Somebody will unlock the doors before you arrive on Sunday. You will enter into a place which will likely be filled with activities that have been planned and prepared for. Another person was up late praying for those who will enter in. Musicians and singers will have meticulously gone over songs to ensure that they are offered in excellence unto the King. Teachers have pondered on the children who will sit at their feet, receiving the foundational layers of Christ and His relentless love for those little ones. Busy and faithful servants of various stripes will offer their best in parking lots full of vehicles and pedestrians, visitor welcome centers where first time guests arrive, ushering in people to be seated, providing bottles and fresh diapers to infants in the nursery, keeping the building and grounds secure from those who may not have Christians’ best interests at heart…the list could go on and on. Pastors and teachers have studied, prayed, meditated and will open their mouths and trust Holy Spirit to do the invisible, inscrutable work that is His alone to accomplish through the Word. Yes, there will be large amounts of activity today where you attend the worship gathering. All of this and more will take place at Meadow, the treasured place where I worship and serve. But I am thinking of something even better, something much higher.
“…we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.” – 1st John 3:2
Jesus is going to appear again on earth sometime in our future. I am going to see Him with my very own eyes. Having not yet seen Him, I have been transformed to love and adore Him by faith. He holds the life of each surrendered believer. He is deeply pleased that we have given everything to Him without scientific proof, without tangible evidence and without being forced against our wills. Somewhere along the line, He became everything to us and we were ruined for this world. The pinnacle of this process is the promise of our being able to “see Him as He is”. We are not baited with images of streets of gold, jasper walls and glassy seas. That is not Heaven to us. What we desire is Heaven’s Lamb, Heaven’s Light, Heaven’s Lord. We desire to be with Jesus for, if He were not there, it could never be Heaven to us. In the absence of Jesus our Lord, Heaven would be hellish to us for as long as He was not there.
But He is. And He is coming to us again. In this we anchor our hope.
So let us enjoy the moment of foretaste today which points us toward a time when there will be a glorious overhaul of our worship. Let’s gather and sing and pray and serve and preach and learn. Let’s love one another until we have emptied ourselves of the commitment to seek the highest good of others. Let’s sing loudly with passion worthy of Him and His promises to us. Let us be today what we will be forever and ever: enthralled with the One who is everything to us. Without reservation or hesitation, let us close our eyes and see Him by faith, knowing that soon we will see Him as all that He truly is.