Appointed To Bear Fruit: A 90 Day Journeyનમૂનો

Jesus’ Desire

Everyone wants to be wanted. We all have a longing in our heart to have community and acceptance. We experience this because we are made in God’s image, and because God is relational. God is all about relationship and desires to have a relationship with us. This is His heart. He loves us and wants to give us the most pleasurable and fulfilling thing that we could ever desire. He doesn’t need to guess at what we need, because He already knows that our deepest longing can only be fulfilled by Himself. We were created to have fellowship with God. That was the greatest blessing that Adam enjoyed. When He fellowshipped with God as God walked with Adam and Eve in the coolness of the day in the garden, what joy must have filled his heart. God was with them and they were with God. However, that fellowship was destroyed by Adam and Eve’s sin. Because they didn’t obey God, they reaped the consequences of that decision: God would not dwell with sinful people.

However, God in His goodness and love, worked to rectify this problem and restore our fellowship with Himself. The Bible teaches us that the glory of Jesus is the glory of redemption. All the inhabitants of heaven give praise to the Lamb singing, “for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9). Christ wants us to be in heaven with Him before the throne, and has provided the way for that to happen. This glory was given because the Father loved the Son. This love was an eternal love arising “before the foundation of the world.” Amazingly, God planned the redemption of sinners through His Son’s death and resurrection before Adam and Eve even sinned. He knew what would happen if He created humans. However, He also knew that through their redemption, God would receive the highest glory. Although He was grieved by our sin, He knew that He would make a way to restore this fellowship forever.

Jesus promised His disciples that, although He would depart from them, He was going to prepare a place for them in His Father’s house. He would once again come back to take them there (John 14:1-3). Heaven is living with God in His house. The Apostle John describes the New Jerusalem, our eternal abode, as a city made of pure gold with the foundations of the walls adorned with jewels, but living in the most luxurious place imaginable is not our greatest joy. Neither is having eternity in our new bodies or being with our fellow believers. Our greatest joy is to be in heaven to see Jesus in His glory and to be with Him forever. John writes that, “the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face” (Rev. 22:3-4). We will be filled with joy in heaven, because we will finally see Jesus’ glory and experience the fullness of His love.

Understanding that God can restore our fellowship with Himself, the greatest desire of our hearts, should change how we live in this world. Jesus has promised that we can know that we have eternal life, and that heaven is ours. And because we know that all humans were created for heaven, our hearts should become distressed when we see those who are still living in sin. We should desire that they, too, know God, because God is most glorified by each person that worships Jesus Christ as Lord. The world continues to fill the void in their lives with temporary, material blessings, but none of these things will ever provide the eternal delight that we have in Christ. What a privilege to give ourselves fully to the work of proclaiming the gospel so that many other will join us in heaven! 

Application:  Will you give yourself to that endeavor?