Let God take a whisk to your life

My kids love baking –they especially love doing the mixing; they want to be involved, be active and play their part. They want to hold the wooden spoon, mix in the flour and butter, and they do it with enthusiasm and relish; they and we get very messy in the process, but the results are usually pretty good.

Stir-up Sunday reminds us to literally start baking for Christmas. It’s a heart-warming tradition - think of all the people preparing their Christmas cakes weeks in advance to allow lots of permeation of the fruit with alcohol! Preparing for Christmas we think not only about getting celebration food ready but we are also reminded that God wants to continually stir up our hearts and wills.

God wants to move us, he wants to impact upon us, he wants ultimately to change us. And it is part of our duty as Christians to keep enabling that stirring up of ourselves. Of course stirring up is not a neutral thing. Someone who is a stirrer is thought of as being a trouble maker. And God does make trouble. He is not content to leave us as we are – he wants to shake us up, rouse us, whisk, and stir us so that we can grow and develop emotionally and spiritually.

Advent which begins next Sunday is a shorter time of preparation than Lent but it is nonetheless one in which we need to get ourselves in the right sort of place where we might allow God to stir us up a bit, however that might be best done for us. It is of course always a risk to let God in a bit more into our hearts and into our lives, we don’t know what direction he might take us in, what he might ask of us, but then we trust in his promises and his knowledge of the truth. So, I encourage you this stir-up Sunday to let God take a whisk to your life, get you a bit mixed up so that you might become a little more like the God who has made you and loves you. After all we can trust that God’s results are usually pretty good.

Collect: Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

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