Rest Assured Devotional Series
Guided Meditations
His Eye is on the Sparrow
Jesus tells his followers in Matthew 6:25-34 that to follow him means that they will be provided for. This is good news for the disciples, because apparently they had cause to worry. After all, you only tell someone to refrain from something that they are doing.
Jesus’ good news for the 1st-century disciples can be good news for us too, for the modern-day news gives us no shortage of reasons to worry constantly. Whether at the national, communal, or personal level, there is always a news story that can make us concerned about provision. But Jesus’ invitation is to lay down this kind of worry as we follow him. To trust God who is amongst us is to trust that our leader knows what provision we need. Our worry dissipates because we are about the activity of God, not mired in the anxieties of our day.
As you listen to this track, to what worries does the Spirit say “peace be still”? Does Jesus’ invitation intrigue you to lay worry down and live like the sparrow, who flutters at peace in the hands of God? Or are you in a place where Jesus’ invitation to follow and trust would just cause more reason to worry? Wherever you are, let this song accompany you.
The sparrows neither sow nor reap, and yet God feeds them. May that be encouragement for you, for us, for all creation.
Blessed Assurance
Running throughout Apostle Paul’s ministry was the call to live in the assurance of Jesus and the foolishness of the Gospel. Paul embodied this assurance in his lived experience as a follower of the Way who spent a large chunk of his public ministry in prison. But it was only from his assurance in Jesus that he could write Philippians - the epistle of joy as some would call it - from behind closed bars. He had assurance that Jesus would ground and guide him. He had assurance that Christ would sustain him even in prison. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Paul knew that the world had its haunts and allures, but could offer no deep assurance, not like the kind Jesus could give. And so Paul insisted to this church at Philippi to live inside the assurance of Jesus and thus exude the joy that God has for us in Christ.
Part of the haunt of modernity is to rob you of any assurance. Our news cycles and hyper-capitalism mirror each other in this way. The onslaught of macabre across your timelines everyday challenges any sense of assurance you might have. Indeed, even many of the wealthy won’t be able to outlast the ravaging havoc of ecological change that modernity hath wrought. And capitalism is no better. For it encourages us to constantly buy our way into contentment. But whatever assurance your product of yesterday gave you, you should be able to buy more now.
The carrot dangled in front of our face is never catchable; it was never supposed to be.
But this isn’t our story. This isn’t our song. Jesus is. “Oh what a foretaste of glory divine,” the song says! This is the good news that I play for you quietly. Your “perfect submission” doesn’t need to be a loud, blaring stampede of news. It can be that quiet news that lives deep in your heart, the kind that grounds Grandma in church as she prays yet again for her family, the kind that has grounded enslaved persons in the Americas for centuries as they have lived through the hell of settler colonialism, the kind that draws you into quiet when you survey the praise of the trees.
What assurance grounds you? Does it run deeper than the anxieties of our age? What kind of holy quiet might it bring about in the church? Who notices that this is your song?
Abide with Me
The arc of Scripture points to the need to abide in God. When humanity remains in God - when we remain oriented towards God’s presence - creation flourishes, we and all that surrounds us. But when we lose the desire to abide in God, and seek to abide elsewhere instead, creation languishes - painfully languishes.
I offer this hymn Abide with Me to let you think about how abiding can lead to soaring. When I start playing the melody with octaves halfway through the piece, “soar” is the only word I can think of. I hope that the momentum of the chords help you and nearby creation soar! In John 15, Jesus reminds us that when we remain abiding in Him, we are gloriously fruitful. But it is only in Him that we can bear that robust fruit; for apart from Jesus we can do nothing.
So what fruit abounds in your life? Who soars because of how you follow Jesus? And where do you see languishing in the world as a result of your not abiding in Jesus?
As you listen to this version of the hymn, let its flow draw all of you towards The Lord. We don’t have to be perfect to abide. We just need to do it. That’s good news.
May the witness of our lives be a resounding insistence from onlookers that we’ve spent time with Jesus.
‘Tis so Sweet to Trust in Jesus
Celebrated in January of every year, Epiphany is a Christian feast day where we celebrate the Magi’s visit to the infant Jesus (Matthew 2:1-6). It is easy to marvel simply at the fact that these visitors came bearing expensive gifts, but their identities are just as important, if not more so, in revealing the significance of their place in the story.
