[Morning Sermon] "So Close, Yet So Far" Luke 9:37-50

Through 35 this morning.

Luke 9, 28 through 35.

Have you ever seen the show Undercover Boss?

I mean, it's not exactly the pinnacle of reality TV, but you know, it's okay.

The premise of that show is fairly simple.

You take the owner, the CEO, the president, whoever the higher up is in a company, you dress them up in a disguise, and they go and work kind of on the floor or in the store with the people.

So, for example, the CEO, it would be like the CEO of Chick-fil-A going to work at the Chick-fil-A in Providence, right?

And at the end of every episode, they have this big reveal.

Most of the time, in the reveal, it's kind of the boss rewards hardworking and inspiring workers.

Once in a while, it's kind of funny because they really drop the hammer on someone who's doing a bad job, but usually it's positive.

Well, imagine for yourself, you know, wherever wherever you work, imagine the owner, the big boss, the person maybe you don't see all the time.

Imagine they put on this a disguise and they came to work alongside you.

But let's say they singled you out to let you in on the secret.

So instead of going the whole week, making you wait the whole week for the big reveal, they took you aside and they took off the fake mustache or whatever it is, and they said, Hey, hey, it's me.

Do you think that would change the way you acted in the presence of that person?

Of course it would.

Of course it would.

Now, today we're going to read the story.

It's a familiar story.

It's a famous story throughout the history of the church.

It's the story of Jesus' transfiguration.

It's this moment when Jesus takes aside three of his disciples and he gives them a glimpse of his glory.

It's not the big reveal at the end of the story, but it is a sneak peek right in the middle.

And the purpose of the peak is to encourage his disciples in the days ahead, not just to act right around Jesus, but to stay the course as they take up their cross and follow him.

And the same kind of thing is true for us.

We weren't there on the mountain with the disciples, but with the eyes of faith, we've actually seen more glory than they did in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.

And what we've already seen ought to encourage us to keep following Jesus, to keep taking up our cross, denying ourselves, following him day after day after day, until that final day when either we go to him or he comes to us, and we finally get to see him face to face.

That's what we're going to see today as we look at this story.

And I'll invite you to rise now as I read it for us.

Now, about eight days after these saying, Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray.

And as he was praying, the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white.

And behold, two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

Now Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory in the two men who stood with him.

And as the men were parting from him, Peter said to Jesus, Master, it is good that we are here.

Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses, and one for Elijah, not knowing what he said.

As he was saying these things, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud.

And a voice came out of the cloud saying, This is my son, my chosen one, listen to him.

And when the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.

And they kept silent and told no one in those days anything of what they had seen.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Father, send your Holy Spirit now, we pray, to help us to hear what we need to hear, and to apply these words to our lives in the way they need to be applied.

For your glory and for our good.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

So verse 28 opens this story by saying it's been about eight days since Peter confessed that Jesus is the Christ, and then Jesus explained how he and everyone who followed him would have to suffer.

To understand what today's passage is about, we need to back up a little bit and consider the last thing Jesus said to them as part of that exchange.

We see it in verse 27.

He said, I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.

Now we really we we didn't really get into this last week, but this is one of those verses that commentators have been arguing over for a long time.

Because everyone who was there to hear Jesus say these things, they've been dead for nearly 2,000 years.

And it sure doesn't seem like the kingdom has come.

Or has it?

To understand what Jesus meant in verse 27, we have to consider how closely Luke ties the coming of the kingdom to the person and power of Jesus.

In Luke 10 and verse 9, we'll see that the kingdom comes near in the healing of the sick, which is a power we saw at the beginning of Church 9 that comes from Jesus.

In chapter 11, verse 20, Jesus will argue with the Pharisees and tell them that in the casting out of demons, they have proof that the kingdom of God has come near.

These things, these healings, these casting out of demons, all the stuff that Jesus is doing and all the disciples are doing in his power, these are things that come straight out of the book of Isaiah.

But they are not the kind of political signs that people would expect to see in a conquering king.

Jesus isn't mounted on a war horse.

And we've already been told, Jesus has already told them, that the path to the throne cuts straight through the cross.

This is why Jesus will say in Luke 17, when the Pharisees come to him and ask about the coming of the kingdom, he'll say, The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed.

Nor will they say, Look, here it is, or there, for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.

It's in the person and power of Jesus that the kingdom has drawn near.

But in the time of his humiliation, when the king of kings walked the earth in the guise of a peasant, you could only see the kingdom in its effects, in the healings and the casting out of the demons, these sorts of things.

