Good morning. I'd like to start out turning our Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 13. I have written in the outline that we're starting at verse 8. I actually want to start in verse 12. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. Amen. Let's start out with a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for bringing us here all once again into your house. We pray that you would bless us. She would fill us with your spirit, hear the words you're speaking to us throughout this entire day. We pray for our pastor as he's traveling this long weekend that you would give him and his family all safe travels. We pray for all these things in Christ's name, amen. Okay, so last week we had spoken about the beatific vision. This week we're talking about walking towards the beatific vision. It's mainly on how we ought to walk in the world because of our heavenly hope. that we ought to set this vision ever before our eyes and in our sights in the here and the now, and how we experience some of these blessings before the final end right now through faith and not by sight. What is here for us now? We get foretaste of that which we look forward to later now, and we are able to experience these things in our everyday lives. But we see dimly now, as we just read. This calls us to continually walk before the face of God, We are to walk our entire lives, as the author of Hebrews tells us, looking unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. To look towards Christ, as we talked about last week, is to look towards God. To walk before the face of God. Remember, it is through the face of Christ that we see God for all eternity, and we pursue that now by faith. So what I want us to get more than anything out of this study is that our lives are to be consumed with God, enjoying who he is and knowing him this life now by faith. This is the purpose for everything we do in our lives, whether we see it or not, communion with God and its culmination in the beatific vision, which is why everything must be ordered towards this as the ultimate and chief end to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, that we would reflect the image of God and see his glory as he is. So we approach him in this life by faith in order that we may get to that point. There's a few doctrinal points I want to speak about. left something out of my notes last week by accident that I need to bring, because it's essential to the argument I'm making today, to set the context for how we ought to be walking in this life. So the very image, as we mentioned last week, that we desire to behold is the image that we are called to reflect now in this life. It is the image we will be transformed into when we see him. I'll talk about this more in a few minutes, but this ties our ethics right to our heavenly hope that we are walking towards. We desire to see that which we are cultivating through our union with Christ now, to reflect in our sanctification, because our sanctification is partial glorification. So we're gonna take a quick look at the position we're in right now again, but a little bit more, moving on to how this thing calls us to live In this life now, as we walk throughout the world, how we ought to treat our Sabbaths, I'm going to look over quickly, and then specifically how we ought to meditate on God throughout the week as well. So we spend eternity learning more of God through Christ, and we are able to do that now. So we ought to be cultivating this as much as we can now. We are in an in-between period at the moment, often referred to as the now and the not yet. As mentioned last class, Paul uses striking imagery, calling the covenant with Moses the covenant of death, in comparison to the new covenant that has now been inaugurated in Christ. The last Adam, Jesus Christ, has already appeared. We see our hope, we know it is Christ. Yet as we just read in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, we see through glass dimly still. The veil can be said to be removed from our eyes so that we see Christ revealed unto us in the scriptures. He has made himself known much more clearly to us now. He has told us about the Father. He has given us further revelation to guide us. He has brought experiences of the eschaton already into the present so that we see much of his glory that is to be revealed to us later, but we experience it by faith again. But we long for the day that we'll experience it by sight, that we no longer need faith or hope because the reality will be ever present. So we walk by faith in Christ, pressing on for this hope, knowing that our faith will be turned to sight. John Owen in the glory of Christ describes our current position by using the blind man that Christ heals in Mark chapter eight as an example of the spiritual life. The blind man was completely blind. He could not see at all. Christ then comes and touches his eyes. He sees trees, but they're very blurry. They're obscured. Then he touches his eyes once again, and he can finally see completely. He compares this to how Christ has touched us. He says that we have the light of nature by which we discern the things of man, the natural things. Man is blind in regards to the spiritual. By that natural light, man is not able to discern the things of the spirit. So Christ then touched our spiritual eyes for the first time. He has infused us with the spiritual light of faith to discern spiritual things. As Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 4, 6, for God, who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. This light, as Owen points out, elevates the human nature and is bringing it towards its perfection. Grace does not destroy