"Close your eyes and tap your heels together three times and say "There's no place like home, there's no place like home…"With those words, Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz is transported back to her beloved home in Kansas.
The word "home" evokes warm memories and feelings for most of us. Home is where everyone longs to be. Where we are loved, nurtured, and unconditionally accepted with all our faults.
After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade center all the travelers who were stranded just wanted to go home. It did not matter where home was or what it looked like. Home could have a high-rise apartment in Manhattan or a farmhouse in Kansas. They just wanted to go home. Did you know that God makes His home in you? Jesus told the disciples in John 14:23
Jesus answered and said to him, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.
God makes His home in us! Imagine the Creator of the universe living inside us! What a privilege and honor to be the dwelling place of the King of Kings and Lord of Lord.
In our home on we have entertained many guests from missionaries to the town mayor. When those occasions occur, I drive my family nuts by insisting that the house be spotlessly clean. When I consider that the God of creation makes his home in me, I realize how little I pay attention to the cleanliness of His home – me. Just as we need to clean our earthly homes every day so we need to clean our spiritual lives every day. Sin creeps in one cobweb at a time.
Many years ago we had a roof leak in our home. The leakage caused some plaster to fall down from the ceiling in the entry way to our home. It left a barren patch of lath boards about two feet by three feet. Each day I would come home and look up at that barren patch wondering when it would get fixed. It was left in disrepair and pretty soon I stopped noticing it. Months later someone would come over and comment on the hole in our ceiling. "Oh", I'd say, I'd forgotten it was there." Sin is like that. If you live with it long enough you don't notice it.
Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
2 Corinthians 7:1
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I John 1:9
We need to cleanse ourselves and God's home on a daily basis, not just of the little sins but the big ones too. Often we focus in on the small sins in our lives and overlook the obvious larger ones. Are we treating our families with love and kindness? Are we following His commandments? Are we living for God and not the things and pleasures of this world? Are we staying sexual pure in mind and body, whether married or single? Do we allow anger, envy, and pride keep us from glorifying God?
Take a daily inventory of your spiritual life. It is easy to let the world's standards become ours. Jesus gives us in the book of John a different definition of home. He did not have an earthly home in his adult years. Christ was at home with God no matter where his body was. Jill Briscoe says "Home is the will of God for the child of God." The most wonderful earthly home would become a miserable dwelling place if we are living outside the will of God.
God makes His home with us but He is also preparing another home for us. Christ said in
John 14:2-4, "There are many rooms in my Father's home, and I am going to prepare a place for you. If this were not so, I would tell you plainly. When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. And you know where I am going and how to get there." (The Living Translation)
This world is not our home yet many of us put down roots like it is. We try to fill our longings with material and worldly pleasures.
"Most of us find it very difficult to want 'Heaven"' at all – except in so far as 'Heaven' means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it. Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts would know that they do want and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise." C.S. Lewis
The world does not satisfy for we were made for another world. Our eternal home is with Christ in heaven and as pilgrims on a journey we long for that home. Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz had the power to go home all along and did not know it. We have the power to be at home with God every day while on this earth and the privilege to spend eternity in His presence.
Oh to be home! To bask in the presence of the Almighty- To be free from our earthly pain – To be reunited with loved ones – To see and touch the nail scarred hands – To worship at the throne – to be Home!
"These last few days! Every little nuisance every stale or tiresome bit of work every feeling of that estrangement which I never quite get over in another country serves as a delightful reminder of how different it will all be soon. Already one's mind dwells upon the sights and sounds and smells of home…."
