Transfigured

 Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves;
2 and He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light.

Matthew 17:1 (NIV)

Devotional writer Oswald Chambers wrote, “On the Mount of Ascension the Transfiguration is completed. If Jesus had gone to heaven from the Mount of Transfiguration, He would have gone alone; He would have been nothing more to us than a glorious Figure. But He turned His back on the glory, and came down from the Mount to identify Himself with fallen humanity.”

That day on that mountain, the heavens opened and Jesus’s life became enraptured in the light of God's express presence. Key and pivotal servants from the past, Moses and Elijah, joined Jesus on the mountain to restore His sense of mission, to remind Jesus of both the cost and the value of the sacrifice of His life for human redemption.

The three disciples—Peter, James, and John—that were invited to make the journey up the mountain and who witnessed these transfiguring moments, had to be awestruck during their descent, trying to put it all in perspective.

“What did we just see and how are we to appropriate it? When the others ask us what happened, how do we put it into words? How do we describe an experience that so far exceeds rational thinking that it stuns you speechless? The other disciples will no doubt ask us, after looking into our eyes, ‘What happened to you up there?’ and our response is going to have to be, ‘It was pure glory! We saw why we must continue to live convicted about our belief in Jesus. It’s absolutely no accident that we are pulled from among those we have lived with and set apart to learn from Him in close proximity. We are different. We need to learn how to steward that difference—because what we saw up there is so majestic and eternal and salvific and redemptive that we cannot let a single human being miss the opportunity to accept an invitation to know Jesus personally.’”

You see, when you are a witness to God’s glory, it transfigures your life. It alters your perspective forever. And it gives you renewed zeal to share His message with the world.