Dwelling Place

Intro: Where Is Home

Where is your home?

I don’t neccesarily mean your address, but where is something that feels like home

We can related to the quote by William Faulkner “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home”

Just because we live in a place does not mean that it feels like home

I wonder, how long does it take when you move to have a place feel like home?

I remember at Moody that particularly my junior and senior years, Moody felt like home more than my parents home, and when I was at my parents home, I missed being at Moody

That includes the incessent noise out the windows, gunshots, ambulences screaming down the street at 1am, and whatever else Chicago has to offer

In fact, I couldn’t sleep well at home because it was too quiet, and I have that issue still today, too quiet, gotta turn on the music to sleep!

We know that home is not neccesarily where we sleep,

I mean we’ve all probably had our share of odd sleeping arrangements

My best friends 05’ Chrysler sebring convertable was a terrible sleeping arrangement when we forgot the tent stakes over a weekend trip to a local camp ground!

On the otherside, sleeping on the balcony of our hotel in Hawaii in High School on our band trip was one of the best experiences I’ve had

Yet, neither of these are home!

It’s not even about things like how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a place is

If you polled 100 people in Chicago, I don’t think many would pick the projects over the Gold Coast and Watertower Place as places that they would rather be

For me, I felt far more comfortable in Cabrini Green than I ever did walking down the ‘prestigious’ gold coast

The difference was, I knew people in Cabrini, they knew me, most people on the gold coast are rather unfriendly and too in a hurry to help anyone on their way to the nearby Lambo dealer

So what makes a home?

Is it where we “Live, Laugh, and Love?” or perhaps “Home is where the heart is!”

This might be closer to the truth, but what it comes down to is something of a feeling almost like nostalgia, we know home when we feel it

My parents just got back last night from a 2 week trip to Florida, and talking to my Dad, he said, I love Florida, but man it will be good to be home!

Sometimes the best part of the vacation is walking through the doors of your home

I think perhaps the most powerful quote I came across the idea of ‘home’ came from the former Secretary of Education under Reagan, William J Bennett

He said, “Home is a shelter from storms — all sorts of storms.”

A shelter from storms

What a powerful image to place within our minds!

When you are thinking about home, what a powerful feeling that is that washes over you

When you consider the importance of where we live and how we remember things, home is important to all of us!

If you are like me, I go by 2 things for most things of my life: my wife and where we lived

Oh when we lived in Minooka, we did xyz, when we moved to Glendale Heights, these things happened, etc.

I think there are 3 key areas that make home so precious to us,

Home is a place where we let down our guard

Home is a place where we can wrestle and think through hard things

Home is where we feel safe

The amazing thing, God is called “Dwelling Place”, or to put it in our modern vernacular, home

Do we ever think of God as the place we find our refuge?

Do any of those amazing feelings of being at ‘home’ come with your experience with God?

So let’s look at these Scriptures and see, perhaps how we can see these truths in our God, and not just in the temporary building we live in!

Psalm 46: Where We Let Down Our Guard

God is our refuge and strength, a helper always found in times of trouble

Then it goes on to talk about what that means and looks like in our lives, even when things are going sideways

We don’t fear when earthquakes transpire, when mountains tumble into the sea, when the sea rages, or the mountains quake at the cyclones and hurricanes that assail them

The reason that although the world is falling apart out there, for you and I, God is with us, and God helps us, and God is our stronghold!

God will deal with not only the natural disasters, but the national disasters of wicked rulers, by his power, so who could be safer than the God who creates and sustains all things?

God doesn’t want us to do anything except simply be still, and watch his might be our refuge!

There’s a beautiful bookmark in this Psalm,

Psalm 46:1–2 “1 God is our refuge and strength, a helper who is always found in times of trouble. 2 Therefore we will not be afraid, though the earth trembles and the mountains topple into the depths of the seas,”

Psalm 46:10–11 “10 “Stop fighting, and know that I am God, exalted among the nations, exalted on the earth.” 11 The Lord of Armies is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold.”

In essence, God is a refuge worthy of chasing and resting in, regardless of whatever is going on our there

If you’ve been watching the incredible destruction in NC, brings a new revelation of these introductory verses to me

We saw mudslides topple and take out interstate highways, then flood waters surge through mountains and take out entire towns

Just like is said in the opening of this psalm

When we see that type of destruction, when our very own homes might be washed away, and many had their homes washed away! Where can we turn?

This is where we see the truth of this Psalm, God is our help in times of trouble

Not only is he our help, but as one translation puts it, “a very sufficient help” when troubles come!

