Good Saturday morning! Slightly better news in the news this morning. One reactor may be stabilizing in Japan; Britain and France will enforce a no-fly zone over Libya; and I missed less games on my brackets yesterday. One of those news items may be less important than the others, but I'll let you decide which one. I left some birthday greetings on a Facebook page this morning and noticed that her status was not up to date. My status is out of date too, and so is yours. Our addresses are all wrong, and our photographs don't show who we really are or what we look like. This is not a problem with any social media site. This is a problem with our perspective and our temporary location.
When a person surrenders his or her life to Jesus, that person's status is updated in The Books. Not the Facebook or the books of this world, but the eternal books that God keeps. Our address is updated to one with a street address in Heaven. Every time a person believes in Jesus and surrenders to His will, the order goes out from God, "Son, prepare a place for Joe!"; and Jesus adds another work order to his list of places to prepare in Heaven. Joe's exact status here in this world has just become a temporary thing; his address is no longer permanent. We have a new home in Heaven with Jesus; we just can't go there quite yet.
The home we have here looks pretty rough. We can't see our heavenly home with our human eyes, and the home we do see with our eyes has a lot of problems. Some days the storm clouds seem darker as they do now with the catastrophe in Japan ongoing and the possibility of our nation joining the war in Libya, and other days the storm clouds seem to lighten a bit like the day when our government started pulling our forces out of Iraq and the Middle East uprisings had not yet begun. Sometimes we can discern the ups and downs of the world situation by the price of gasoline, and this can give us an up or down day. In this world of ups and downs, it's kind of hard to imagine a home in Heaven that has all ups. We see the pain of our loved ones and feel our own pain, and it's hard to imagine a place where pain and suffering are banished forever. You can far too easily think back to your last time of sorrow; and it is understandable that we would have trouble imagining a place with no sorrow and every tear wiped away forever.
We may have trouble imagining, but the Bible assures us that our permanent and eternal place is there and not here. Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us - rest in His assurance.
Bucky
No comments:
Post a Comment