Your daily praise phrase

Watch the evolution of this playlist of Facebook live videos https://www.facebook.com/ANewPhilosophyOfLiving/videos/vl.263191524375189/1616595618512224/?type=1

The idea of a daily praise phrase is to have something that you can easily remember to keep you beautifully focused on divine values throughout each day of the week. You are encouraged to substitute the thoughts of your choosing.

For me, this exercise and the series of videos produced during the week represent an evolving experiment. Memory has not played the place in my education that it plays in some other cultures, though it had a greater place when I was in school than it does in school today. And just think of the countless Muslims who have memorized the entire Qur’an! But even during this first week, I am finding blessings with this practice—especially from the creative effort each morning to come up with something fresh, perhaps the answer to the prayer of the previous evening.

Rituals can be dead—or alive. Perhaps this one may bless you for a season or longer. What would you like to memorize, to have readily and precisely accessible to nourish your mind and your conversation?

Here are my initial choices.

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.

            This is a daily praise phrase for Sundays, highlighting a life illuminated by worship.

What does this teaching mean? Please ask God and find the answer that your mind and soul need. Here are my answers for today.

What does it mean to worship God in spirit? That we are not simply wrapped up in our own human efforts to worship. We place ourselves in the presence of God.

Here is a sequence that I often use to orient my worship. “You are. You are in us. And we are in You.”

What does it mean to worship in truth? Partly it’s about truths that can be written down—truths about God and truths of spiritual experience. We worship God for who we comprehend him to be, and some particular truth typically functions as the trampoline for the mind’s ascent into spirit communion.

But there’s more to worshipping in truth. Truth is a living spiritual reality that cannot be restricted to human attempts to formulate it. Even a favorite passage of scripture may be flat and powerless on the page until the Holy Spirit breathes on it and brings it to life.

 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

This is a praise phrase for Mondays on the theme of scientific living.

Scientific living is in accord with the laws of the creation. The concept of a Creator, a First Cause, is suggested by the evidence of intelligent design. The sovereign God has created dependable laws for our evolving universe on material, mental, and spiritual levels.

Physics sees the cosmos as a closed physical system that has no energy come into it from outside. Physics has no place for a Creator. Physics needs these restrictions in order to function, but philosophy does not need them, and religion joyously ignores them.

If the Creator is continually pouring fresh energies on every level of reality, then our personal friendship with God might tell us something about the Creator, and may lead us to explore the ways in which we can discover the universe to be friendly.

 

Get wisdom, and with all your getting, get understanding.

This is a praise phrase for Tuesdays, highlighting philosophical living.

When a person says, I did something stupid, usually what they mean is, “I did something foolish.” The error was not a matter of intelligence. It was on a deeper level. Or a person may seek knowledge in order to get money or power, but take no interest in understanding the deeper meaning of the changes that are taking place, say, in business and geopolitics.

Wisdom builds on knowledge and understanding and goes further.

Let’s add wisdom to our faith. God gives us the capacity for insightful intuition in the realms of matter, mind, and spirit. But we need to integrate our intuitions about scientific realism and spiritual idealism in a meaningful comprehension of our duty.

An image of wisdom is a Rembrandt painting in the Louvre in Paris, titled “Philosopher in Meditation.” Art historians do not believe that this is in fact a philosopher, but it serves as a fine symbol. A venerable old man is sitting in a noble chair and sunlight is pouring in from above on his right. While on his left is a magnificent, sturdy, winding, ascending staircase leading to the floor above. Wisdom integrates the meanings of down-to-earth facts and the meanings of lofty spiritual values.

God alone has the fullness of wisdom; and if we lack wisdom, we can ask. When seek wisdom well, we will be more receptive to what God has to reveal to us.

 

The heavens declare the glory of God.

This is a praise phrase for Wednesdays, highlighting living amid universe beauty

Today I’ll invite you to memorize—if you are minded to memorize anything at all—as little as you like of these first four verses of Psalm 19.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day after day utters speech; night after night shows knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.

Day after day. It’s not only about the night sky. It’s about all the beauties of the physical creation . . . including the beauties of your body. Yes, each one of you has such beauty, no matter how deformed or diseased—if you can read or hear these words with understanding, your body is performing its essential function: to support a mind that can host to the gift of the spirit of God within you. Walk in beauty. Take care of your body temple of the spirit. Honor the cosmic and ecological functions of these beauties of nature. Believe and rejoice!

 

Sing to the Lord a new song.

 This is a praise phrase for Thursdays, highlighting artistic living.

You do not need to struggle for novelty in your song. It can be new—no matter what your level of gift of artistic creativity and accomplishment—if your life expresses your best intuitions of the Creator and the creation. And if you affectionately dedicate your will to the doing of the will of the Father in heaven. Novelty is also inherent in your personality, given by God, unique, mysterious, and constant through change.

If you express your most truthful intuitions and desire the will of God wholeheartedly, then the unique melody of your life will increasingly be the Father’s will. That melody will increasingly harmonize in the choir of the spiritual family of God. And the rhythms of your life will increasingly synchronize with the rhythms of divine blessings to your body and mind.

Sing to the Lord a new song. That’s the beginning of Psalm 96, gloriously full of praise and anticipation of when the whole earth shall be filled with the praise of God. We bring that planetary destiny closer by heeding the psalmist’s call to proclaim . . . in thought, word, and deed.

 

 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.

And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

This is the daily praise phrase for Friday’s theme of morally active living.

The duty to love is paradoxical, because if we stay on the level of the duty-conscious intellect, we cannot fulfill our duty. We have to move to the higher level of soul and spirit.

The divine command to love does not spell out our duty in any detail but only reveals the motivation for all our relationships. In this way God expresses faith in us that if we love, we will be motivated to seek out the moral and ethical truths that may be needed to guide our handling of our evolving situation.

Sometimes duty-consciousness becomes overwhelmed with the full implications of the love command. It is helpful to have other words with less burdensome or distracting connotations. Take the word affection, for example. We can think of ourselves as capable of knowing God, receiving the divine affection, and loving him in return. We can give to our Father the affectionate dedication of our will to the doing of his will. And we can seek to love each of our fellow human beings with an intelligent and wise affection.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

 

Be you perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect

This is the praise phrase for Saturday, highlighting character achievement

There is a fascinating tension between two facts. On the one hand, growth is gradual, like a tiny seed that grows up into a mighty tree. The spirit perfection of Paradise is way beyond what we can attain in this life. On the other hand, the present tense imperative, Be perfect, implies that there is a kind of perfection that we can experience in this life, and that is righteousness.

We begin our growth by seeking entrance into the kingdom of God, the spiritual family of God with the faith and trusting dependence of a little child. By faith, we come to be sons and daughters of God. The child grows up to be like the parent, and we come to hunger and thirst for righteousness. And faith in the effectiveness in the supreme human desire to do the will of God, to be like God is all we need in order to receive God’s gift of righteousness. The prophet Isaiah celebrated it in these words. “My soul shall rejoice in the love of my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation and covered me with his robe of righteousness.”

But there is something beyond this core righteousness that I call the beautiful wholeness of righteousness. That is not simply given to our faith. There are things we have to learn, for example, to integrate spiritual living with scientific living.

The fullness of character achievement integrates the strengths highlighted in each of the daily praise phrases: worshipful living, scientific living, philosophical living, living with sensitivity to the beauties of nature, artistic living, and morally active living in the loving service of God and his family.

 

Colorful Weekly Blogging Planner

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e3/f2/bf/e3f2bf606a699e4d6fcd30464315289a.png