What If Jesus Visited Your Church This Sunday?

Seeing the Invisible Through Eyes of Faith

1 Peter 1:8, [Christ] whom having not seen you love. Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory (NKJV). 

I have on occasion asked our congregation what they or our neighbors would do if they heard that Jesus was coming to visit our church in person—next Sunday! Right in front of their own eyes, they would see Him about whom they have heard all these years! I could see the wheels turning, a sort of collective . . . hum-m-m. This notion immediately seems to elicit either a sense of wonder or of dread--wonder at the thought of actually seeing Jesus, and dread at the implications involved in his seeing us! Imagine how this contrasts with the fact that for all these years we have already been praying to the Unseen. We have grounded our hopes and decisions upon biblical principles alone, fostered by the inner working of the Spirit--both real for sure, but incorporeal. Further, we have fought off the pesky temptation to content ourselves with earthy expressions as over against an “other-worldly” attitude. We live out the Christian faith supposedly in the reality of Christ’s presence. 

The flip side is the divinely intended one, namely that NOT seeing Christ IS IN FACT seeing him. Indeed, "believing IS seeing." And this seeing of him produces a marked positive change in the demeanor of the genuine saint--"joy inexpressible." 

But after having posed the above question, we have to scratch our heads and ponder. Oddly, we may need to ask ourselves the unthinkable--"How truly necessary is Jesus himself to our Christianity?" Ludicrous, you say? Of course it is. But WHAT is ludicrous, the question or the answer? How contented has the mass of believers become with a non-Christ Christianity? Hebrews says that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," and where might that fact most be tested but right here in the personage of Jesus himself?

It seems a necessary question these days, when so many have grown smug in their "decision" to "accept" Christ. Their salvation seems to have become reduced to a choosing of Christ, without an accompanying affection for him. Yet, biblically, there is no alternative faith for all true salvation finds it's life in a living, loving Jesus. He "rejoices with joy inexpressible and full of glory" (1 Peter 1:8b). Should this not be the test of our profession, viz., that we are so grounded in the visibility of the Invisible that it is as if he were walking down the isle of our church, or sitting at the dinner table, or in the passenger seat? Why should a mere thing like invisibility create such angst among believers? I suggest that it does not . . . in the true saint. This is key. Such faith will enliven the church once again, for it is on this basis that all are saved. Living, breathing joy . . . inexpressible!