nature, but restores it to that from which it was fallen and perfects it to that purpose for which man was originally intended to go. This is what the terminology we use about born again or regeneration means. To be born again is for humanity to be restored to that image from which it was fallen, to be able to walk towards the purpose for which it was created. To regenerate something is to restore. To restore is to bring something back to its intended function. In some way we can actually say we're becoming more human in our sanctification because humanity is good. It's just fallen. So we still see through a glass dimly now. Christ will return and touch our eyes once again as he touched the blind man. And it is then that we shall see fully. When we have that final consummation of the beatific vision. Owen describes these differences as nature, grace, and glory. He says grace renews nature, glory perfects grace, and the whole soul is brought unto its rest in God. We are told that when we see him, we shall be like him as he is. The sight of Christ in glory, in his glory at the end, will transform us to be like him. We shall become as he is. We shall finally be completely formed into his image. As John says, we know not what we shall be, but we shall be like him. But of course, this happens partially now. We are changed from glory to glory as we behold God in the face of Jesus Christ by faith now. This is what Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 3, that we with unveiled face beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ are being changed from glory into glory. But we are also able to see God more clearly as we grow in his likeness. We are told by the writer of Hebrews that without holiness, we will not see God. This is true both of the end and the now. We do not see God as clearly when we pursue sin instead of God. These two things work together. And Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, who I had mentioned a lot last week, the thing I really like about him is he ties the beatific vision, the final end, His ethics and his doctrine of God are all very strongly brought together. So let's take a look at how connected this all is here. So David tells us in Psalm 36, nine, for with you is the fountain of life in your light. Do we see light? This is the part I had forgot to mention last week in my notes that we, the Bible says that we see God through light. John 1 verses 4 through 5 we read that in him was life and the life was the light of men The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it So Jesus is the light to which John the Baptist bore witness to he is the light of the world The divine logos as John tells us later in verse 9 had already been enlightening everyone coming into the world So Christ is the logos behind behind which God had been revealing himself even through the creation. He is always the one through which we have seen God. So Logos reveals himself as the light of the world. And this is further proof that Christ is the one through whom we are going to see God at the end. So those of us who are in the church are in union with Christ. So we are actually called the light of the world in Matthew five. Jesus says in his Sermon on the Mount, you are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a stand. And it gives light to all the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. So we are the light of the world because we are united to the light of the world. So we must be conformed to that very image we are pursuing as our final end. We must ourselves be walking as the light of the world in less life in order to grow in deeper communion with that light. So we may see God more clearly in the here and the now. We see this concept as well at the beginning of 1 John. John tells us in 1 John 1.6, if we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. In the blood of Jesus, his son cleanses us from all sin. So in this life right now, we need to embody this light, to walk in communion in pursuit towards purity in Christ. When we sin and we walk in darkness, we do not see Christ clearly. When we backslide, when we run away from God, we walk in the darkness for a time, we do not see him, even in this life. He feels distant. We must live and walk in conformity to Christ in order to see him more now too. And not merely that, but Jesus said in the passage that we just read, so that others would see Christ through us. This passage completely gets rid of the idea that somebody could be so heavenly minded that they could be of no earthly good. When you're united to the light of the world, you ought to live as lights in the world. We ought to live as lights in the world. so that others would see our good works and it would be a cause for others to glorify God. This is something that Michael Allen in the book that I had mentioned last week hits on a number of times that Arnie had brought up last week. It's hard for us to place sometimes how exactly love for those around us and our heavenly hope fit together. They do right here in this section that we just read. We live as the light of the world in the world while we pursue the true light of the world that we're united to as our final end. And is pursuit of the good for our neighbors in the world against our heavenly hope? Absolutely not. Does heavenly mindedness contradict true concern for the people around us, concern for family, neighbors, communities, even your nation, concern for the world? Are all these things inherently idolatrous? No. as heavenly hope against such concerns. As long as those things have not become our final goal, they are not the ultimate thing, ultimate priority in our lives, absolutely not. We are