WHERE IS YOUR FUTURE HOME: Devotional by Lorilyn Roberts

 

Mount Everest

After spending a week in Nepal and returning home, I appreciate the little things so much more—I can drink tap water, enjoy coffee with breakfast, and eat anything I want. I’m not sneezing anymore from allergies. The air is clean, and I love sleeping in my own bed. I know this sounds trite, and I don’t mean it to be. God uses the mundane and ordinary in this world to teach us about the extraordinary in the next.

My home is here in sunny Florida where we have far too many cats and a rescued dog. This is where I’m comfortable. It’s where most of my friends are and where I work and play and do far too much complaining about mostly meaningless things.

Nepal was foreign to me. What made it familiar were the relationships with the Christians I met. We worship the same God, we sang the same songs in church, and Joy and I enjoyed the sweet fellowship of the Christians in Nepal in their homes and places of worship.

I’m reminded of Matthew 16:19 which says, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you lose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Our job in this world is to build a foundation for the next. Are you sending ahead of your homecoming an investment in the future?

If you aren’t a Christian, you wouldn’t want to go to heaven. It would be outside of your comfort zone. The Holy Spirit is not in you because you rejected God; neither are Christian relationships. You chose not to be part of that world. You rejected the most important relationship, Jesus Christ, who died so that you would have an inheritance at your homecoming. Jesus said, “I go and prepare a place for you.”

We live in worlds of comfort zones here, and there are thousands of them, scattered to the four winds. Home is our familiar world, but it is temporary. Where will your future home be? Nothing familiar exists in hell. Hell was made for the devil and his fallen angels—not for humans. In heaven, we will have the Body of Christ, the relationships we’ve forged here, and whatever we have here will be so much more there.

Let us not grow weary of doing good (as I’m apt to do at times), because we are God’s workmanship, created for good works. We are building a kingdom right here on earth.

I longed to do a better job of keeping my priorities in order—and I want God to renew His Spirit within me. Help me, God, to have more of you in my life, in my home, in my world, and less of me. Your Kingdom is increasing here, I know it, even though outwardly, we may be persuaded to think otherwise, but you promised in Isaiah 9:7, "Of the increase of His government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore.” I believe before I went to Nepal I was allowing the evil one to convince me otherwise.

Now I see your kingdom with more hope and with more belief in the impossible. In Isaiah 64:4, you say, “Since ancient times, no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for Him.”

God’s kingdom is expanding here in our homes, in our communities, in our government, and in our world. Nothing except our unbelief can stop God’s power from being manifest everywhere. Seize the moment and make your home a “taste” of your heavenly home. What greater gift can we give our families than a preview of what’s to come?