And so when Jesus made this promise in verse 27, he was saying that the day would come when his disciples, at least some of them, would see the kingdom with the eyes of their flesh, because they would see the king in all his glory, the CEO of the universe would reveal himself.

Now, we we living in 2026, we know the end of the story, right?

We know that when Jesus said in verse 22, he would suffer, he would die, he would rise on the third day, he was speaking the truth.

And Paul tells us in Romans 1.4 that specifically in the resurrection, Jesus was declared to be the Son of God in power.

That was the big reveal.

Not the ultimate reveal, but the big reveal.

So much so that it is only on the other side of it that we can truly say with John 1.14, we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

We've seen him in glory.

Not with the eyes of our flesh, but with the eyes of faith.

And because we've seen it, because we right here in this room have seen him, we've seen the kingdom.

But of course, at this point in the story, the twelve haven't.

All they've seen are these miracles from a guy who says he's the king.

And all they've heard, beside all the good stuff about the kingdom, is that this guy who says he's the king is going to have to suffer and die and rise from the dead.

And they are not getting it yet.

They are struggling to put these things together.

And so what does Jesus do for them?

He gives them a sneak peek.

He gives them a little taste of the glorious kingdom that they cannot yet fully see.

And that's what today's story is about.

It's about a sneak peek into the glorious kingdom that is both now and not yet.

And even though we have seen and heard more of the story than the disciples at this point, this story still stands as an encouragement to us as we await the ultimate reveal, as we await that day when we finally get to see the return of the King.

So as we dive into this, we're going to consider three things this morning: the glory of Jesus, the necessity of the cross, and the voice of the Father.

The glory of Jesus, the necessity of the cross, the voice of the Father.

And we start, of course, with the glory of Jesus, the scene.

It opens with Jesus and his disciples on a mountain.

And the mountain, of course, is not an incidental detail.

Throughout the Bible, mountains play a really important symbolic role.

They're often the place where God shows up in power to reveal himself to his servants.

Just think of Moses, Mount Sinai, or Elijah on Mount Carmel.

And of course, Jesus isn't just hanging out on the mountain with these disciples.

Jesus is praying.

We've seen it time and time again.

Prayer is such a big deal in Luke's gospel.

We could even call it the gospel of prayer.

Time and time again in Luke, when Jesus prays, important and revelatory things happen.

Like the twelve get chosen, or Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ.

Now, in this scene, we don't have the fullness of the twelve.

We have something more like an inner core.

Three disciples, Peter, John, and James.

And Luke doesn't tell us why specifically Jesus took these three.

It's certainly not because they're the brightest crayons in the box, right?

We're about to see some of that.

But as Jesus was praying, verse 29 says, the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white.

In Matthew and Mark's version of the story, it says that Jesus was transfigured right before their eyes, and hence why we call this story the transfiguration.

But the interesting thing here is that Luke doesn't use that term.

The original Greek is actually much more abrupt.

As he was praying, his face became other.

That's all it says.

And why?

Why does Luke leave out the term?

Well, remember who Luke is writing to.

He's writing to a well-to-do official named Theophilus, who is almost certainly educated as a Greco-Roman.

And so, even though Luke draws a ton on the Old Testament in order to show how Jesus is the fulfillment of everything God was promising to do in and through Israel, Luke knows and writes for a Greek audience that would have been steeped in the mythology of their day.

In Greek mythology, transfiguration is kind of a thing.

That word in Greek, it's actually metamorphosis.

I know you've heard that.

I know you've read it in books.

Metamorphosis.

The idea was all over Greek mythology.

The gods would often change their appearance in order to mess with people.

Zeus, for example, he would transfigure himself into different animals in order to seduce women.

And so by dropping the word here, Luke is actually making a really important point in his Greek reading context that Matthew and Mark didn't feel like they had to make in their gospels.

Luke is making the point that the thing that changes about Jesus here is not his form, but his appearance.

Now that might sound like an overly fine distinction, like I'm kind of straining out a gnat here, but it actually makes a huge difference because in this scene, Luke is emphasizing that Jesus does not become something other than what he already is.

You see what's happening here?

Jesus is merely lifting the veil, as it were, so that Peter, John, and James can see what's already true of him and what's been true of him all along.

This Galilean Jew with whom they have been sharing their life for however long, this man of sorrows who just predicted his impending death, he is the king of kings.

His shining face is evidence of the fact that he dwells in the presence of God.