to live as lights in the world. We are to love the world with a rightly ordered love that does not take the things of the world and put them in the wrong context where we're just desiring them constantly. As mentioned earlier with Owen's analogy, grace does not destroy nature, it instead restores that It to that from which we have fallen and brings us unto perfection. Our human nature was created good, although we are fallen. Heavenly mindedness reorders our desires so that we are able to love in a self-denying way, in a rightly ordered way, not placing anything else above God. We are able to live better for our neighbors, our families. We recognize the tendency in our hearts, as we mentioned last week, that we are so prone to coveting endless things. Our passions, our desires, wanting more and more. That is how we can easily have a love for the world that is misplaced. That turns the things around us into idols. As mentioned last week, our passions being stirred up to endless things is meant to be placed on God because God has endless glory to give us. Whereas to have God as our first love, there's ever more glories to see and we can live with contentment in God. So God has not set his created ends against other ends. He has placed us in communities, families, according to his wise counsel, and it is only due to sin that these things so often come into conflict. So heavenly mindedness stirs us up for good works. Heavenly mindedness is actually good for our neighbors. It is good for those surrounding us. We bring the influence of heaven in our persons, in our actions, because we're united to the king of heaven. And caring for those the world often despises, the sick, the downtrodden, we are able to love those the world sees as unlovely, people who actually are unlovely, as many of us were apart from the gospel. Apart from Christ coming and setting his love upon us, we are able to love those people. Many of us are here because we were those people and someone else came and showed the love of Christ to us. Many are here because someone did that to their parents and then they raised them in the faith. C.S. Lewis hits this point very well in his Mere Christianity. He says, a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not, as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking. But one of the things a Christian is meant to do, it does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history, you will find the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The apostles themselves who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth precisely because their minds were occupied with heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither. William Wilberforce himself is one of the men that Lewis is referring to here. He was an evangelical Calvinist Anglican that labored in England to destroy both the slave trade and ultimately to abolish slavery with his influence. He used his influence as a man in Parliament to do what he could to live as a light in the world. He was also an incredibly heavenly-minded man. Let me read you one of his prayers that demonstrate that his life mission was grounded in his desire for heaven. Dear God, I cast myself at the foot of the cross, bewailing my exceeding sinfulness and unprofitableness deeply, most deeply aggravated by the infinity of my mercies. I please your previous promises and earnestly pray to you to shed broad in my heart more love, more humility, more faith, more hope, more peace and joy, in short, to fill me with all the fullness of God, and make me worthy to be a partaker of the inheritance of saints and light. Then I shall also be better in all the relations of life in which I am now so defective. And my light will shine before men and I shall adorn the doctrine of my Savior in all things, amen. We see in this prayer right here that Wilberforce saw his life among others as a light to be seen, as directly connected with his inheriting the saints, having the inheritance of the saints in light, which is the beatific vision that we spoke about last week. When we are focused upon Christ, we see Christ as the one being served in our earthly affairs. We are able to love people the way God loves them, not for anything that they do, but in a self-denying way. This is what Matthew 25 says, that when we are loving others, we are loving Christ. Then the king will say to those on his right, come you who are blessed by my father, Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. Then the righteous will answer him saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see? see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you? And the king will answer them, truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of my brothers, you did it to me. If heavenly mindedness is an excuse, it has been charged in the past for some people to make us supposedly focus on God, but to the detriment of the people around us, then it's not heavenly mindedness and we're not actually seeking God. We may, in fact, not be serving God at all, but serving idols. Of course, I'm not saying we're called to solve all the issues of the world. We are merely called to live faithfully in the positions that God has placed us all in. With an eye to God in our everyday affairs, in the very stations we're called to in this life, Wilberforce was a member of Parliament. He was in a position to do the things that he did. He lived faithfully before God as a light, serving God as he could in the position to which God had called him. And we must all live as lights in this world, embodying Christ in us in the very places he's called us. We have countless examples of the saints we can read of that meditated