The most accurate translation of the word for Magi is sorcerers, not wise men. This means these men were astrologers well-versed in the ways of magic (think: Magi, magic). Yet these learned ones chose to instead trek from far away to bow down before the wondrous infant whose star divinely guided them (v. 11). (I guess by this point in the story Mary and Joseph had moved away from the manger.)
In fact, these magicians were the only members of the infancy narratives who bow before Jesus. Mary ponders what she’s observed, Joseph is merely described as being present, and the shepherds come to see whether the angel’s news to them in the field was true. It’s only the magicians who bow.
My version of ‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus is more upbeat than I normally hear it in order to draw special attention to the fact that Jesus is worthy of enthusiastic praise and worship. It can be so sweet to reserve for Jesus deep reverence, reverence that I’d otherwise be tempted to give to other magical spectacles around me. I especially notice this discrepancy between Jesus and others when I come to Analog Sabbath, my weekly day of laying aside all screens. Once the noise of the screens cease, I’m reminded of the sober fact that technology ought not own me and is ultimately a limited spectacle. My devices are forms of magic in our modern age whose power I choose to limit because I would rather trust Jesus to be my ultimate focus of attention. When I bow to Jesus on Analog Sabbath, I remember the proper place of tech - as a tool, not a lord.
What forms of magic tempt you to step away from Jesus? Who would be blessed if you trusted Him more?
O Lord, Hear My Prayer
Psalm 6 starts off with a harrowing cry to God to be heard for tangible change in their life. “My bones are shaking with terror while you O Lord, how long?” Words this fierce speak from a deep place, hoping to be heard by The One who calls from and lives in the midst of our deep. How much do we dare to pray for specific change?
One of the times of greatest for conviction for me in seminary came around how often we are content praying vaguely. My worship professor L. Edward Phillips noted this when talking about the mild congregational prayers that are often uttered in middle class churches, where we often just ask God to change our disposition and not material realities. “Lord, help us hear you better. Help us love our neighbors as ourselves. Help us hear the cry of the needy. Forgive us of our pride. Help us endure the pandemic.” Phillips noted that while these prayers are important, when they are the only prayers we render, they suggest that we don’t need anything material to change: in other words, we have all of the materials that we need and so we only need to reform our dispositions.
Of course, this was a generalization. Many churches of all economic means do pray boldly for material change. But wow was I convicted during that class, because so often I don’t pray for material changes for me but rather just changes in my disposition.
So I recorded this song with the hope that I might change the content of my own prayers. How might resting assured emerge from changing the nature of our corporate prayers such that they were bigger, more specific?
Lord, as people listen to O Lord Hear My Prayer, may their bodies be healed from COVID. May marriages be restored and strengthened. May the young people blossom in school because their parents see more of their gifts. May people restrain themselves from excesses that our societies take as sacrosanct. May this song the coral reef by mystically encouraging people to not litter or buy needless plastics. Lord, may this song affect the way we think about transportation and emission rates. May we exercise self-restraint in needless movement that hurts us all. Lord, may this song help us stop killing each other this weekend with words, cancel culture, and gossip. Lord, may this song help people with economic power rest so that those who don’t have more of a chance to do so as well.
Lord, hear my prayer! Amen.
It Is Well with My Soul
With all of the doom and gloom engulfing us these days, it is important to think about how to pursue wellness. One way to do so is to ignore the onslaught of news about pain around us. The thinking goes, if we don’t stare it in the face, it can’t affect us as much. But there is another, more fulsome way to deal with the strain of living.
The songwriter Horatio Spafford reminds us that we can stare sin, Satan and death in the face, take account of how these forces undo us, and still declare that our souls can be well. He made this declaration in his hymn “It Is Well With My Soul,” which he penned after learning that all of his daughters had died at sea. Its lyrics remind him and all of us that we can declare our lives well because God is present in the midst of our suffering and has experienced tragedy too in the death of Christ. (“That Christ has regarded my helpless estate, and shed his own blood for my soul.”)
Knowing that his own tragedy was to come, perhaps this is what was at stake for Jesus when he comforted the beleaguered masses: “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” This 1st century, poor Jewish teacher in occupied Palestine was inviting other colonized subjects to follow him, to seek after the Kingdom of God that was bigger than the the reign of Rome and some of the misguided leadership of the Jewish people.
The powers of this world that lead to the tragedies of death - including the death of Jesus and the death of Spafford’s children - will not have the last say. In his living, dying, and being raised, Jesus shows us the way to eternal life in God, a rest far deeper than the restlessness that tragedies induce in us now.