Just like Moses' face would shine when he went to meet with God in the Old Testament in the tent of meeting.

His dazzling white clothing, it bears witness to what is true on the inside of him.

It shows forth his true nature.

I wish we had time to go through Luke and Acts to show all the times that clothing is used to demonstrate the inner character of a person.

It's actually a lot.

It happens a lot.

But what this is showing us is that Jesus' clothing matches his character.

Pure, radiant, dazzling, utterly divine.

So do you see that this is what the heavenly king looks like when he lays aside his earthly disguise.

And for the disciples who are struggling to sort out this concept of a crucified king, this sight of who he really is, this sight of him and his glory, this glimpse of it, is a gift.

Because they're about to come down off this mountain.

And when they come down off the mountain, they're going to turn their sights toward Jerusalem.

And on the way to Jerusalem and in Jerusalem, they are going to need God's help to sustain them through the trials that they're going to face.

And that's part of what this glimpse of glory provides for them.

As they watch their king subject himself to the utter humiliation of the Jews, as they see the Romans torture him to death, as they take up their own cross and follow him, they're going to need that vision of his glory to remind them that the crucified king is indeed the king, even under the guise of his broken human flesh.

So let me ask you what trials are you facing right now?

Jesus told us that if we want to be his disciples, we gotta deny ourselves.

We have to take up our cross.

We have to follow him.

We talked about that last week.

And while it's easy to affirm it out loud, when I say something like that, it's easy for us to say yes and amen.

It's not so easy to actually live it out.

Because what do we do?

What do we do when Jesus calls us to follow him into a difficult marriage or into conflict with our family?

Or when he calls us to give up things that we don't think we can live without.

See, there's a reason why taking up our cross and following Jesus involves self-denial.

There's a reason why finding our life in him can sometimes feel like death.

And as we suffer for Christ's sake, what we need is not just a vision of a crucified king who knows what it's like to suffer, as important as and as encouraging as that is.

We need a vision of a glorified king whose suffering is also his victory.

In the same way Jesus encouraged his disciples with a glimpse of his glory, he does the same thing for us.

He does it for us even now.

He does it when we sit down with his word and we read of who he is and what he's done for us.

He does it when we go before his throne in prayer.

He does it when we gather for worship, when we hear the word of our King proclaimed, when we sit down with him at his table and partake of the Lord's Supper.

In all these things, we get a taste of heavenly glory.

That's why these ordinary means of grace are so necessary for Christians today.

We tend to treat them like obligations, we tend to treat them like the rules we have to keep in order to keep God pleased with us.

But that's not what they are.

They are the ordinary means by which God communicates his extraordinary grace.

They are the places where God has promised to show up and to give us enough of a glimpse of his glory to keep us moving forward, to sustain us as we're taking up our cross and we're following him into the world.

So that is the glory of Jesus that we see revealed.

Now, let's talk about the necessity of the cross.

As I said, this glimpse of heavenly glory was meant to encourage Peter, John, and James during the trials that they would face.

And it's meant to encourage us to stay the course.

But the funny thing about the disciples in this story is they've actually fallen asleep.

They've fallen asleep before the transfiguration.

And while they're asleep, verse 30 tells us that two men come to talk to Jesus in his unveiled glory.

Moses and Elijah.

Now Luke doesn't spell it out for us why exactly these two came to Jesus.

The most likely reason, I think, is that Moses represents the original prophet of Israel who gave the people of the law of God.

And Elijah represents the eschatological prophet who points the people to resurrection and eternal life in the new heavens and new earth.

I think that's why it's them.

And Luke doesn't give us a transcript of their chat.

Again, things that we would like to know, but aren't ultimately important.

Instead of giving us a transcript, Luke summarizes the conversation in one word, and that word is departure.

That's what Jesus talked to Moses and Elijah about, his departure.

And here's the really interesting thing about that.

The Greek word for departure is a very familiar one.

It's the word Exodus.

That's what he's talking to Moses and Elijah about.

Quite literally, Jesus is talking about his exodus with the leader of the original Exodus and with a prophet who, along with all the other prophets, pointed forward to a new exodus that God would accomplish in order to liberate his people.

In what does Jesus' Exodus consist?

What is that about?

What is he saying?

Well, the last bit of verse 31 compresses it for us in a short phrase.

His exodus consists in what he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

And so to spell it all out and to put it all together, Jesus is going to recapitulate what Moses did in the past and what Elijah and all the prophets pointed to in the future.

He is going to lay down his own life in death.

