THE INVITATION
Yesterday, a friend with beautiful gardens, invited me to come and pick any of her flowers as she was going to be leaving town for a few months. So, naturally, I accepted her invitation.
Walking through her gardens, I began to slow down and really look at the design, the color, and the uniqueness of each flower. As I softly touched the petals, my thoughts returned to Scripture in Genesis; the beginning of time, when God spoke into existence all the vegetation and plants on the third day. I reasoned that His days must have stretched longer than ours because just looking at the variety of flowers, each with such detail, it had to have taken more than twenty-four hours to create! I was seeing only a fraction of the beauty that He had created that day and yet the awe and wonderment of what I was seeing filled me with such joy.
Arranging all the flowers that I had cut, I remembered that earlier that day I had asked God to show me His glory and here He was answering my prayer. When Moses asked God to show him His glory, God agreed but only revealed a portion, His backside, because showing Moses His full glory at that time would have killed Moses (Exodus 33:18-23). What I was seeing was a portion of God’s glory through His creation and it was magnificent! Just like the invitation from my friend, God invites each of us to come and experience who He is, to see His glory in part. With that invitation comes a promise that one day, we will get to see His whole glory and I imagine that in that there will be created things with colors so vivid and wild, colors we have never seen that will cause us to pause in awe of it. I imagine that there will be created things with such detail that we have never experienced and it will ignite a wonderment like we have never known before.
The invitation is there, every day, all around us in His creation, entreating us to come and see. Have you accepted His invitation? Stop now and look around you. What do you see? Take a deep breath and look deeper. Now, what do you see? In John 1:38 Jesus says, “Come and you will see.” It is an invitation to come to Him so that then you will see and fully understand who He is and the longer we remain with Him, the more He reveals Himself to us. Then in John 1:50, Jesus tells us that there are greater things that we will see than what we have seen thus far if we accept His invitation and believe in Him. Will you accept His invitation today? He is waiting for you to come and see.