Redefining Home, Part 3: Home Is More Than We Can See

As I continue to wrestle with the concept of home, coming to a place where I realize home isn’t so much about place as it is about people, I keep coming back to the niggling feeling that there’s an additional piece. That while home is absolutely where my people are, there’s yet another layer to the definition of home.

God was the original home-giver. The Garden of Eden, the Promised Land (given to Abraham, and again to the Israelites in Joshua). Esther was given a royal home that enabled her to save God’s people from extermination at the hands of a sociopath.

For now, home is not just about the place we live or the people we love, it’s about our relationship with the Lord. When Adam and Eve lost their Eden home, it was because they brought brokenness into their relationship with God. When the Israelites had to wander in the desert for forty years, it was because they had broken their covenant with God by worshiping false idols. When man lost his home to the flood, it was because he had cast the Lord aside, turning to evil.

For some of us, there comes a day when we have no earthly home left because of tragedy or illness or financial loss. What is left to be our home but the heart of God? Where else will we find comfort, warmth, love?

When Jesus came, he asked his followers to leave their homes, turning their idea of home upside down. Although we can see this since creation—God in the garden, God in the shekinah, God in the temple—Jesus was living out the true definition of home as originally designed by coming to earth to be with us. [Tweet “Our true home is wherever God is.”] And He is everywhere, just as David wrote in Psalm 139:

“If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”

This is why Jesus admonished us not to store up our treasures on earth (Matt. 6:19-21), but to keep our eyes on him and the promise of an eternal home by his side. One day, we will learn the deeper meaning of home. Until then, we may always feel, no matter how pretty our house or how surrounded we are by loved ones, that we haven’t quite found home.

[Tweet “If we can find our home in Christ, we will have peace.”]