Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  Matthew 8:20

Home is the canvas on which you paint the memories of your life!  It isn’t how elaborate is the house in which you live that makes it home. It’s who lives there and the love that turns a house into a home.  Your house is built of steel and beams, but your home is built of love and dreams.  When you live in a rented house, you hang pictures on the barren walls and try to make it as warm as possible, but you live with the reality that this house isn’t going to be your home forever; it’s temporary. Then you are able to put together enough money to make the down payment on a house. You buy it or you build it. This time it’s different. You can paint the walls purple with yellow stripes; you can tear out the bath and replace it. You can redo the kitchen.  It’s yours. That house becomes your home.

But then, eventually the time comes when you walk through that house for the last time. You’ve been transferred. You decide it’s time to sell and downsize or get into a large home to accommodate the growth of your family. Walking through a house, one filled with memories which are largely painted on the canvas of your memory, is tough. I’ve done it and will never forget either–once when I walked through the old family home for the last time when mom and dad were no longer with us, the one where I grew up. Then there was the house where my children grew up. It was difficult to look at the barren walls, remembering where grandparents once sat and entertained the grandchildren, and friends and family laughed and joked.

Before I depress you with any other memories, may I remind you that life as we know it is a kind of dress rehearsal for what is ahead, when we finally break camp and walk through doors of an eternal home, one not made with human hands, one where you can settle in with God’s family for all eternity? Wow!  That’s something to think about.

Abraham Lincoln one said, “Going home is the end of all journeys. Did it ever occur to you,” he asked, “that every living creature has its home? The fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field and forests, the creepers in the grass, all go home. Most of them turn toward it when the day wanes. The call of home,” he said,” is the one voice heard and respected all the way down the line of life…

“I never lie down in the darkness,” said Lincoln, “without thinking of home when I am away. I think I see the point of the whole thing. It isn’t the place or the furniture that makes it home but the love and peace that’s in it. There must be another home somewhere to go to after we have broken the last camp down here. Going home! It’s the end of all journeys. It’s the one miraculous gift—the one call that’s irresistible.”

He was right!  After my wife and I were married, we headed to Europe, where we ministered for a number of months. I shall never forget taking the key to my dad’s home, and pinning it to the divider in the old tan Samsonite suitcase that we used. Every time I opened that suitcase, the key was a reminder that someday I would go home, and the key opened the door to my father’s home.  Jesus told us how we can grasp the key to that home in heaven. He said simply, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). The key that opens the door is faith in what He has done, and faith in what He will do to forgive you, to pardon you, and receive you in an eternal home as His child. Make sure, friend, that you have the key. The one that opens the door.

 

Resource reading: John 14:1-4