Zion

Christian worship is more than a public meeting. It is a meeting between God and His people in public. Invisible and visible are touching. Heaven and earth are communing. There is no visible indication that the Holy has entered, but God comes to His people in worship and we enter the Holy of Holies. The church gathering is an assembly that is enrolled in heaven. Jesus lifts us into the presence of the living God. The worshipping assembly on the earth is the unshakable kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is an outpost of the heavenly Jerusalem. It is the Zion of God. Therefore, it is our priviledge and duty to offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe as if we could see Mt. Sinai burning when Moses and the people witnessed God descending there. How dare we be so casual about worship! How dare we think of the church of the living God as being unimportant and irrelevant to our Christian life! The writer of Hebrews warns us that those who refused to be warned at Mt. Sinai did not escape. Therefore, we must not reject when we are warned from heaven by a far greater mediator than Moses. To reject His call is to reject Jesus. And to reject Jesus and to take His mediatorial ministry to us in worship is to defile the Holy. Let us, therefore, be warned on the one hand and encouraged on the other. Let us be encouraged to draw near. Let us be encouraged to find out what is to be acceptable worship. Let us ask God to give us a true sense of Him so that with fear and wonder and love, we would carefully draw near--but with every sense of belonging draw near to our God who is still a consuming fire.