Elvis Presley sang “Home is where the heart is.” Computer techies would suggest “home is where your Wi-Fi connects automatically.” Poet Robert Frost said, “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
How about you? Where is your “home?”
After being gone from “home” with my wife to the Canadian Rockies recently, I know how great it is to be back “home” in the USA.
“Home” is where we live. It is where we have been, where we can get comfortable, where we are.
But how good of an idea is it to get comfortable—here?
We know God’s original idea was that this world would be “home” for humanity. His good earth was to be the place where the crown of His creation would “be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).
But after the entrance of sin and death through man’s falling for the devil’s temptation, God didn’t want us living in this setting forever, and so blocked any access to the tree of life (Genesis 3:22).
Instead God, acting in His grace, carried out His plans that had been in place from all eternity—plans which revolved around taking us to His “home”—in heaven.
And as we are like Thomas by nature in that we do not know the way (John 14:5), our Lord has both told us the way home, and has done for us what was needed to make that way home a reality!
Through the pen of the inspired writers, we have the clear record of Jesus’ perfect life, which was offered into death on the cross—a death which was shown to be the satisfactory payment for sin by His glorious resurrection on Easter Sunday.
Yes—it is alone by Spirit-worked faith in this Jesus that you and I can claim that heaven is our home!
So, no, it is not a good idea to get comfortable here, is it?
We all know how easy it is. Since things go on day after day as they have for millennia, it is tempting to join with the scoffers who say, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:4).
The temptation is to think that physical existence on earth equals the only reality there is, to think that what you have not personally experienced and become familiar with cannot be real, cannot be “home.”
But the true reality is that this earth will not last forever, while heaven will! And what a wonderful place that eternally real home will be, where there will be “no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
It is there that Jesus encourages us to have our treasure, “where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matthew 6:20).
It is there that our Savior is getting a place ready for us, as He said, “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:3).
It is there that our citizenship is, “from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself” (Philippians 3:20-21).
So—where is “home” to you? For us, it is as the hymn
writer wrote:
Therefore I murmur not
Heav’n is my home;
Whate’er my earthly lot,
Heav’n is my home;
And I shall surely stand
There at my Lord’s right hand.
Heav’n is my fatherland,
Heav’n is my home.”
(TLH 660:4)
Paul Krause is pastor of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Watertown, South Dakota, and Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hidewood Township, South Dakota.