Emphasis Preaching Journal

If you were invited to an audience with a king in a great palace, the likes of which you had never before entered and the wealth of which exceeded anything you had ever dreamed of, you might try to describe that palace to someone later on. You would use whatever poor little images you could find from your own circumstances that, by comparison, now look almost threadbare and poverty-stricken, but none of them could completely describe what you had seen and experienced of royal splendor.

But the surroundings would not really be the important part of the story, would they? The bigger and far more important question would be, "What did the king say to you? Was he commending you for something? Did he ask you to do something?" After all, a king does not invite someone to his palace just to look at it. What the king said to you is what would make a difference in your life no matter whether you could describe the palatial setting with vividness or not! You could come and go in exquisite circumstances endlessly and the circumstances would not do much to change you, but when you are addressed once by a king, everything changes in a sense. You would always carry that moment and those words with you.

Today's lesson is like that. John strains to describe the glory of the heavenly vision spread before him as he enters through the open door for an audience with the Holy One, invitation in hand, so to speak. And the description John gives of the scene makes our eyes twinkle and causes our heart to skip a beat. But it is what God says once John gets there, as we read in the following chapters, makes all the difference in the world to his readers. Describing God or the eternal mansions means little. Listening to God means everything!