Prepared?

 "And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me that you also may be where I am." John 14:3...."The mansion may be ready for you, but you are not ready for it." J.B. Chapman

Believers, especially older ones, are often prone to say something like, "If I'm still here, God must still have ways He wants to use me." I've often harbored those same thoughts, but I'm seeing things a bit differently these days. Someone said that "heaven is a prepared place for prepared people." How prepared are we, you and I, for an eternity in His Kingdom? How prepared are we to abide in the place He has prepared for us?

Life in this fallen world has conditioned even we believers to see it as the true reality. We may have the ultimate hope of heaven, but the reality of that heaven is somewhere on the back burner for most of us. So entangled in the day to day affairs of life in the here and now that we give, at best, only leftovers to the One we call Lord and the Kingdom we say we're a part of. Truly, if the Lord were to call us home today, just how ready are we to go home, to even call it home?

I believe in a life of good works. I believe that we are to be used by Him, to labor with Him as He builds His Kingdom and His Church in this passing realm, but that is not His priority with us. His focus is to transform us into full citizens of His Kingdom. Not just in name but in character. J.B. Chapman asked just how comfortable we would be in the company of those who dwell in the Kingdom of heaven? Would we fit in? Would we really be at home? Or is the truth of it that we have been so immersed in the ways and works of this life that heaven would be a totally disorienting experience for us?

I think each of us who profess to be citizens of His Kingdom need to soberly ask just how ready for the fullness of that Kingdom are we? I don't want to be ill-prepared. I don't want to look like a tourist totally out of their element. I don't want to look out of place in the place that He has prepared for me. 

I will be 74 years old this month and I never thought I would live to this age. I long for my homegoing, but I want to be ready when the time comes. I don't want things in my heart, my mind, my life, to be left unfinished. I don't want to be unprepared for the place He has prepared for me. It has become an ever-deepening prayer that I not be.

Whatever your age this day, may you begin now to dwell upon where your home really is and that you be prepared for that place, He, Jesus Christ, has already prepared a place for you. To borrow a phrase from a pop culture novel of my youth, let us not be strangers in a strange land in the very land He made for us.

Blessings,
Pastor O