Just a little question
if you don’t mind, it shouldn’t take long to answer it:
“Are you yearning
for your heavenly home?”
Paul tells us
that we are to live in the confidence that when our “earthly tent which is our house
is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal
in the heavens. For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with
our dwelling from heaven…so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life.
Now He who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit
as a pledge.”
People in many parts
of the world live with a thin distance between life and death; many do not make
it out of infancy, many others do not know what it is to mark a 21st
birthday, and still many more know an old age that, chronologically, is equivalent
to our (in the West) middle age.
We Christians in
the West can also know a thin distance between life and death, and we can know
a thin veil between that which is temporal and that which is eternal (2 Cor.
4:18) – for if we live in the knowledge that the death rate in our land is 100%
we can ponder the reality of death even as we live life to its fullest in Jesus
Christ. To live life to its fullest, for the disciple of Jesus Christ, is to live
a life in which Christ increases and we decrease; it is to live a life which
acknowledges that we belong to Christ and that we are not our own, it is to lay
down our lives for Jesus Christ and for others.
Living for
Christ, belonging to Christ, means that this life is a prelude to a glorious life
in which we behold our Lord Jesus in all of His glory – being transformed into the
fulness of His image and enjoying the koinonia (fellowship, communion) of the Holy
Trinity – as we see Him as He is (1 John 3:1 – 3).
The fears and
threats and anxieties of this world pale in comparison to eternity with Jesus
Christ and His saints (Romans 8:12 - 25). Physical death becomes a servant, allowing us
to leave our decaying and corruptible body in order to be clothed with a body
whose glory is beyond our current comprehension (see 1 Cor. Cp. 15).
Perhaps this is
something we might ponder during these times.
“Now He who
prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a
pledge.”
It was just a
little question…wasn’t it?
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