Sitting down with the Lord
When the hour had come, He sat down, and the twelve apostles with Him (Luke 22:14).
I was struck recently with Luke’s details of the Lord’s preparation for His final Passover meal with the disciples. Jesus asked Peter and John to “Go and prepare the Passover for us, that we may eat” (Luke 22:8). It is worth commenting that the Lord gives the responsibility for what seems a straightforward task to two of His leading disciples. But the Lord personally made the arrangements for the large, furnished upper room to be available to Peter and John. In these simple arrangements, the Holy Spirit shows us how the Lord prepares for and directs His disciples’ service. There are those things which the Lord prepares independently of us, and there is the service He calls us to do under His direction in those prepared circumstances. Often we think we serve God in fallow and unprepared areas. But this is rarely the case. God goes before us. He can work in the hearts of people we have never met. In Philippi, God had prepared Lydia’s heart and made sure Paul and Silas passed the possessed slave girl on their way to pray. God also caused an earthquake which was used to open the Philippian jailer’s heart.
But the work Peter and John did was in preparation for being in the Lord’s presence. And the Lord also prepares us for worship. Each week we are impressed by the Spirit of God through the Scriptures, our fellowship and our personal experiences of the Lord’s grace and love. So, when we come into His presence at the start of the week, we come with hearts ready to express our gratitude, praise, and worship. We have a lovely picture of this in Bethany at the beginning of John 12. At that meal, there is a beautiful sense of the Lord’s people being ready to receive Him. They knew they were loved by Him: “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (John 11:5). And they wanted so much to express their love for the Lord. Lazarus was full of life, sitting in fellowship with Jesus. Martha, with a full heart, served the Saviour. And with a full spirit, Mary worshipped Jesus.
Each Lord’s Day morning, we have a fresh opportunity to come together into the Lord’s presence. As on the beach in John 21, we hear the resurrected Saviour’s words, “Come and dine” (v. 12, AV). We should never come out of habit or ritual, but with the wonder that was in John’s heart, “It is the Lord!” And like Peter, there should be quickness in our step. Like Mary, we should be ready and willing to worship. We are invited by the Lord to remember Him, and He welcomes us into His presence. We look back to trace the journey which led Him from glory to His suffering death at Calvary. In doing so, we look up to our resurrected and glorified Lord and Saviour in heaven. And we proclaim His death in the sure and certain promise of His return. We look back to worship in love. We look up in faith to behold His present glory, and we look on in the hope of His sure return. By remembering the Lord, hearts are overwhelmed by His love that was stronger than death and His grace that has made us the children of God. The Lord rejoices over us with singing. And we can speak to our Father of the glory of His Son in the power and liberty of the Holy Spirit.
