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How many of you love the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas? Although many of us groan over all the obvious negatives of the holiday there are many more positives that we can agree on. One of those positives is gathering to eat, celebrate, and enjoy being together. As with anything we really love there has to be a certain amount of preparation. Isaac Watts wrote in the classic carol Joy to the World: “Let every heart prepare Him room.” Prepping for a holy day requires intentional decluttering so that Jesus is not turned away by the noise of our own celebrations. Imagine preparing for an important royal visitor by cleaning every room in the house, but filling the master bedroom with extra storage boxes and old furniture. When the guest arrives, there is no place for them to sleep. We do the exact same thing during the holiday season. We pack our schedules with good events, shopping, and social gatherings, leaving our actual souls completely cluttered and crowded.
The month and season Elul is a time of preparation. Preparation for what you might ask? Preparation to see our King. Yet, there is a side to the preparation that many Christians fail to see and appreciate in a culture of “cheap grace.” Cheap grace was a term popularized by Dietrich Bonheoffer. Cheap grace is defined as, a theological concept describing the false idea that God’s forgiveness can be obtained without any personal repentance, moral transformation, or commitment to follow Jesus. The founder of the highly evangelistic ministry the Salvation Army, William Booth, prophesied of this day stating: The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.”
Preparing to meet the King of kings, and Lord of lords at His return to rule the earth implies that you are preparing for judgment. You might say, “Well, Robert, don’t you know that Jesus was judged for our sins on the cross and that we don’t have to fear judgment?” I’m not referring to that kind of judgment. There are actually two judgments that every follower of Jesus should concern themselves with:
- Judgment of the Sheep and Goats
- Judgment of the Believers Works, or the Judgment Seat of Christ
2 Cor. 5:10 states: For we must all appear and be revealed as we are before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive [his pay] according to what he has done in the body, whether good or evil [considering what his purpose and motive have been, and what he has achieved, been busy with, and given himself and his attention to accomplishing].
This season of Elul is a reminder to begin preparing the room of our lives for our Master. That we are declutterring our lives to center around Jesus. This insures that He has a place to “rest” in the center of our lives and not on the peripheral edges. Ultimately to prepare ourselves for the Judgment Seat of Christ in which we will be judged based on what we did with the gifts of Grace and the Holy Spirit He imparted to us. Did we invest them in His Kingdom, and in others? Ultimately, what have we been busying ourselves with: His Kingdom or ours?