much upon heaven and impacted those around them significantly. Because they spent time meditating and focusing upon God in their everyday lives, particularly. So God calls us in all of our lives to be centered on him, walking on, pressing towards our heavenly hope, to live faithfully in all our stations, in our vocations that God has called us to, as pilgrims, yes, but as dual citizens. We are here and we ought to live here as lights in this world. This is what the entire long line of godly men in Hebrews 11 tells us. Jesus tells us in Luke 14, 26, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Of course, the fifth commandment completely contradicts that if Christ is actually calling us to despise our family. But Christ has not called us to despise our family. Being God, Christ demands affections of us that supersede anything in this life. Because of sin, those loves that many times, as we've already said, come into conflict. Christ must always be the one who wins in those situations. Keeping love for God is the highest love above all those things allows us to love others rightly. The love actually becomes more significant when we love God above them. Because we are able to love them in a way which will allow us to look at people that we know we're going to hurt and speak the gospel to them. We're able to love our children in a way that we bring them towards what they need, not what they want. So we want to reflect the light of Christ in the world, that we'll be better employees or employers, better citizens, better fathers, husbands, mothers, wives, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons. That's not the purpose, of course. Our purpose is God. God is our portion. God is who we're pursuing. More than all of those things, of course, and those, we do have purposes to walk towards in that, but we must keep God as the highest priority. Our affections are not supposed to be ultimately grounded in the temporal as our ultimate focus. This is why we must have time that is particularly focused on reordering and reorienting ourselves towards God. We must have time to retreat from the world and focus upon what our ultimate hope is and what we are ultimately walking towards so that none of the earthly affairs we are involved with are taking the place of God, the place of Christ in our lives. And then we get to see things in what they point to as the greater. We are able to see our marriages as a great thing to enjoy that points to Christ in the church. We're able to see The world is pointing to the new heavens and the new earth and the greater world that, the greater earth that we are walking towards. We're able to see everything as it points to something much, much greater. And we can enjoy the things of this life in such a way that we see them as signs pointing to the greater reality. And not as something to be made the ultimate reality. But this is, This is why God has given us the Sabbath, to remind us that this is not all that there is. The Sabbath brings us to never treat these temporal things as our ultimate end. So walking towards the beatific vision calls us to lay hold of our Sabbaths, to pray for them that they would be heaven on earth to us. So we ought to approach the Lord's day a lot more intentionally. That we would be like David, as we mentioned many times last week, that one thing I desire, that I may behold the beauty of God. So we must desire to come here intent and ready to see God's character that he has revealed to us through Christ. Through the means of grace that he's given us, we sing praises together every Sunday as we'll be doing for all eternity. Really just preparing for what we're going to be doing, never ending for the rest of eternity. We are being fitted every Lord's Day for heaven, for what we'll be doing. He has given us this very day in order that we would retreat from our earthly affairs and remember what our ultimate hope is. Remember, Hebrews 4 tells us concerning the Sabbath that we are striving right now to enter into Christ's rest. This remaining Sabbath we have right now is pointing towards entering into Christ's eternal rest. This is not merely a day we retreat to rest in Christ and focus upon him right now. It's pointing towards the final rest we all look forward to, when we'll no longer have a Sabbath that's one day in seven, but the Sabbath is every single day in eternity with Christ. He has given us his preached word in the public reading of that word to hear his voice in the context of our church life. The word which contains the very spirit of Christ in them, as Peter tells us in 1 Peter, that when the prophets wrote down the word of God, it was the spirit of Christ saying these things to them. Jesus himself, when he was saying those words that were recorded down as the scriptures, that he was speaking to the Pharisees in John 6, 63, that the words he had spoken were spirit and life. We have Christ right here in these words right now. Every Lord's Day, we come here and read these words, and we have Christ here. Christ has given us his very presence contained in these words. They are God-breathed. The preached word of God that we come here for is to bring us to him. We'll not need the Bible anymore when we go to be with Christ, because God will be right there in front of us. We'll no longer need to use the scriptures to see him, as glorious as they are, but we will just see him. So we come here hungry in anticipation of that. God has also given us the sacraments that point towards Christ. Every time we eat the Lord's Supper, we are partaking of Christ spiritually by faith. He is given and promised to be with us by his Holy Spirit. He feeds us with himself when we partake