He is going to take it up again in the resurrection.

And only then will he ascend his throne.

Death, resurrection, ascension.

That's what Jesus is going to do in Jerusalem to set his people free from their bondage to Satan's sin and death.

That's what he's talking to Moses and Elijah about.

And as he finishes that conversation, that's when Peter, John, and James start to wake up.

That's when they start to behold this glory of Jesus with these two men standing there.

And apparently that makes quite an impression on them.

Because as the men leave in verse 33, Peter says to Jesus, Master, it is good that we are here.

Yeah, you think?

Let us make three tents, one for you, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

Commentators are kind of divided here on what this actually means.

What is Peter trying to do?

Maybe Peter recognizes all what's going on here with all this old Exodus, new Exodus sort of stuff, and he wants to celebrate the Feast of Booths.

That's an option.

Or maybe Peter is just so gobsmacked by the glory of Jesus, and he is so starstruck in the presence of Moses and Elijah that he just wants to live there.

He just wants to camp out there.

He just wants to bask in the glory of Jesus and take it all in.

Either way, either way, Luke tells us at the end of verse 33, his head was in the wrong place.

He didn't know what he was saying.

He was talking like a madman.

Apparently he slept through all the stuff that Jesus said about his exodus in Jerusalem.

Maybe.

But what did Jesus told him in verse 22?

And all the other disciples, or all the other 12.

He already told them he was going to have to go to Jerusalem.

He told them he was going to have to be rejected.

He told them he was going to have to suffer at the hands of the Jewish leaders, that he would die, that he would rise again.

And so, whatever reason Peter might have here for wanting to build these tents, he's acting in direct opposition to Jesus' mission.

Instead of denying himself and his own desires, instead of setting aside what he wants, what would be good for him in the moment, instead of taking up his cross and following Jesus all the way to Jerusalem, Peter gets in his way.

It's good.

It's good to want to bask in the glory of God.

Psalm 27, 4.

One thing have I asked of the Lord, that I will seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and inquire of him in his temple.

That's a good thing, right?

It's good to want to be in the presence of the Lord.

But Peter's mistake is to think that he can have that glory without the cross.

During the Reformation, Martin Luther, he made a very important distinction in his arguments with the Roman Catholic Church.

He distinguished between the theology of glory and the theology of the cross.

In his view, the Roman Catholic Church was all wrapped up with a theology of glory.

They wanted all the glory, all the trappings of the kingdom, and they wanted it right here, right now, on earth so much that they completely lost sight of the cross.

And the same kind of thing happens with us.

We do the same when we think we can have all the spiritual blessings that God has to offer people, and we can have them without taking up our cross and following Jesus.

What does that look like in practice?

It can look like a lot of things.

It could take a lot of shapes for a lot of different people.

But I think in our contemporary church culture, it takes on the shape of chasing spiritual experiences.

We'll go to an exciting new church or a concert or a retreat or a conference.

We'll have this profound feeling.

We'll have a taste of glory that really might be a genuine movement of the Holy Spirit within us.

But then we'll try to camp out in that place.

We'll take whatever that thing was that made us feel that way, that brought about that religious experience within us, and we will start to build our entire spiritual life around it.

And then when the feeling fades, and when our attempts to reproduce it fall flat, we'll get frustrated and will hop from thing to thing to thing until the fire comes back, or we give up altogether.

What this story, and take it in the context of taking up our cross and following Jesus, what it reminds us is that the majority of the Christian life is not lived on the mountaintop.

It's lived in the valley.

And Jesus is kind to give us foretasts and glimpses of that future reality that awaits.

But we're not there yet.

We are not living in glory yet.

And so the time comes when we have to step down off of the mountain and follow Jesus even into the valley of the shadow of death, where we will fear no evil because he is with us.

And it's only after, only after his goodness and mercy follows us for all the days of our lives that we will finally get to dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Yes, we have glimpsed his glory.

Yes, we continue to get glimpses of his glory in all the ways that he has appointed for us to commune with him.

But the best is yet to come.

We're not there yet.

And so we've talked about the glory of Jesus, we've talked about the necessity of the cross, and now we get to finish with the voice of the Father.

Coming back into the story as Peter is seeing how much of his foot he could shove in his mouth, verse 34 tells us that a cloud appears, and this cloud overshadows the disciples.

Just like the mountain, the cloud is another important symbol drawing from the whole of Scripture.

It's a symbol of God's glorious presence.

