“Make yourself at home!” are warm words of welcome. Yet it can sometimes be a meaningless phrase that amounts to little more than ‘take a seat’.
The question of being ‘at home’ and ‘where is home’ is one we saw Nehemiah and his colleagues working on last Sunday morning from chapters 11 & 12 of the Old Testament book of the same name. They were trying to re-populate the newly re-built city of Jerusalem and in the only way they knew how, working out the large variety of people who would enable the worship of God to continue and get to call the city home.
Thankfully we don’t have to go to a city in the Middle East to worship God today. Four hundred years after Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem, the Lord Jesus told a Samaritan woman that because He had come:
“…true worshippers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23)
Yet Jerusalem did serve the purpose of pointing God’s people to where their true home really is: the writer to the Hebrews described it as he told us what the Old Testament believers were longing for:
“…a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.” (Heb 11:16)
For Christians today there are many occasions when we simply don’t feel at home in this broken world. That’s because we are not at home! Jesus died so that we would belong to the New Jerusalem described at the end of the Bible:
“There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Revelation 21:4)
There we will be truly home with Him forever!
Spencer Shaw