of this meal together. We must come here hungry, expecting, prayerfully seeking Christ to feed our souls with more of him through faith. These are the signs he's given us while we wait and look forward to drinking with him in that eternal rest during the marriage supper of the lamb. He has given us these as promises of his presence to be with us now, that he has not left us now, but they all look forward to much, much better things to come when we have his presence finally in front of us in a much, much fuller way. Likewise, our baptism points to the very union we have with Christ now, that will find its full consummation when we have that never-ending communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through that union, and we get to see him finally. Paul tells us in Colossians that we have died and our life is hidden with Christ in God. This is because we are united to Christ now by his spirit. We are seated in the heavenly places in Christ, as he tells us in Ephesians 2, because we have died and risen with him. Our baptism being a sign of our dying and rising with Christ as a sign of what not only has already been done, but things to come when we are finally resurrected in our bodies, glorified and washed completely of all of our sin. And our eyes are illuminated with a holiness befitting to see the sun in his glory. When we are conformed to the one we are united to. Let us anticipate when we see baptisms here. This is the beginning and the promise of much, much better things to come. So walking towards the beatific vision calls us to pray for our Sabbaths, that they may be heaven on earth to us now, that they would point us to our eternal rest, that in our Sabbaths we would get as much of God as we can now, fueling and fitting us towards heaven. We also ought to retreat in our prayers to contemplation of God in our everyday lives. We must meditate not simply on the scriptures in general, but more particularly focusing upon God himself in meditation upon the scriptures. We need to take time to make sure our thoughts are taken up specifically with God, that we are praying to him in adoration for who he is. That we are reading the scriptures with a specific intent to see God through Christ more clearly. That he would be the one speaking to us when we read. That it would not be a mere exercising of the mind with us, but that we would worship God in meditation. The more we gaze in faith upon God in his beauty, the more we grow in godliness, as we mentioned earlier. But when we neglect this, when we do not pursue God by faith, we feel cold, lifeless, and dead. Because Christ himself is our life, we must draw fresh graces upon him. He is our creator, our beginning, and our end for which we are made. And he is our helper now as we walk this path, as he walks this path with us. He himself is the one who created us and is our helper for our recreation back into his image. Thomas Watson says in his Body of Divinity, you who are real saints, whose hearts are purified by faith, spend much time in musing upon those glorious benefits, which you shall have by Christ at death. Thus might you, by a contemplative life, begin the life of angels here, and be in heaven before your time. What should we contemplate but celestial glory when we shall see God face to face? David was God above the ordinary sort of men. He was in the altitudes when he said, I am ever with thee, Psalm 139, 18. We must make sure to keep us from deadness that we are delighting in and enjoying God every day. that we give ourselves those times of refreshment, that it has a part in our prayers every day. It does not need to be very long. It keeps us from desiring sin more because we are in the constant exercise of allowing our desires to be ordered back towards God. We are able to deny sin easier because we desire Christ more. We enjoy our lives more despite the many sufferings that we face in this life, because we have a sense of God's hand even in those mundane things that happen in our everyday lives. Because he is being set before our face every day. When we are going through troubles, we are able to see God, even in that. If any of you have Johnny Gibson's prayer book, for instance, he has a prayer of adoration in there before. He has a call to worship and then a prayer of adoration. immediately after that to set the pace for your prayer first thing in the morning. And I, I really enjoy that specifically because before you give any confession of sin in there, there's, there's an expression of adoration towards God and it sets the pace for the entire rest of the prayer. It lets the whole prayer be ordered towards God. It's, we don't want our prayers to simply be about the things we want. the desires we have. We don't want it to be merely confessing sin. We all must do those things. We're commanded to do those things. We're commanded to make petitions to God for the things we need in our everyday lives. We're commanded to confess sin to God regularly. But it's so easy for us to get caught up in praying to God every morning and just asking him for what we desire, what we need, and then confessing our sins to him and leaving it at that. We want to very intentionally pray to God about who he is, so we are really ordering our desires towards him. It also makes our confession of sin be much more weighty, because we are seeing our sin in light of God's goodness. We're recognizing that we are sinning against a God who has gone to so many lengths to free us from those sins. He has gone to so many lengths to forgive us of those sins, and he will forgive us again. And we see God's goodness that we are sinning against still. And it sets the context that we are seeing this in a much weightier context. This great God who we are sinning against has been so good to us. How dare we sin against him? Our loving father, what grace. As we contemplate God desiring to enjoy him more, we must approach him by faith, prayerfully asking for his help as well. This is how this becomes a spiritual exercise, and not merely an exercise of the mind by itself, but of the heart as well. We take a passage of scripture, we meditate on what it teaches us concerning God, we pray to God about it, asking him for help to see more of his glory. It's so easy as well to get in the habit of just picking up our Bibles and reading it in the morning, and we're trying to see Christ, but we're not having a conversation going on with God as we're reading his word. We must see and recognize our helplessness apart from God speaking to us through his word, through his Holy Spirit, so that whatever we are receiving from him is not simply an intellectual exercise. This is very humbling for us and it's very enriching. It helps us recognize that we can't just open our Bible and read it. We need God to speak to us with his spirit and to show us the mysteries that he's revealed to us in his word. I had mentioned Michael Allen, his book. He has a few other books that I really enjoy, particularly because he has a few of his books on theology. He really stresses the fact of the need for grace alone to do theology that God has It has given his spirit, he's given his grace to the church to understand the things that the church understands. And we sometimes can forget that so easily. The catechism we have, just those small sections on the Trinity, we would not be able to see the things that are contained in there if we did not have some of these Nicene fathers doing the work that they did a thousand years prior that we can make such a simple statement to teach to our children about such profound truths. And that's all of grace. God has given that gift to the church, all these gifted theologians he's given to us to be able to bring these truths to us that we can now learn so easily. We must feel our helplessness if God does not speak to us concerning himself, does not teach us more concerning himself. We cannot have knowledge of him that reaches down into the heart. This becomes a triune exercise. We pray to the Father, asking him for help, while relying upon the Holy Spirit to show us the glory of Christ in the scriptures, as he is the one through whom we see the glory of the Trinity displayed. We aren't left alone in our seeking God. We are reading God's word before the presence of God. Jesus Christ sent the helper in order to teach us these mysteries concerning himself. We come to him to learn more of him by his spirit. I'm just gonna have us take a quick look at a few passages from Anselm's Proslogion. The entire work is set out as a kind of prayer where he is contemplating God. He's a medieval church father from the, I believe it's 1040 around there. So I'm gonna have us take a look at this, not really even for the argument he makes in the work, And just particularly the disposition he has towards God while he's engaging in this meditative exercise he's doing in this work. One thing I love about a lot of these older theological works is just how devotional they are. You can get a lot out of them even if you're not understanding the points they're making sometimes. His entire disposition in the proslogion, it's filled with adoration and worship. There's nothing at all dry here. It's actually, I would highly recommend reading it. It's only 21 pages and it's free online as well. But it's very comforting to see in this that a man like this with such brilliant theological conclusions that he's really recognizing his helplessness before God and his need for God to speak to him so he can see more of God. And it's something in here that we can all imitate, even though we're not all going to be theologians, we can all imitate the very things that Anselm is showing in this work. It's also very comforting to see that just how much he is really struggling to see this here. He's very much like every single one of us. We see a man struggling in his human frailty desiring to see as much of the beatific vision in this life now as possible by faith, feeling his utter dependence on God to see this. So he starts out directing the reader to enter into the inner chamber of thy mind, shut out all thoughts save that of God and such as can aid thee in seeking him. Close thy door and seek him. Speak now, my whole heart. Speak now to God, saying, and here is Anselm's controlling scripture verse for where this entire meditation springs, Psalm 278. I seek thy face. Thy face, Lord, will I seek. And come thou now, O Lord my God. Teach my heart where and how it may seek thee, where and how it may find thee. So right here we see him wrestling with what it means to seek God's face in faith. This is him desiring a taste of the beatific vision now. He's prayerfully approaching God, knowing, as he says later, quoting 1 Timothy 6.16, that God dwells in light that is inaccessible. And he asks, how, oh God, am I to approach? How can I know you? How can I see you? At times within this long extended prayer, we can almost see him getting frustrated. He feels this longing, this desire, he's almost unsure if he can ever have it, if he can ever be satisfied. He cries out, I have never seen thee, O Lord my God, I do not know thy form. What, O most high Lord, shall this man do in exile far from thee? He laments the fallenness of his humanity that made it even harder for his heart to see more of him. We see many of these, if you read the work, you can see many of these outcries of how his