In Exodus 13, it was the cloud of Yahweh's glory that went before the people of Israel to protect and to guide them.

In Exodus 24, it was the cloud of his glorious presence that settled on Mount Sinai for six days.

And on the seventh day, the voice of the Lord went out from the cloud as great thunder and lightning shook the mountain around, and he invited Moses to come up into the cloud for forty days and forty nights.

In 1 Kings 8, it was the cloud of God's glory that filled the temple in such an overwhelming way that the priests couldn't even get in to do their work.

Daniel 7, the Son of Man, comes before the ancient of days, riding on the clouds of glory, ready to receive his everlasting dominion.

The cloud shows the drawing near of God's glorious presence.

And as it draws near, God draws near.

And it's no surprise, right, that Peter, John, and James would be afraid as the cloud overshadowed them and they entered into the presence of God's glory.

Of course they would be afraid.

They would be like Isaiah and Isaiah 6, confronted with the holiness of God, falling to their faces and saying, Woe is me! But instead of vaporizing them, instead of casting them down for their sin, their stupidity, their dullness of mind, a voice comes out of the cloud, just like it did at Jesus' baptism.

And that voice, the voice of the Father, speaks on Jesus' behalf.

This is my Son, my chosen one.

Listen to him.

This is the voice of God.

Affirming what up until this point for the crowds and the disciples has been something of an open question.

Who is this Jesus?

And God Himself is affirming that Jesus is a prophet, yes, but more than a prophet.

More than just the kind of prophet that Moses and Elijah were.

As Hebrews 3.5 says, Moses was faithful in all God's house as a servant to testify to the things that were to be spoken later.

But Christ is faithful over God's house as a son.

Moses, Elijah, all the prophets, faithful servants in the house.

Christ is the son over the house.

And that's why the Father speaks over him, and it says, This is my son.

The words are a clear allusion to Psalm 2.

Jesus is the Son whom God will place upon his holy hill, who will bear the rod of iron and dash to pieces all of the nations that oppose him.

And more than that, he is the chosen one.

That's language straight out of Isaiah 42.1.

Behold, my servant whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.

I have put my spirit upon him.

He will bring forth justice to the nations.

The chosen servant, the son, the king, will bring justice.

But as Isaiah makes clear, he will do it by first bearing in his own body the justice of God against sin.

Again, no glory without the cross, no crown without the cross.

And because the disciples are still grappling with that, because they're still struggling to figure out how that works, God says, listen to him.

Listen to him.

Jesus is the prophet to end all prophets.

He's the prophet promised in Mosaic, or sorry, in Deuteronomy 18, 15.

The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers.

It is to him you shall listen.

So you listen to Moses in high school, Peter.

You've got Elijah's poster on the wall in your bedroom.

Well, the truer and greater Moses is here.

The Elijah to end all Elijah's has come.

And so if you listen to them, if you're so starstruck in their presence, listen to my son.

Even when he tells you stuff that you don't want to hear, even when he tells you things that you cannot wrap your mind around, even when he defies your expectations, listen to him.

It's with those words that everything just kind of falls away.

The voice goes silent, the cloud dissipates, the prophets disappear, and Jesus is left standing alone.

A lot like he will be left standing alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, sweating drops of blood as his disciples sleep on the ground.

But as imperfect as those disciples are, as much as Peter, John, and James still have to learn about Jesus and all of this kingdom stuff, they get it.

They get the message.

The end of verse 36 says that they kept silent and told no one in those days anything of what they had seen.

Why not?

Why didn't they tell?

It was because Jesus had ordered them to keep his secret back in verse 21.

And why would Jesus do that?

He did it because he knew how people would respond if they knew who he truly was.

He knew that they would act as Peter acted, that they would try to camp out in the presence of his messianic glory instead of taking up their cross and following him all the way to his.

So the glimpse was given to demonstrate the truth about Jesus.

It was meant to encourage his closest disciples, but it wasn't meant to replace the greater glory that was to come.

Now we live on this side of the cross, right?

And we'll move to a closing with this.

We live on this side of the cross, and so the truth is that we have beheld the greater glory.

Jesus has already accomplished his exodus.

He has delivered his people from their bondage to Satan's sin and death.

That's happened.

And we have beheld it.

Which might sound strange because I'm pretty sure you weren't there to see Jesus' death and resurrection.

I know I wasn't.

But we are like the Galatians.

The Galatians weren't there to see Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension either.

And yet Paul tells them in Galatians 3:1 that it was before their very eyes that Jesus was publicly portrayed as crucified.

