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| 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?