fallenness is holding him back from seeing more of God and how he just keeps lamenting it. And as he's seeking to see more of God's goodness, he just keeps saying over and over how fallen he is and how evil he recognizes that his heart still is in the presence of God. It's, I think it's very comforting to see in these words that how much some of these men that we sometimes think are so holy are exactly like us. And despite Anselm feeling that this is almost a futile task, he recognizes that this was in fact the end for which he was made. He was created in order that he may see God. So he continues to pray. He continues to seek God by faith. It is impossible to truly seek this knowledge of God apart from God shining his light upon us. He says to God, teach me to seek thee and reveal thyself to me. He also prays after this in humility, give me so far as thou knowest it to be profitable that thou art as we believe. He's humbled before the sight of God. If only God will give him what is profitable for his soul, he will be satisfied. This is the kind of attitude that we should all have before God. When we want to contemplate his greatness and focus upon him, we want to pray to him about him, desiring to see more of him, desiring that he would give us what is profitable for our souls. Remember, it's not profitable for us to see too much of him when we are not we're not growing in his likeness more as it's going on, because it can be frightful to us. But it's also good for us at times to see that as well, because we are lamenting of our sinfulness as we are seeing more of God. And we really want to strive that this is all being done in prayer as we're seeking God, so that this is a spiritual exercise where we're not just getting concepts in our minds, but we're really recognizing before the goodness of God how wicked we are, and how forgiving he is at the same time, and we see more his goodness, his character, who he is, and we long to enjoy him more, and it stirs up our hearts for what we are going to be doing and seeing for all eternity. Again, these do not have to be long, drawn-out prayers. We do not have time for those most days. They can be scattered, but we should, if we can, from time to time devote certain times to be able to pray to God specifically about who he is, and specifically in adoration of him, thanking God for his character, thanking him for as many gifts that he gives us, thanking him for showing us more of himself. It is so gracious of him to show us so much of his glory when we are so evil still. when we measure up so little still, that he gives us this grace in showing us himself. So we really want to fuel this kind of a disposition in us through our prayers, so we're enjoying and seeing him in our everyday lives as well. As we are constantly praying to him about him, we see more of him in our everyday affairs. As we were mentioning earlier, we are able to love people, In light of Christ, we're able to see God in the small things we see in our everyday lives walking around. We're able to see the positive aspects of Romans 1, as we are seeing the creation that God has given us, we are seeing God in that. God's hand was in everything that was made, and we are seeing his glory. I remember when Joe Beakey came for the last conference he had done, he was talking about reading a scripture verse and seeing like a feather or something. You read a verse that speaks about something that seems so mundane. You see the lilies of the field, you see what Jesus said about the lilies, that they represent how God dresses us, how God gives us these things. Henry Scudder in his work on the Christian life, he mentions that just the practice every morning of getting dressed in the morning and how many scripture verses speak about us, speak about things related to that because his focus is on God. So he's recognizing while he's putting his clothes on just the need for clothes because of our sinfulness and the righteousness of Christ that he gives us and now clothes us. So we're seeing all these concepts that God has given us that point to things that are in our everyday lives that we do. Things that really seem to have no meaning at all, unless they're pointing to God. So we want to fuel this kind of a disposition in us so we can actually enjoy the things of this world in a God-honoring way. That we would not grow dead and take no joy in our lives, but have Christ constantly set before our eyes to see his glory as the object of our affections and desires. And let us remember as we walk towards this goal by faith that because God has made us for this very purpose and is in fact our helper in walking towards this goal, as long as we are sincerely walking with him by faith, we cannot ever ultimately fail at attaining this goal at the end. This is a work ordained by God. He has planned it all out. It is all of grace. He will walk with us to see to its completion. Take care, brothers and sisters. He who began this good work in us will bring it to completion in the day of Christ Jesus. He is here behind it all, maintaining it and walking us towards the end. He is working in us both to will and to work of his good pleasure. He loves us, he desires us, and is presently pursuing us for all of this as well. And he will not ultimately fail to have us. Let us take comfort in this fact as we press forward to the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. If we have God's face set before us as our joy in this life now, then we are able to have a sense of heaven in our earthly day lives now. Although none of this even scratches the surface of the glories that we'll experience when we finally behold him face to face, when we see him as he is.