The Bema Seat of Christ
Bema
Seat Narrative
How many believers
in Jesus Christ will there be over the ages?
Have you ever considered that?
Scripture tells us potentially billions, “as the sand which is on the
seashore”.
There is a day
ahead of us, a Great Day, when God will gather up His Church and we will stand
before Him as a great sea of His people.
Imagine the exhilaration! In the
presence of God! In beautiful fellowship
with our brothers and sisters in Christ!
In sweet communion in Heaven!
Shoulder to shoulder, singing praises to the Lord of the Marriage Feast
in Paradise. We will be there, savoring
the events leading up to this beginning of blissful eternity with God
Himself. A sea of people, perhaps more
than you can imagine. And you, standing
there amongst the throng.
One day, this will happen to you if you trust Jesus
with your soul. If you’ve ever been in a
great crowd, you’ve noticed how easy it is to feel like a grain of sand. However, as we will stand before Jesus,
together with the whole Body of the Church, He will call out each of our names,
one by one, to come forward and kneel before Him. And as He is forever your personal Saviour,
He will know you intimately as the individual He has walked with your entire
life. In that moment each of us will be
fixed under His gaze, and He will know everything about us, everything in
us. And not just by a divine call on His
knowledge, but more importantly by His loving, intimate crafting of your life,
His patient walk with you here and now.
He will look upon you and me, and weigh out what we have done with our
lives since He Saved us, and He will test our lives with an honest, piercing
accuracy. From what He reveals, He has
promised to give to everyone according to what he has done as a steward of the
life he has been given. Each of our
lives, as disciples of Jesus Christ, will be fully exposed and weighed. So, the big question is, brothers and sisters
in Christ, what will He say to you?
This depends upon
the life and opportunities the Lord has put before you, and how you have
strived to fulfill your responsibilities to manage them as He expects you
to. This is the Christian life, the one
you have been Saved for.
James instructs us
to persevere and to engage our faith in the arena around us.
Paul tells us to
recognize who we are now before God and to break away from the “pattern of this
world”. He urges us to follow his
example in tireless pursuit of the Prize.
Jesus commands
those He has Saved to surrender their lives and pick up their cross, to cling
to their first love of Him and overcome, so that we may eat of the “Tree of
Life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God”.
And why do they
tell us this? Because of the common end,
the Day, they all know lies ahead of us.
Enter, the
Church. The Church of Jesus Christ
exists to Worship God, to equip and impact the lives of It’s members, and to
reach out to gather the Lost. It is the
funnel God has chosen to use to prepare us for that Great Day.
John 14:21 reads:
“Whoever has My commands and obeys them, he is
the one who loves Me. He who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I too
will love him and show Myself to him.”
Here, Jesus
explains the relationship a believer should have with the Lord through loving
Him in Scripture and by experience, by obeying Him and doing what
the He shows you is true, and then in experiencing Him as He
reveals Himself to you. This is the
cycle of our walk we hope to encourage, because it is true that anyone who
brushes with God is never the same. The
Church presents opportunities to encourage your walk and to step into this
cycle with other people who love the Lord, too.
I long to see the
Lord and hear Him say, “I’m pleased in what you’ve done with what I’ve given to
you. You’ve done a good job.” Do you want to hear this from your Lord,
too? Then make it your priority to make
the most of your walk, and to take advantage of every opportunity you have to
grow in the Lord. Run for the Prize, and
long to hear Him say “Good job, my faithful and trustworthy servant”.