The music in your heart
Lee Hoskins, Interim Pastor, First Congregational Church
Friday, August 1, 2008
Ephesians 5:14-16, 19-20
A writer of devotions related that he was on a spiritual safari, prowling through the Ephesians letter, tracking an elusive, totally unrelated verse, when verse 19 literally sprang out at him: Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
In Chapter 5 of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, God charges us to be imitators of God ... and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. We are to be filled with the spirit, and to sing and make music in our hearts to the Lord. We are to communicate God’s presence within us by presenting our own individual concert of sacred music to Him. Our individual song is somehow incorporated in God’s unending symphony of life. There is harmony with all of God’s creation instead of discord and chaos.
Why break forth in song, we may inquire. The spirit-filled servant of the Lord is a song-filled servant. Every one of us is a one-of-a-kind precious child of God with a unique song to sing, and the challenge for us today is to find those ways necessary for resurrecting our songs. So many in this day seem to have gone away from Jesus and to have lost the ability to sing his or her song or to live the abundant life just as the Triune God created life to be.
It is unfortunate that in today’s reality we simply do not sing as often as we ought. The question for this day is: What keeps us from singing our songs? What’s quieting or even silencing the songs within us? Sometimes a simple pre-occupation with what we don’t have rather than what God has already blessed us with can do us in. Many go away because of the want of grace in their hearts; the lack of faith, the absence of vital godliness in their life. Jesus comes in His appeal to us and makes a clear demand: If you would have me for your Savior, I must come first. ...
Proverbs 29:25 warns that fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts the Lord is kept safe. All about us the fear of man plays the most desperate havoc in human life. Many go away from Jesus when fear inserts itself in their professional, social or political world. Have faith in the Word of Christ: Be not afraid. Full many a time people go away from Him through captious doubts and questions concerning religion. Many ask, What if this and that be not so? They go from Jesus and turn away from vital truths of faith, and miss the very way of life.
Many go away from Jesus because of the power of sin in their life. We must die to self and reach out and receive God’s free gift of salvation, becoming totally submitted to God and empowered by the Holy Spirit. And finally, the simple, fearful, fateful power of procrastination causes people to go away from Jesus. Procrastination is the thief of time, but it is also the thief of souls.
Wake up, O Sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. (Ephesians 5:14b). When a precious child of God discovers the strength and courage, the skill and grace, to live the way God has created us to live, and to live that life with integrity and harmony and transformation, that’s singing your song! God, the very God who made your heart to sing, knows that your song is there waiting to be resurrected and to come forth!
madpoet (anonymous) says...
What a nice sermon! Thanks Pastor Hoskins for that rather unique description of living a Godly life.
August 1, 2008 at 3:11 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )