v 1. Oh, praise the Lord, all you servants of the Lord,
you who serve at night in the house of the Lord.
It may be hard for us to get our minds round the Hebrew notion that the day begins at nightfall! The idea of ‘time’ appears in Genesis and is reflected in Genesis 1:5 ‘And evening passed and morning came, marking the first day. ‘ So this Psalm conveys the significance of the evening worshippers starting the day with God. They were not rounding the day off after the busyness of it, they were starting it off with worship.
The challenge that comes to us is therefore ‘How did you start your day?’
Compare our days, starting with a shower, clean teeth, clean clothes etc. with the Hebrew day starting with evening worship. I’m not suggesting we try to change our time-culture, but I am inviting you to begin your days with God. That will mean different things to each of us; some begin with reading the Bible and these daily notes in bed, and then committing the day to God by praying in bed. Others might like to read and pray at the breakfast table – that is what we did with our children even when they were very young. Others finish the day off with prayers at bedtime. I sense the rightness of starting the day with God however, of giving Him the priority place in our busy days. There is the standard caricature of the commuter eating his toast on the way to the station and buying coffee on the platform because the morning has been rushed – and maybe he got up too late.
However you do things, try to develop the habit of starting the day with God; no rush, no hassle, but peace and quiet with God at the start of each day. The history of the Christian Union in Cambridge includes the tale of one undergraduate who rigged up his alarm clock to some fishing tackle that pulled off his blankets at the right time to get him going early! A bit extreme perhaps, but you get the point!
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