For the last 5 years, my family has lived in homes owned by someone else.
Since living in rental property, my heart has longed for what I do not have–a home. I have woven such a fantasy centered around having a Norman Rockwell type dwelling that it astounds me.
This morning as I read Psalm 84 God met me with the sweetest enticement to think new thoughts about this circumstance. He met me with the dearest compulsion to rethink the truth about “home.”
First, He questioned me about where I really thought I would feel most at home. Then He pressed me to examine why I want a place of “my own.” With the motives of my heart dredged up and the most demanding functional god identified, my eyes began to savor the words of psalmist.
New thoughts flooded my mind when He had me consider the perspective of the writer of psalm.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD Almighty.
I long, yes, I faint with longing
to enter the courts of the LORD.
With my whole being, body and soul,
I will shout joyfully to the living God.
This was one who wanted to be at home in God. This was one whose thirst was not for an abode that would be a show place of what he could acquire on his own. This was not a person who thought security, satisfaction and comfort was found in an independent dwelling. He desperately wanted to be where God’s glory was on display! This writer felt deprived–exiled from the best home ever–the Presence of God.
A single day in your courts
is better than a thousand anywhere else!
I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of my God
than live the good life in the homes of the wicked.Augustine said, “If you have a house of your own, you are poor; if you have the house of God you are rich. In your own house you will fear thieves; in God’s house God himself is the wall. Blessed, then, are those who dwell in your house. They possess the heavenly Jerusalem, without distress, without pressure, without diverse and divided boundaries. All possess it; and each singly possesses the whole.”
Praise God–today I can say and believe, I am not homeless, I have a true home and it is my God!
Jack Miller wrote, “If you have made your home this world and whatever you can possess in it you are always in danger of being plunged into insecurities, fears, and losses.
But make God your dwelling place and you have unlosable treasure.”