Begin With Worship
Most days, it is my alarm clock that does the trick. But on occasion, I have no idea what wakes me. Perhaps the baby monitor chirped on the nightstand, or the dog woke up, or my spouse turned over in her sleep. Yet no matter the culprit of my coming to, every sunrise presents me with the same daily question:
How will you begin?
There seems to be only two ways to answer that question. Before me is a choice to wake with a pre-determined purpose or with an improvised “We’ll see what happens next.” If I was to drive somewhere unfamiliar, I could begin the trip with a map or instead resolve to go blindly and hope to find my destination. One choice guarantees arrival, the other frustration. I am sure you can guess which of the two answers proves better for the day ahead.
BEGINNING WELL
As I write this, we are entering a new year, a hopeful refreshment from the difficult year we faced previously. Usually in this season we reflect on ways we want to grow and mature, ways we want to better cultivate what life is all about. For those of us in Christ, rarely do we come to a January without a desire for better spiritual disciplines in our lives. What are some ways we can begin this year well, growing in Christ? We need to examine our spiritual disciplines, not only in substance but also in our execution of them.
Oftentimes, our conversations surrounding spiritual disciplines regard time as inconsequential. Much writing on spiritual disciplines tells the reader, “This is important…but make it work on your time frame.” We don’t want to be dogmatic with time. And yet, ironically, we all have access to the same amount of hours. None of us evade the question when our eyelids first open: How will you begin?
Last year, I wrote about the importance of expanding our traditional understanding of “quiet time.” We need to realize that Bible intake should happen in not only one space or corner of our day. What I hope to suggest here, as a complementary word, is that beginning our day with pre-determined, intentional, unhurried time with God makes all the difference for the day ahead.
On many occasions, people have asked me whether I see any difference between Bible reading in the morning compared to at night. The spirit of the question seems to be asking permission not to study the Bible in the morning. Reasons abound. We are “not morning people.” Our children need our attention. Our morning duties render the thought of meaningful Bible study impossible at sunrise. Each family has its own particular challenges to navigate with time, of course. And no time spent with the Lord, whenever it may be, is deemed inferior or a waste. But the more I have experienced the choice of beginning my day with purposeful worship, the more I believe there is something to it. It seems Scripture itself tells us so.
AN EARLY-MORNING DISCOVERY
Recently, on such a morning, I was reading in Exodus 34 about Moses and the making of the second set of tablets. I stopped for a moment when I read this verse:
So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first. And he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the LORD had commanded him, and took in his hand two tablets of stone. (Ex. 34:4)
I was still working myself out of bleary vision, yawning, trying to get my coffee to cool down for consumption, waiting for the sun to arrive. But Moses’s rising “early in the morning” caught my attention. Then I really took notice of God’s command to Moses previously in verse 2: “Be ready by the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai.
Then I remembered this wasn’t the first time Moses was up early with God. In Exodus 24, something similar happened. In Moses’s confirmation of the covenant, “he rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain” (Ex. 24:4).
I started to wonder if there was anything to these purposeful early-morning encounters with God. What I found surprised me.
There is explicit mention of early rising to meet with God in the lives of Abraham (Gen. 22:3), Jacob (Gen. 28:18), Moses (Ex. 24:4, 34:4), Gideon (Judg. 6:38), Israel (Judg. 21:4), Elkanah and Hannah (1 Sam. 1:19), Hezekiah (2 Chron. 29:20), Ezra (Neh. 8:3), Job (Job 1:5), and, to cap it off, Jesus Christ (Mk. 1:35). In each of these verses, the “early” nature of the meeting is given recognition.
In these verses, the motivations that bring them to the morning vary. Abraham woke to sacrifice his son, Job woke to address sin, and Jesus woke to speak with the Father. The activity varied too. In these verses, altars are fashioned, prayers are prayed, and the Scriptures are read. Yet for each of them, these days began with worship.
Certainly, we shouldn’t draw too many dogmatic conclusions from these words. But to ignore the continuity present here would be wrong as well. There is a significance to beginning the day, whatever one’s day may hold, with the One who holds all our days together. I think of God’s words to Moses in Exodus 34 as being for us too: “Be ready by the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai” (Ex. 34:2).
THE MOST IMPORTANT HOUR
One author calls our first hour spent awake “the most important hour of the day.” I believe he’s right. That first hour is usually the quietest, the calmest, the least prone to disruption and distraction.
I wouldn’t call myself a “morning person.” It’s not easy for me to get up early in the mornings. It's easier still to wake up and lay in bed for a while, hitting snooze or checking all of my favorite phone apps. To dedicate my Most Important Hour to the Lord is, as was the case with Abraham and Jacob and Hezekiah, sacrificial.
But that is kind of the point, isn’t it? Our first hour is like the “firstfruits” of our harvest that we delight to bring to the Lord (Neh. 10:35, Prov. 3:9-10). We owe God our least-frazzled worship. And giving Him such was never meant to be an easy task. With a heart at war with itself, we have to fight for it.
PREPARE AND WATCH
If I have learned anything in my own walk through this, it is that I have never regretted fighting for this time, giving this Most Important Hour to Him. Never have I looked back on that hour and felt it a waste, wishing I had spent it answering e-mails or looking at Twitter instead. This stands in complete contrast to the mornings I have failed to fight for. Letting my Most Important Hour slip away to unimportant things is always regrettable.
I think of David’s words in Psalm 5:3. “O LORD, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.” That’s the mentality we need most to begin the day with worship. We need to prepare, and we need to watch. We go to bed with a plan for waking up. We’ve primed the Keurig for brewing the night before. We’ve set the Word where we’ll read it in the morning. We show up and turn our eyes and ears to the Lord.
Friend in Christ, I know mornings are not easy. But the Lord is there, waiting to receive our worship, waiting for us to receive all that He has for us. I am convinced that if we want to finish well, we desperately need to begin well. What you and I do during that first hour may look different. We may wake up with different emotions that bring us to the Throne of Grace. But let us join together in prizing that first hour. It is our precious firstfruits. And when we use those wee small hours to prepare and watch, to "be ready by the morning," we will find it is never spent in vain.
Zach Barnhart currently serves as Student Pastor of Northlake Church in Lago Vista, TX. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Middle Tennessee State University and is currently studying at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, seeking a Master of Theological Studies degree. He is married to his wife, Hannah. You can follow Zach on Twitter @zachbarnhart or check out his personal blog, Cultivated.