The Glory Now Revealed预览

Day Six: God’s Loving Purposes

The $2.5 million “Grand Complication” wristwatch made by German watchmaker A. Lange and Söhne has 876 parts, each one handcrafted and hand assembled to form a perfectly harmonized piece of machinery. In the same way, God has assembled our lives and harmonized them with the lives of everyone with whom we interact. In heaven, we will understand the loving purposes of God in our early years, how we were raised, what level of poverty or affluence we experienced, how our parents interacted with us, the extent of our education, and our successes and failures along the way. 

The Holy Spirit’s power sanctifying us and sustaining our faith will also be made manifest in heaven, for the praise of his glorious grace. We will be able to see how Christ continually interceded for us at the right hand of God (Hebrews 7:25) that our faith might not fail (Luke 22:32). We will give him glory again and again in heaven for this great work. 

One of the other most exciting revelations in heaven will be to see fully the eternal effects of our good works on earth. We usually are not privy to the full effectiveness of our ministries. Perhaps God intends to keep us from becoming conceited (2 Corinthians 12:7). This is the effect of the division of labor God willed in the work of the gospel. Paul said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6). Jesus said, “One sows and another reaps” (John 4:37). 

I have shared the gospel on airplanes for years. Literally hundreds of people have sat next to me and have heard either some portion of the gospel message or all of it. I have almost no evidence that any of those seeds amounted to anything. Perhaps some were like the seeds sown along the path, that the birds ate right away (Matthew 13:4). But there may well be some people who will tell me in heaven that the conversation we had on a flight changed their lives forever. It will be thrilling to see the harvest of all the seeds of ministry we planted throughout our lives.

God, I have so many questions about your purposes, especially about the hardest things in my life. Thank you that you will one day show me how you were at work in and through me all along. Amen.