So as I play this song for you, I pray you can take stock of how it is well with your soul. May you experience God’s presence in your midst as you sojourn through dangers, toils and snares of this life, for Jesus wept, then died, and now lives.
Great is Thy Faithfulness
During the last few years, we’ve seen a great deal of separation happen here in the West. Many people decided to separate from their jobs during the pandemic (the “Great Resignation”), many from spouses, and many from friends. Great Britain left the EU, children were separated from parents at the border, and polarization has led to widening fault lines in US society. Many of us continue to feel alienated from nature.
In this age of separation, it’s all the more important to think about how God’s not separating from us. I love how Jeremiah 3:12 puts it:
“‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the Lord,
‘I will frown on you no longer,
for I am faithful,’ declares the Lord,
‘I will not be angry forever.’”
At the time, Israel was being faithless, yet God chose to draw near to them. Great is God’s faithfulness to creation even when we are anything but faithful to God. This is good news for us in the midst of all of the faithlessness surrounding us and in us. Since the Garden of Eden we’ve desired to separate from God, but God routinely chooses to draw close to us nonetheless. We always stand in the presence of a nevertheless God.
For the downtrodden and cast out who know separation all too well, God chooses you. For those who feel they are on top of the world and are ignorant of how they have chosen to separate from God, God chooses you too. This is the good news Jesus embodied: God comes close.
How does the restlessness of our souls ultimately point to separation that we’ve chosen and that others have chosen for us? What faithlessness is God calling you away from? Who or what have you separated from that you actually need to draw close to again?
I pray that this rendition of Great is Thy Faithfulness serves as celebration for you as you realize that you, and all of creation, are created for intimacy.
I Will Trust in the Lord/Oh Freedom, Before I’d Be a Slave
With all that Black folk continue to face in this country and around the world amidst the multiple pandemics of COVID and anti-blackness, it is an ongoing miracle that Black folk walk around in any semblance of our right minds. Yet in the midst of such death, God has sustained us. Mary’s Baby has walked with us. And the Spirit consoles and animates us. We seek flourishing nevertheless and it is a glorious testament to annals of God’s faithfulness down through the years.
It in this spirit of awe and resilience that I played these two spirituals, I Will Trust in the Lord and Oh, Freedom. These songs come to me from my known and unknown ancestral bards who sang these as declarations of resistance to the dehumanization they endured in these lands we now call the US. “I will trust in the Lord ‘til I die.” “Before I’d be a slave/I’d be buried in my grave/and go home to The Lord and be free.”
Both songs center death, but not as a morbid end or escape from this world. No, death in these songs is a reminder that the brutalities of this world aren’t everything, and that there is someone greater than the travails constantly besieging us. Death in these songs is a part of the journey to face with a confidence only faith can provide. That’s the kind of confidence that Jesus possessed as he navigated the challenges in this life attacking him from every side: “Don't be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul” (Matt 10:28). Indeed, that’s the confidence that I want to live out now through my music and in my life.
What does your relationship to this world reveal about your relationship to death? I pray The Lord grow your faith in light of what is inevitable but what is not final.
You can listen here: I Will Trust in the Lord and Oh, Freedom
The Church’s One Foundation
There are many reasons to be nervous and anxious about the future of the church if you are a modern-day Christian in North America or Europe. Polarization, narratives of institutional decline, ongoing schisms, falling birth rates, epically public moral failures - all of these point towards a crumbling of the life of power that many Christians have known in some capacity during the last 1500 years. Insofar as we have any love for the institutional church, the current erosion of what we’ve constructed can understandably lead to nervousness and anxiety. Are our churches crumbling because we are unfaithful? What more do we need to do? What will happen if we don’t? These are questions worth posing, but we must ask them remembering that the foundation of the church is not washing away, even if some of its ornamented scaffolding is.
In times of deep uncertainty like these, the Spirit wants to remind us that the resurrected Jesus bears on his person the marks of our disunity, uncertainty, and confusion. No amount of human disarray is a match for God’s faithfulness. The Spirit is calling church members away from the restlessness of worrying about our waning institutional vibrancy and towards the faithful rest made possible by Jesus, our true foundation. We can rest assured.
As Mako Fujimura puts it in Art + Faith: A Theology of Making, the church, like all of creation, lives inside the grace of God. God does not need us, but God made us. God has freely given us life, and freely invites us to participate in the life-giving work of the church. Therefore, in order to survive, we need Jesus. Jesus doesn’t need us. This one-way dependence on God is an important truth during these times of unrest, because the struggles our institutions are going through can tempt us to adopt the position of savior and overextend ourselves. (I’m preaching to myself here!)