Galatians 3:1

See, the understanding of Scripture is that in the preaching of the gospel, God holds Jesus before the eyes of faith and says to us, This is my son, my chosen one, listen to him.

Right here, right now, in the event of the preaching of God's word, each and every one of us is being confronted with the glory of the crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus Christ.

You may not feel like you're having a mountaintop experience right now, but you are.

God is giving you a glimpse of his glory.

God is giving you a taste of the kingdom to come.

And the question for you, the question for me, the question for all of us is what's next?

Because the grave mistake we could make was would be to confuse this taste for a meal.

It's not the meal.

And to camp out here would be as silly as pitching your tent beneath a billboard picture of the sea instead of getting in your car and driving to the coast.

And so the exhortation for all of us is to get in the car and drive.

Pack up your tent, get down off the mountain, take up your cross and follow Jesus into the world this week, knowing that even if you have to take one on the chin for Christ's sake, he is worthy.

For Paul says we do not consider the sufferings of this time as worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed on the last day when this sinned burden creation is finally set free.

The boss of the universe, he's revealed himself to us in Christ, but his biggest reveal is still to come.

And when it does, the promise from 1 John is that we will see him as he is, for we will finally be like him.

For now, 1 Corinthians 13, 12 says, we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

Now we know in part.

Then we shall know fully, even as we have been fully known.

In the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, we have the most beautiful display of God's glory that this world has ever known.

But even that, in the light of eternity, is just a sneak peek.

He's pulled back the veil, he's showed us who he is, and now he's calling us to live in light of what we've seen in hope and expectation that one day we will see even more when we see him face to face.

Let that encourage you this week as you deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.

Let's pray.

Father, what wonderful things lie before us.

And so we strain ahead, not looking backward, but looking forward.

Fixing the hearts, fixing our minds, fixing our eyes on the upward prize.

Lord, we need your strength to sustain us as we do this.

Help us, Lord, not to fall to the wayside, not to be distracted by the lesser glories of this world and all of its cares and concerns, not to try to camp out in those moments when you are so kind to give us a glimpse of yourself, but to come down off the mountain and to follow Jesus into the valley and to take your presence with us there, because you are so kind as to never forsake us.

Lord, for those who do not know you, for those who have not yet taken up their cross, who have not yet followed you, I pray, Lord, that this would be the moment when you give them a glimpse of glory, when you give them a foretaste of heaven, when you unveil your kindness and goodness and mercy for them in Christ, when you show them that the darkness of this present world is not worth comparing with the radiance of your eternal kingdom.

And as you do, Lord, give them what they need to step over that line and to come into your loving presence.

We are so thankful for the grace that calls us home and the mercy that is ours in Christ.

Help us to see him as he is with the eyes of faith and to live in light of his glory.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

I'm going to invite our ruling elders up now to prepare the Lord's Supper for us.

Looks like we could use.

No, we're good.

We're good.

I can count.

Glimpses of glory, four tastes of heaven, down payments on the future promise.

These are the things that God gives us in the ordinary means of grace.

And this right here, I've spoken a lot of words this morning.

This right here is the visible word that God speaks, that God places in our hands and in our mouths, so that we can know that these things are true.

This is the place where we can taste and see that the Lord is good.

That we can experience in a real tangible way, if only for a moment, this glimmer of heaven and know that the promise that we will one day sit down at the table with Jesus Himself is true.

Not just true out there in the clouds, but true right here in this room.

True for me, true for you.

So if you have embraced that promise through faith in Jesus Christ, if you have been baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if you have joined yourself to the visible body of Christ where you can know and be known and you can be shepherded, then Jesus says, come to the table.

Come as part of the family to this family meal and be strengthened, be encouraged, taste and see the glory of God's kingdom.

If that's you, then come to the table.

But if it's not you, not yet, then Scripture says, wait.

Scripture says sort out your relationship with Jesus before you come and sit at this table.

And if you want to know more about what that looks like in real terms, please don't hesitate.

Ask me, ask one of these guys.

We'd love to have this conversation with you.

But for now, I'm going to pray and I'm going to ask Lord to bless the Lord to bless this time to our bodies and to our souls.

And then we'll come forward, receive the elements.

After you've been served, we'll partake together.

Father, thank you for this meal.

And thank you for what it does to strengthen us in the Lord.

Please, Lord, help us to get a taste of heaven here at the table together.

And may that taste strengthen us to be agents of heaven wherever we go.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.