God Our Home

I was listening to a song today by the group Finding Favour. One of the lines says: "You're the place, you're the place that I call home." (Refuge from Reborn, 2015) We can spend a lifetime looking for our place in life, and we can look for it in a successful career, a soulmate, or a great achievement with all its accolades. But in reality we only have one home, and that is God. We come from Him because He made us, and in the end we'll all return to Him as well. (Psalm139:13-14; Hebrews 9:26-28, NIV)

We're made for relationship with Him. Our place in life, our home, is found there. At our core, we all want the same thing - to love and be loved - to be fully known, and fully accepted. Many times we fail to recognize that this is freely available to us. God's greatest gift to us is this: "I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness." (Jeremiah 31:3) "For far as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love to those who fear Him...." (Psalm 103:11) On the flip side, He shows us our highest call in Matthew 12:28-31:

One of the teachers of the law came and....asked Him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this:....'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."

We can ignore God all our lives, with the continual, nagging sensation that something is off...something is missing. An emptiness that never gets filled becomes our deepest experience in life. In the end, we discover that He was what we needed and wanted all along.

Or, we can choose a better alternative: we find our place in Him. In some respects, all the activity of our lives is secondary to this: Did we know God and love Him by the way we lived? Did we walk in His ways, follow His lead, and experience the love He had in store for each of us? Or did we miss it? An intimate relationship with God IS where we belong. And the only path to it is Christ: "Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God...." (John 1:12) "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12) Jesus leads us home.