Chapter One
Celebrate Him!Most of us use any excuse for a party. One woman threw a Spring Is
Coming Picnic to deal with midwinter doldrums. Her green living
room carpet served as the lawn, and she even purchased plastic ants to toss
onto the tablecloth spread with springtime treats. Another woman gave her
dog a birthday party and invited friends over to play Pin the Tail on the
Puppy (a paper puppy, not the real item) and other canine-related games.
Why, the whole concept of Thank God It's Friday sounds like a party waiting
to happen once a week!
Yes, we're always on the lookout for reasons to celebrate. God
seems to approve, for the Bible reports a number of festivities: David's celebration
when the ark is moved into the city (dancing, music, and food
abounded); the wedding feast with the finest wine money couldn't buy; the
regular family fetes Job's children had; the end-of-sheep-shearing party Nabal
refused to invite David to; the Passover feast to celebrate God's mercy.
Despite our propensity to party and God's institution of some celebrations
of his own, we seem to spend little time experiencing God through
celebration. How do we establish a personal tradition of praising him? We'll
take a look at a couple of ways people in the Bible did just that. One is a
Grand Opening that included weeping and rejoicing; the other shows us
how to throw a grand opening in our own hearts.
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. Isaiah 25:6
A Moment
for Quiet Reflection
1. Find a quiet corner in which you can relax, maybe sip a
cup of tea, and jot down thoughts as they occur to you.
View this time and place as the setting to meet with and
experience God.
2. List the different types of celebrations you can recall ever
attending.
3. What were your favorites? Why?
4. How could you incorporate your favorite aspects of a celebration
into your relationship with God? (Remember, you
don't have to celebrate your spiritual relationship by yourself.
That's what the term "corporate worship" means.)
5. Make a plan to include some of those ideas into your times
with God in the weeks ahead.
Knowing God's Heart
1. Share a celebration idea from your reflection time with the
group. This is one way you can begin to get to know each
other, and you might just pick up some ideas that hadn't
occurred to you.
2. Praising God is a key element in celebrating your relationship
with him. Psalm 147 provides us with a list of reasons
to praise him. Read over the entire psalm, and find ten reasons
it gives to praise God.
3. Discuss five ways to praise God suggested in this psalm.
4. What are some of the specific ways you have praised God
and how have they led you to experience him more deeply?
5. Brainstorm ideas for creatively using the five ways to
praise God described in the psalm during your personal
times with God.
6. In Ezra 3, a corporate time of celebrating God takes place
when the Israelites have a ground-breaking ceremony to
mark the laying of the temple's foundation. The temple had
been destroyed decades before when Israel was overrun by
the Babylonians, and the Israelites were carted off as prisoners.
Those who attended the ceremony were returning
exiles or the children of exiles. According to verses 10-11, what elements were used to make the celebration special?
7. Verses 12-13 report the crowd expressed a mixture of joy
and tears. What occasions today can you think of in which
people feel such a range of emotions?
8. What does this passage's scene tell us about "appropriate"
emotions when we praise God?
9. List as many reasons as you can think of that these people
had to praise God.
10. What does the psalm and the passage from Ezra teach you
about the meaning of "praising God"?
11. How can you enrich your relationship with God through
praising him?
Have you noticed that we are laughter and tears, Dirges and dances, jubilations and consternations, Hallelujahs and woes?
Friendship Boosters
Declare the upcoming week Celebrate Friendship Week.
Exchange phone numbers and addresses. Keep your eyes open for
little tokens of friendship (a bookmark or a card), quotes about
friendship, or cartoons or jokes about friends. Each day call a different
person in the group and tell her what you've discovered.
Start out by calling the person who sat on your right and work
your way around the circle. Or send that person the item. Use this
week to concentrate on growing closer to one another.
Just for Fun
Plan a time to attend a local celebration together. It could
be a store's grand opening (ooh, sales!), an ethnic group's festival,
a circus, a chili cook-off, or whatever is happening in your community.
Use your imagination and dare to do something you haven't
done before. Pay attention to the various emotions within and
around you and what they tell you about the nature of celebration.
When I was a child, my Sunday-school teacher always
told me, "God's blessing bucket is bottomless." Barbara Johnson
Praying Together
Name some songs of praise you especially like. As a group,
pick two of them and sing them as your prayer together. If you
have trouble choosing, you might want to sing a couple of familiar
Christmas songs such as "Joy to the World" or "O Come All Ye
Faithful."
Adoration is the lifting up of the heart and mind to God, Asking nothing but to enjoy God's presence. The Book of Common Prayer
Making It Real
in Your Own Life
1. Nature is a luxurious place to look for reasons to celebrate
God. It's loaded with lovely sights-and sometimes silly
ones, too. (Ever watch a squirrel and a dog having a "discussion"
over whom the backyard belongs to?) Keep a list this
week of what you see in nature that causes you to celebrate.
2. At the end of the week, look over your list and write a
psalm, praising God for how wonderfully he has expressed
himself in nature and how this enriches your personal
experience of him. To get in the right frame of mind, you
might want to read Psalm 19 and Psalm 95. Relax and think
of this as a way to let God know you recognize how awesome
he is.
(Continues.)
