Worship with the nations

Last night we had a worship service led by a group of native Koreans among us here at the international learning center. Many people have heard of the immense South Korean Christian church, in fact Korea is even the 2nd largest sender of missionaries in the world today. Much of the worship in Korea has followed the lead of the US, and they've taken many of our traditional hymns and songs and translated them into Korean, with the same message and same music that we are used to. We find this as perhaps a sad occurrence that has lost some of the beauty of Korean culture in what they may have created themselves, but tonight it gave us a glimpse into heaven.

We had the pleasure to sing some hymns which were led in Korean. Because they are the same music of hymns that we already know in English, we all (300+ people) could sing along in whatever language we knew.
As we sang, holding back tears was more than difficult.
To stand next to so many people who are truly giving their lives up for the nations, who have the love of Christ inside them, and who are singing all together the same thing in different languages, all worshipping Jesus our Savior, was and is a beautiful thing.
I had never before heard the words coming out of the mouth of my brother in Christ standing next to me, but I knew what he was saying and my heart was in line with his.
Maybe we felt for a moment what it was like on the day of Pentecost.
Definitely we felt a bit of what eternity in heaven will be! One day, we will be standing around the throne of Christ, singing of His glory in thousands of languages (probably millions!), and we will all understand, we will all know one another and know our Creator. One day...


As an aside to this post, some of you are reading this and do not know if you will be with us in Heaven, side-by-side with the God of the universe. If that's you, and if you want more than doubt and uncertainty, please e-mail us and we will get to a phone the moment we get it. The only thing that would make worshipping with the nations better is to have you there with us too. We love you, our friends, and realize that in leaving the country we may have missed our chance to share what means more to us than anything. We may have failed to share hope before, but don't let our blatant blind and muteness keep you from knowing a loving God for eternity. Please!!
(Michael – mkharr1 at gmail dot com, Joe Joe – rjharr at gmail dot com)