a dish we don’t care for. Don’t ask what anything is; if you don’t recognize it, we’ll tell you what it was later. If you don’t like how something tastes, move it around to seem as though you ate more than you did. But—and this was imperative—try it first; you may find it’s much tastier than it looks. On this my parents couldn’t have been more right. I owe my adventurous palate to those days of learning to appreciate new tastes no matter how off-putting food sometimes appears.

Unfortunately, it’s taken a lot longer to learn the same rule applies to Scripture. For years, if I came on passages that looked hard to swallow, seemed half-baked, or smelled funky, I’d either skip them entirely or push them around a bit to pretend I did more with them than I had. Hearing believers rave about relishing the tougher portions of God’s Word, I’d think, “If that’s what you like, knock yourself out. But some of that stuff is just nasty and indigestible.” To be sure, parts are nasty and indigestible. Written to primitive cultures in situations that no longer exist, they’re rotten and deadly, and believing we must choke them down because they’re in the Bible risks scriptural food poisoning. (Indeed, most nausea in today’s Church can be traced to texts that have outlasted their expiration dates.) Yet as I mature, I’m amazed how much of what I avoided is truly delicious. Psalm 119’s poet exclaims, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (v103) and I get it. The Word is sweet.

The Vibrant Force

To say the psalmist loves Scripture would be like saying fish love to swim. It goes beyond love. God’s Word is his natural habitat. It permeates his every thought. He hides it in his heart. He knows it better than all his teachers. He keeps it top of mind, present in memory, never to be forgotten. He relies on the Word to strengthen him when he fears he’ll faint. He loves the sweetness of its taste. He looks to it to light his path. He doesn’t depart from its direction. He can’t exhaust its boundless truth. He takes solace in its permanence. His understanding of the world is rooted in God’s precepts. He goes on and on, waxing rhapsodic about Scripture until he ends up composing the Bible’s lengthiest chapter—176 verses in all, running longer than nearly half (30/66) of the Bible’s books in their entirety.

Without exploring the psalm, the obvious question is, “Why does he love the Bible so passionately?” The answer is his poem’s raison d’être. Verse upon verse, line upon line, he exults in the wealth of God’s Word and how it enriches his life. A more fascinating question, perhaps, is, “How did he come to love Scripture with such fervor?” The psalm is abundantly clear he’s been obsessed with the Bible most, if not all, of his life. By not providing details about where his passion originated and its development over time, however, he whets our curiosity about his leaps from casual reader to devoted student to besotted lover of God’s laws, precepts, and commands. “Oh, how I love your law!” he exclaims in verse 97—and we want to grab him by the lapels and ask, “How did you do it?” His ecstasy is contagious. By the time we’re this far into the poem, we sense tinges of jealousy creeping into our response. Whatever he found that made Scripture the vibrant force it is in his life we want it, too.

Wonderful Things

So how did he do it? The riddle’s solution hides in plain sight in verse 18: “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.” The psalmist has stopped reading God’s Word and started discovering it. He no longer listens to it; he expects it to speak. In other words, he makes himself available to the text. For him, the Bible isn’t an objective, impersonal library of knowledge and wisdom. It's God’s channel to communicate directly, specifically to him. The more he learns about it the more clearly he finds his place in it. When he turns to a page, he uncovers wonderful things that immediately resonate with who he is, where he’s at, and what he needs at this precise moment in his life. Thus he prays for open eyes to see what God wants him to know. It may the first time he’s explored a certain passage. It may the hundredth. Either way, he eagerly anticipates seeing what God desires to show him now.

I love the way Hebrews 4.12 captures this phenomenon: “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” The Bible is a living thing. It’s actively engaged in our lives. When we open it with open eyes, we discover wonderful things that God wants us to see now. It’s the medium through which God speaks—to you, others, and me, collectively and personally. It penetrates gray areas between our soul’s emotions and our spirit’s longings. It takes us apart and puts us back together. It pierces the marrow of our beings and assesses our thoughts and opinions. If we read it passively—passing on the tougher portions and moving what doesn’t appeal to us around our plates—we miss much of its sweetness. We’ll never fully tap into its incandescence. Our paths will remain dim. But if we approach it, passionately and eagerly expecting to find what we need at this point in our lives, we discover wonderful things. The more frequently that happens, the more like the psalmist we’ll be. God’s Word will become our natural habitat. As we undertake our Lenten journey, I pray we’ll make ourselves available to God’s Word in new and wonderful ways, finding many new and wonderful things.

The Bible is God’s channel to communicate directly, specifically to us now. We pray for open eyes to discover new and wonderful things each time we open it.

Postscript: “Open My Eyes”

My church closed our Ash Wednesday service with this hymn—albeit at a more meditative pace. A longtime personal favorite, it distills the essence of praying for discovery and expecting God’s Word to speak. I trust the song will speak to you as well.

Open My Eyes, That I May See

Open my eyes, that I may see

Glimpses of truth Thou hast for me

Place in my hands the wonderful key

That shall unclasp and set me free

Silently now I wait for Thee

Ready my God, Thy will to see

Open my eyes, illumine me

Spirit divine!

Open my ears, that I may hear

Voices of truth Thou sendest clear

And while the wave notes fall on my ear

Everything false will disappear

Silently now I wait for Thee

Ready my God, Thy will to see

Open my ears, illumine me

Spirit divine!

