“This day is sacred to the LORD your God. Do not mourn or weep…. Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our LORD . Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength”. (Neh 8.9-10) When the walls and the Temple were finished, Nehemiah, Ezra and the priests told the people, in essence, “Throw a party! Have a barbecue! Eat the really fat pieces and drink something good — something with a cork or with one of those little umbrellas in it!”
One of the prophets of an earlier period predicted, “On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine—the best of meats and the finest of wines”. (Isa 25.6)
God is, apparently, in favour of good food (and we don’t necessarily mean “good for you”) and good wine. He wants us to eat the red meat, the marrow, the good stuff.
Oddly enough, this doesn’t get taught in a lot of places. Those verses in Nehemiah and Isaiah are never the memory verses for Sunday School. It may be for precisely this reason (and a few others) that we’ve lost touch with the discipline of celebration.
Oh, yeah, I did say “the discipline of celebration.” We normally associate the word “discipline” with being deprived of something fun or enjoyable. But God is so concerned that humans learn how to celebrate properly that He actually built specific days into the Old Testament calendar on which people had to party. They were called “feast days,” and they were mandatory. They were balanced by days of meditation and days of fasting, but there’s no getting around the fact that they were in there. They involved all the things you would normally associate with partying: gathering with people you like, eating, drinking, singing, dancing.
And it was always a corporate thing, never done in isolation. All of these activities were to be done in the company of others while reflecting on the goodness of the God who had given them such wonderful gifts.
This wasn’t pleasure seeking for the sake of seeking pleasure. On the contrary, this was intensive training for joy. When we practice celebration — real celebration, from a biblical perspective — we find the exact opposite of hedonism. When we merely seek pleasure, we end up following a path of diminishing returns. The things that made us happy last night won’t work tonight. We have to constantly raise the stakes.
But when we really celebrate, we find ourselves noticing things today that we did not notice yesterday and taking delight in them. Those things that formerly went unnoticed become catalysts for joy in our lives. Celebration actually exercises our ability to see and feel the goodness of God in small things.
So celebrate! Throw a party. Gather your friends together and rejoice in the fact that you have friends. Thank God for your taste buds, for the availability of creamy, buttery sauces and medium-rare beef. Play your favourite music loudly. Sing along at the top of your lungs. And when someone asks you what in the world you’re doing, tell them it’s worship. And if they look at you funny, consider that an invitation to tell them about your amazing God.
Prayer
Father of lights, teach me to enjoy You as never before. I want to delight in Your goodness, glory, grace, beauty, perfection, wisdom, justice, holiness, compassion, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, majesty, truth, love, patience, transcendence and immanence. Teach me the wisdom of acknowledging You in all things, including Your often-overlooked tender mercies in the small things of life. May I celebrate Your many gifts and graces and delight in Your will. I affirm that my service to You is perfect freedom and that delighting in You is so much better than delighting in passing things. May I will to do Your will, love the things You love and desire what You desire. Only as I do this will I find the true fulfilment You want for me, because all good things come from You, and in Your right hand there are pleasures forever.
In Jesus’s name, Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment