Tomorrow is the Lord’s Day. We do not know from one day to the next what lies in store for us. Proverbs teaches us to remember that: A man’s heart plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps (16:9), and there are many plans in a man’s heart, nevertheless the LORD’s counsel—that will stand (19:21). Our life is but a vapor that appears for a time and then vanishes away (Jas. 4:14). Moreover, the LORD knows our frame, he remembers that we are dust (Ps. 103:14).
You might expect that our inescapable frailty and and certain mortality would be regularly at the forefront of our minds, but for most people this is not so. Many people never think of their own death or the likelihood that any number of factors—whether pleasant or painful—may intrude to change the plans we made for our future. While this knowledge perhaps should be common to all men, it is a particular mark of God’s saints. If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that (Jas. 4:15). Whereas worldlings will say: Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die! The believer sees the same inevitability as a reason for piety and obedience rather than self-indulgence. “You only live once” means very different things to those who serve Christ as opposed to those who live to serve only themselves.
If the Lord’s Day is a regular part of our spiritual discipline, then we will never be far removed from thinking about the end of our lives, the salvation of our souls, and standing before the Lord in judgment. There are friends I have not seen in-person for many years, some I have not even spoken to in more than a decade. But when I take my last breath in this world and open my eyes for the first time in heaven, I want the next thing I see to be very familiar to me, even if I am looking at it for the very first time. As Lewis says in the passages we recently quoted from The Problem of Pain, Christ will look like our first love because he is our first love. The first time we look upon his face, it will be as if his face is the one we’ve known best all along.
You do not have to fear standing before God in judgment if you have made a practice of confessing your sins and standing before the judgment seat of Christ every Lord’s Day: hearing his pardon, receiving his absolution, and being comforted by the knowledge of his love and grace. You will not be idolatrously wed to this present world if you have made it a habit to wholeheartedly give yourself to the Lord’s kingdom on the Lord’s Day week after week. You will not feel out of place singing and praising God in heaven above if you have made a regular practice of it here below. The Lord’s Day is God’s gift and preparation for our eternal destiny, whatever may lie between now and then.
Sometimes illness, injury, or an inconvenient providence will intervene, but we should know with certainty our plans for the Lord’s Day each and every week. I was glad when they said to me, let us go into the house of the LORD (Ps. 122:1). We still must say, “If the Lord wills, we will meet with the church tomorrow morning.” But may the Lord will it, may he give us the grace and strength to do so. We need it. The Lord’s Day is the ministry of God to us. We are not merely serving him in worship; the worship is God’s service of mercy to us, miserable sinners, but not miserable in Christ. --JME
