Prepared

A voice of one calling: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Isaiah 40:3 If we're to receive the powerful presence of God, we must prepare ourselves. Henry Blackaby We tend to dismiss the Old Testament these days, which is to our harm. There is so much teaching and power in those Scriptures. They foreshadow the coming of Christ the King and they have so much to teach us. One of these is found in how the priests were instructed to prepare themselves for their coming into the inner court to minister to Him. Preparation had a central part in all of their worship. What part does preparation have in ours? How we prepare ourselves for corporate worship speaks loudly to how we prepare ourselves for our private times with Him. How often do we stay up late on the night before our corporate gatherings giving ourselves over to entertainment and a host of other activities that do not prepare the soil of our hearts for meeting with Him, but distract and take us further from Him? As a result, we're disjointed, distracted, unfocused as we come into His sanctuary. Worship leaders will tell you they spend a good part of the service trying to get the attention of the people gathered before them. We're not prepared to meet with Him. We are not treating Him as Holy. Our bodies may be present, but our hearts and minds are missing. The worst part of it is that we're not much bothered by it. We've made a kind of peace with it. We expect to have to "work" at getting the people's attention. This results in a lot of flesh centered efforts to stir hearts. Sadly, emotions may be touched, but hearts rarely are. We've come unprepared and we leave unchanged. How do we prepare? It's not in trying harder or having music and preaching that stir the emotions. Blackaby says that there is only one real way to prepare to come into His Presence, and that is in repentance. That's an ugly word to our flesh, but if we dwell on what it means, a turning away from the direction we've been going and unto the direction where He's found, it's a wonderful exercise. The enemy, working through this world, is fully committed to taking all of our attention away from Jesus Christ. He has seemingly limitless ways of doing this and he is often very successful. We need Him to cleanse us from all that has pushed Him aside in our lives in both our individual and public worship. We need to confess where we've allowed other things to come between He and us. We need to turn from all of it, be emptied of it. We need clean hearts, empty of all the things that are not of Him and have found their way in. When we have, we are prepared to meet with Him. To encounter Him. In the Old Testament, the priests needed to be ceremonially clean before ministering to Him. So must we. This is how we prepare. We empty ourselves of all the spiritual clutter so that He may now come and fill us with Himself. This is worship, and we can only experience it when we're prepared. How will you prepare to come to Him today? How will you prepare yourself to meet with Him when you gather with your fellow believers this Sunday? Will you come before Him distracted, disinterested, and leave Him no different than when you came before Him? Or will you come with clean hands and heart, empty of all the trash the enemy and the world have tried to fill your life with, and simply worship and adore Him? Will you, will I, be prepared? Blessings, Pastor O