If I’m being really honest with you all, Epiphany season is still one I’m working out how to do well.

I love the idea of Epiphany season – I’ll be posting next week about what I think it adds to the liturgical calendar overall. But honestly, January was for many years one of the busiest months for me at work and many of the things I’ve tried to do in the past have been drowned out by that. So, rather than offering ‘tips’ like I did in Advent, which might suggest I already have strong epiphany traditions, here are some suggestions for things I’ve tried and things I’d like to try for a great Epiphany season.

1. Try to keep it festive!

I find that it helps a lot in observing any liturgical season to do things that set the atmosphere well. Things outside of quiet time/family worship that just remind you what season you’re in and reinforce the mood of that season a bit for you. In Epiphany, the barometer is set to ‘festive’ so we try to keep it festive here at home.

There are lots of ways you can do this. We still have a ton of festive food left over from Christmas – partly owing to having been ill – and are generally a bit laxer about what we eat than we would be at ordinary times of the year. We’ve taken the decorations down for the most part but left the tree up (it only went up on Christmas Eve anyway). And the centrepiece on our coffee table is the Mary, Joseph and Jesus from our nativity set with just the magi – a miniature reminder at the heart of our living room that this is the season we celebrate Christ’s manifestation to the Gentiles.*

Whatever it may be, try to give life a more festive aspect.

2. Spend some time reading the Servant Songs

All Scripture should get us thinking about Christ’s glory being proclaimed to all nations, but the Servant Songs in Isaiah seem especially appropriate at this time of year. Christians are likely already familiar with Isaiah 53, but the previous Servant Songs in chapters 42, 49 and 50 add huge depth to our understanding of Christ’s mission and glory. Take some time to read through them slowly this Epiphany.

3. Read a book about the glory of Christ

My superficial impression is that the Evangelical book market is actually surprisingly sparse on this. I wonder whether our tradition’s famous activist streak sometimes leads us to neglect just dwelling on how good Christ is. Still, there are plenty of good books on this topic. John Stott’s The Incomparable Christ could be a good place to start. John Piper’s Seeing and Savouring Jesus Christ is a short book and you can download it as a PDF from the Desiring God website. For something more ambitious, John Owen’s The Glory of Christ is old gold. Use them to give you space to reflect, to pray and to worship your way through the theme of Christ’s glory.

4. Pray for world missions

Epiphany reminds us that Christ is glorious, and that we long for his glory to be acknowledged and enjoyed by all people everywhere. Why not find a way to pray for that? That could be as simple as starting or ending your day by reading Psalm 67 or 117. But most mission agencies produce a prayer diary – if your church has mission partners, why not try to get hold of the January edition of their sending agency’s prayer diary? Or pick a part of the world you don’t know or pray about as much as you could and use a resource like Operation World to pray for the Church in that country.**

5. Think, pray and plan for your own evangelism

Most of my readers (I assume!) are also Gentiles. So it would be a fundamental mistake (one to which Western Christians have sadly been prone) to think that Christ going out to the nations is something that mainly happens abroad. We are ‘the nations’ who are graciously being brought into God’s salvation plan. So Epiphany is as much about what you might think of as evangelism as it is about what you might think of as global mission.

Lots of people find evangelism difficult (I’m one of them!) and we need any encouragement we can get. If epiphany is a time when we reflect on Christ’s glory and his manifestation to the nations, it makes sense that it should be a time when we do a bit of an evangelism M.O.T. Maybe take some time to think where you are with evangelism. Who could you be praying for? What opportunities do you presently have? What opportunities might come up between now and Easter? Is your church or small group doing something? And just as the terror sets back in, remind yourself of the glory of Christ. Think about what you live about him and ask God for confidence to share that thing with those around you.

* A quick confession of personal eccentricity. I actually collect the kings/magi from nativity sets, so we have about 20 of them and counting. On Christmas Day, the nativity set goes up with Mary, Joseph, Jesus and the Shepherds but some of the Kings will be put out somewhere in the house far from the nativity set. Each day at Christmas, before my wife gets up, I move the kings a little closer to the nativity set and increase the number of kings in the group. By 5th January visitors to our house will find about 20 miniature kings attempting to scale the coffee table. By 6th Jan the Shepherds are gone and the magi surround the holy family until Feb 2nd. Perhaps pics will appear in a future post.

** I really enjoyed this article which the BBC published today on what sounds like very encouraging Gospel growth in Nepal.