Exhortation
When we worship Jesus Christ, we are coming to the Father. When we come to the Father, we are coming to the source of all things. As we do this, we discover we are not able to come unless His Holy Spirit equips and moves us.
The God of Heaven is our fear. Now in the world objects of fear are something to recoil from, to get away from. But the fear we have of God is not simple fear, as we experience when we come suddenly on a rattlesnake, for example. Fear of God is numinous, and moral, deadly, and utterly attractive. When we experience it, we are undone, and don’t know what to do. We would simply stand there paralyzed unless His Spirit moved us in the direction we should go, which is towards Him.
True fear, fear of God, is attractive. You cannot have true fear of God without the work of the Spirit in your heart, and if you have had that work of the Spirit in your heart, He impels you to approach the unapproachable light. We cannot imagine what God has in store for us, any more than we could imagine a game of lawn darts on the sun. We have nothing in our experience that will reveal the brightness of the glory that is coming to us.
And yet we desire it. And yet we want it. As we begin a new year, remind yourselves that your central business, your ultimate calling, your foundational identity, is found in desiring God. This is a desire that you cannot fulfill . . . unless He has first loved you. Fortunately, in the gospel of Jesus, this is precisely what He has done.