Open my mouth, and let me bear

Gladly the warm truth everywhere

Open my heart and let me prepare

Love with Thy children thus to share

Silently now I wait for Thee

Ready my God, Thy will to see

Open my heart, illumine me

Spirit divine!

Words and Meditation

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm 19.14)

He Knows What’s Up

The past few days, Walt’s endured relentless replay of “Work on Me,” by Tonex (pronounced “Tow-Nay”) & The Peculiar People—so-named for 1 Peter 2.9: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (KJV) Before getting into the song, it’s useful to provide some background on Tonex (born Anthony Charles Williams II), as his life speaks to his music. After growing up as a Pentecostal pastor’s son and church musician, he burst on the scene with no qualms about pushing gospel’s boundaries, bypassing convention to reach new audiences, and defying stereotypes about how gospel singers look and behave. For the first time, the genre had an authentic “bad boy.” Some questioned his methods, but none disputed his calling or commitment. People everywhere testified that his music changed their lives. He sold millions of CD’s and was honored with every conceivable award. Then, in 2009, on a nationally televised Christian talk show, he came out. The crowds fled. The awards stopped. Preachers labeled him an unholy disgrace.

Tonex secluded himself, sparking rumors of what’s to become of him. We who’ve dealt with similar rejection know what’s next will be even more amazing. To date, he’s the only high-profile male gospel star to embrace his same-sex orientation—though (trust me) the field overflows with men who would follow suit if they had his courage. Still, faith that God has extraordinary plans for Tonex rises less from his bravery than his music. The chorus of “Work on Me” is a prime indicator of where his head’s at and his heart lies. As one listens to it, the music—an inspired restyling of classic call-and-response gospel set to a pop-friendly stride—merges with the spirit in its lyrics: “You know what’s up. So fix me up. Please Lord, just work on me. You know my faults, my secret thoughts. Please Lord, just work on me.” This is worthy of David at his finest, a profoundly personal prayer in psalm. The lyric’s conscious craving coupled with the composition’s driving desire reveal sincere longing to honor God without compromise. Since He knows what’s up, He can fix us up. And nothing less than His pleasure with us will satisfy. As the first verse says, “Lord work on my life, so I’ll be pleasing in Your sight. You know what’s up.” The same message and emotions pierce Psalm 19.14: “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.”

Two Distinct Channels

Words and meditation mirror lyrics and music in how they work. They’re two distinct channels that converge in unified expression. Like lyrics and music, words from our lips have no power unless they’re tightly anchored to meditation in our hearts. Fully grasping this requires a little homework to dig out the roots of “meditation,” because modern concepts of its meaning deviate significantly from its origins. Meditation is more than inwardly articulated thought or attentive silence. At best, these notions focus on meditation’s means without remotely defining its ends. Conscious inner thinking is cogitation—knowing thought—while silence in search of God is contemplation, which literally means “to make space for the divine.” Both are valuable, but neither focuses on meditation’s purpose. If meditation is something other than cogitation and contemplation, then what is it? The family resemblance to “medication” and “mediation” provides our best clue. “To meditate” in the truest original sense means “to avail oneself to a healer.”

We seek God’s help with our outbound words and inbound meditation because one can’t succeed absent the other. Without conscious effort to please Him in what we say, our hearts can’t instinctively welcome His healing. On the other side, until we give God free rein to work on us, His power can’t work through us. Awareness we’re being healed even as we speak changes our conversation. Peace, confidence, and love gained in meditation emerge in words of peace, confidence, and love. In this way, talking and knowing become very much like lyrics and music. What can’t be put in words is felt in our composition. This is what David strives for—to be like the rest of the Nature, which automatically yields to the Creator’s touch and rejoices for His pleasure. He announces this right away: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.” (v1-3) Healing that transpires in word and meditation transcends spoken language and articulate logic.

Peculiar People

Contemporary translations of 1 Peter 2.9 hang very closely to the King James Version except for one phrase—“peculiar people.” Obviously scurrying from an adjective with unflattering connotations, they opt for “a people belonging to God” (NIV), “a people for God’s own possession” (NASB), “His own special people” (NKJV), etc., which suggests we’re His particular people. While the scholars get A’s for accuracy, I still think they fail by implying we’re some kind of in-crowd of spiritual elites. If anything, we’re outsiders. Mindful effort and heartfelt craving to please God in word and meditation make us peculiar. Knowing they converge as the Great Physician works on us enables us to speak, love, and live freely. And freedom so great is very peculiar.

Concerns about what we can’t understand or why we’re not understood hold no value for us. They invite us to speak defensively or timidly, neither of which pleases God, and they crowd our hearts with emotions that impede our healing. As peculiar people, we sing David’s song: “Let my lips and heart please You, my Rock and my Redeemer.” We sing Tonex’s song: “You know what’s up. So fix me up.” When we do this, we make good on the charge Peter affixes to our peculiarity: “That you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (NIV) Darkness to light—healing meditation. Declaring praise—healing words. It pleases God to work on us so He can work through us.

As we speak healing words, meditation opens our hearts to God’s healing. As meditation yields to God’s healing, we speak healing words. It pleases Him to work on us so He can work through us.

Postscript: Work on Me

Some of you may have caught this yesterday, when I posted it on Facebook. If you missed it—or if, like me, you can’t get enough of this song—here’s Tonex & The Peculiar People: “Work on Me.”

For those preferring a softer-edged approach to the same theme, here's "Make Me Over."