But because Jesus is the foundation, we can participate in the work freely trusting in God, thankful that we have any role to play in the first place. Keeping Jesus as the foundation grounds us in the urgent work of the ministry, yet can also help stave off the restlessness of anxiety and over-functioning that leads to widespread burnout among the saints. As we journey towards the cross this Lenten season, we’re reminded that our faithfulness doesn’t guarantee institutional longevity. However, it does make us available to the rich reward of intimacy with God, the kind exhibited by the women bearing witness at Christ’s birth, crucifixion and the resurrection.
This is the hope and conviction from which I played “The Church’s One Foundation” on Rest Assured. S. J. Stone penned these beautiful lyrics about what the church is meant to be in the world: “[the church] is his new creation, by water and Word.” My hope is that you hear in this song an invitation to move into the restfulness of the church’s founder. We ought love and nurture the church not out of anxiety for self-preservation, but out of the free gift of grace that God gave us in life itself.
May this music and devotional help you celebrate the fact our foundation is as sturdy as ever. We serve a mighty good God!
What restlessness do you see coming from failures in the church? Does that turn you away from the church? How can you (re)engage the church again through the lens of holding onto Jesus?
Give Me Jesus
“Give Me Jesus” is the Negro spiritual that I play to conclude my Rest Assured album and my Notes of Rest retreats. It is perhaps my favorite spiritual because of its familial, political, and spiritual significance to me.
My mother, Rev. Adonna Davis Reid, is a pastor in the United Methodist Church. When she was getting ready to move from her old appointment to her new one, she asked me to play “Give Me Jesus” at her send-off service. She requested this tune because it was a favorite of hers and one that she had received from family growing up. So starting with my distant enslaved ancestors and coming down through the annals of Black Church history to me, ending the record with Give Me Jesus reminds me of how my Black family and the Black Church has kindled my faith. (As an aside, the record begins with an inherited hymn as well: His Eye is on the Sparrow, bequeathed to me from my Grandma on my Dad’s side.) What songs do you sing that speak to how your faith has been kindled by your family?
Alongside the familial importance is the fact this song is an act of resistance. The refusal happens in the lyrics: “In the morning when I rise/give me Jesus/you can have all this world/give me Jesus” and “When I come to die/ give me Jesus/you can have all this world/give me Jesus.” It is a rebellious move for my enslaved ancestors to compose and sing a song that insisted Jesus was what they really wanted more than the world that was being denied them.
Normally those who are denied access to something are baited into wanting what they cannot have. Exhibit A is in Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve are forbidden from eating from the tree but are then coaxed into desiring it by the serpent. Exhibit B is the commercial hip-hop and pop music industries today. The industry spends a lot of time and effort foregrounding music that depicts the astronomical wealth of the performers, levels of financial accumulation unattainable for most of the listeners. But we listen because we are formed to respect, admire, and even imitate the ways these entertainers have navigated late capitalism to amass the wealth that they have.
But the antebellum songwriters’ sang of the wisdom of Jesus: what good is it to gain the world but forfeit your soul? I’m amazed at the self-possession of these slaves to reject the desire to prioritize the goods of the world over a relationship with Jesus. To be sure, this isn’t to say that freedom from chattel slavery and loving treatment of Black folk are not goods worth having; they most certainly are. That said, “Give Me Jesus” reminds us that material gifts should always be put in their proper place. That's the relationship I yearn for all of my listeners to have to worldly success. Worldly goods can come in this life and we should celebrate that! But I pray we don’t hold fast to those at the expense of the rest of our souls. How can this song help you rearrange priorities about what matters in this life so that you and those around you might better rest amidst the excesses of late capitalism?
This leads to the third point: the spiritual significance. “Give Me Jesus” call us to rest assured. We can have “the assurance of Jesus” no matter what comes our way, be it a sunrise of a new day to work or the sunset of our lives. My ancestors demonstrated that a certain kind of rest is possible even when you don’t have the economic or political means to take a day off. That is, they chose to rest their souls by singing about their Crucified God. This is rest that emerges from a clear sense of purpose, one that even the crucifying slavocracy we still endure cannot wrest away. How would your life look different if you rested in Jesus’ assurance?
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Thank you for reading and thank you for listening. I look forward to putting more music out for you in service to our rest.
abundantly,
Julian