Hey y’all! Today Ella’s Tea Table features our next-to-last guest post, and it is a good one! Elouise, Daughter of Concord is an incredible writer and very dear friend of mine. She’s so much fun to talk to and really has an incredible gift of making few words do so much work for her. Elouise writes exquisite poetry and fiction, and she blogs! You can find her blog here. Seriously, you will love it!
Nothing was different about my Bible-reading routine this early summer morning. After breakfast, I opened the blinds in an empty room, sat down, opened my Bible to the Psalms, and began to read: How lovely is Your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts! My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the LORD; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.
The words of Psalm 84 leaped off the page as vividly as if they were written for that day. It was 2020, and amid the pandemic lockdowns, I had not set foot inside the church building for several months. I wanted almost nothing more than to go back. It had not been any use reminding myself that unlike the centuries of congregations behind us, we were richly blessed with the technology to join together in worship from our homes. I should be grateful, but I wanted so desperately to hear words spoken and notes sung by a hundred voices, to feel that I was not alone.
Blessed are those who dwell in Your house, ever singing Your praise!… For a day in Your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. The Psalmist expressed a deep longing to be in God’s house, to stay there and to keep on praising his Lord. It felt familiar. But there was more to it than that.
Written several centuries before Christ, Psalm 84 expresses this kind of longing for another reason than my own thoughts did that morning. Because this was before Jesus walked on this earth and humanity literally saw the face of God. This was before the temple curtain separating man from God was ripped in two. The writer of the book of Hebrews puts it this way: We have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He opened for us through the curtain, that is, through His flesh (Hebrews 10:19-20). So in a way, the longing that fills this Psalm is fulfilled in every Christian already. We don’t need the temple to not only approach God but to speak with Him at any moment.
Back in 2020, this was the sweetest reminder of hope that I could have asked for, but it hardly changed my longing to come back to church. Then, when we did come back, it never went away. Yes, it was beautiful to be there again, surrounded by beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, our voices joining together as one, but it was not enough. Even though all the COVID restrictions are a thing of the past, it still hasn’t gone away. The church building isn’t a place where all life’s struggles magically disappear. Large and small divisions, misunderstandings, and personal sufferings shared by brothers and sisters within the church family are only a few of the obstacles the whole Church faces on a daily basis. And in the grand scheme of all times and places, we are fortunate when those are the biggest obstacles we face.
When fallen humans are involved, worship is never going to be at its best. But because God Himself comes to us in worship, it will always be a tiny taste of our future forever with Him.
No matter what tradition you look at, worship is filled to the brim with aspects that link us to the hope of eternity with Christ–from the design of the building to the pieces of the service itself to the music to the fellowship. We might all have individual practices, but they all look forward to a time when the worship will never have to end.
This physical witness to the hope that is in us continues far, far outside the church building. Worship happens at home, within families. It also happens individually, even as we step out into the world and reflect our faith to the world around us by living it out. In every situation where this happens, it’s more than a person or a group of people coming to God and hearing from Him: it’s the Kingdom of God coming so close that the rest of the world can see, hear, and touch it.
Ultimately, at its core, worship of the true God through what Christ has done for us truly is heaven on earth. When Jesus brings us home, it truly will never end.
Verse five of Psalm 84 reads, Blessed are those whose strength is in You, in whose heart are the highways to Zion. Isn’t the phrase “the highways to Zion” full of overwhelming beauty and hope? We have the path to the final Promised Land in our hearts because we have Christ. Because of Him, we carry that hope everywhere we go. Through disease and lockdowns and whatever other hardships might come next, we can still hold onto it, knowing that our God, who comes to us and opens the way for us to come to Him, is bringing us Home where the joy of being in His presence will never end.
Image credits: scienceofcorrespondences.com
Oh my goodness! That was beautiful!!!❤🥺