I came across an article by Hannah King in Christianity Today, someone who lives in some of the areas destroyed by Helene, and what she said was quite insightful:

The truth, I soon remembered, is that limitation is a basic human condition. In our digitized, high-speed age, we believe the lie that we are limitless, omnipresent and omniconnected—but in reality, we are so very finite. Sometimes it takes a crisis to force us to realize this. Even then, we tend to rage against our limits, punishing ourselves for not being able to do more or becoming so disillusioned that we retreat into apathy.

But on the other side of the frustration is a freeing realization: All that any of us can do is the one or two things in front of us. We feed our kids; we pray for our neighbors; we donate or fundraise or hand out bottled water. These things might feel laughably small or even irrelevant in the face of national or global crises, but they are the very things God entrusts to us. In return, we must trust that God conscripts us, limits and all, to manifest his limitless love and presence in the world.

We are limited to what we can do, what we can control, what we can stop, and sometimes God uses the craziness of life to help us remember that realization

This Psalm points to one of the best ideas about home, that we let our guard down

We get home and get out of work clothes, undo make-up, and get cozy, we relax

There is suddenly nothing expected of us, we can let down our guard, we can breath that big sigh of relief as we hop in our bed and relax

Yet when our home is washed away, or maybe we lose our home because we can’t pay the mortgage, what do we do?

Then we turn to God, and we find that we still can have that, when our house might be lost, since God is so good!

What I think this Psalm really pushes us with though is this: When we are home, when we let down our guard, when we are in a vulnerable state,

Or to put it in the language of this Psalm, when we are still, no longer striving, what drives our thoughts and actions?

For many of us it’s simply self-preservation, what we need to do to survive the workday, what we need to do to get throught his week, or season

Yet, where does God come into the picture here?

Have we thought about God since we last heard a sermon?

Have we talked to God today at all? Do we even bring God to our mind, let alone our lips?

Are we too distracted by the sports, TV and Netflix binges, Video Games, or Manga reading to even think about God as our refuge?

I really like what the Jews had a practice of doing, called the evening Shema, or prayer before they went to bed, and it went like this:

Praised are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who brings sleep to my eyes, slumber to my eyelids. May it be Your will, Lord my God and God of my ancestors, that I lie down in peace and that I arise in peace. Let my sleep be undisturbed by troubling thoughts, bad dreams, and wicked schemes.

A great reminder that we must bring ourselves to think of God since he is the one who the mountains tearing themselves asunder means nothing to

Yet sometimes, it takes something like Helene for us to even see a persepective of localized life, in the midst of our overconnected world, we have a God who is with us in the storms

The God of Armies is with us and is our stronghold and refuge, and he is the place we should find our home in!

Psalm 90: Where We Wrestle With Hard Things

Life is hard, or it will be hard, or it has been hard for us

Psalm 90 is written by a man that knew hardship especially well, Moses

This man murdered an Egyptian, and ran away and for 40 years lived in the wilderness as a sheep herder, until God called him, and he led the people out of Egypt by the 10 plagues

Then those people were led into the wilderness for Moses’ last 40 years, and things only got worse!

They were full of wickedness and pride, and constantly complained about how being slaves was better than being under Moses and being freed by their God!

This was likely written close to Moses’ death, and a man that had been wondering in the wilderness, there was no settlement that Moses called home

Yet inspite of these things, the faith of Moses is on point

Lord, you have been our refuge in every generation

That means Joseph, the slaves of Egypt, and even the stubborn wilderness generation that would die for their sins!

God is eternal, he is the source of all things, and that makes him God

Since he is God, he gets creator rights, like deciding our very days and when we die, he is the one who can judge us and condemn us!

God knows us, and that includes our sin, and the deserved punishment that our sin should carry with it!

Yet, when life comes and we strive, we end up only 70/80 and they are years of difficulty, let us not pretend that we live forever!

The only way worth living according to Moses, closing in at 120?

God’s lovingkindness, his hesed, makes us rejoice, because only God can deal with our sins that we have done against him!

We can only do what God allows us to do, we can only accomplish what God allows us to accomplish

So when we consider Psalm 90, what it shows us is when we ask the question about our homes, the answer is that our home is not here!

I love the old Degarmo & Key song “Aliens and Strangers” which says in the chorus: My closest friends are aliens and strangers, Travelers here, living with danger”

Perspective is a powerful thing, and this Psalm is full of it

There are hard things from our modern perspective, we are so me-centered, that we get mad at God for being God!

For instance, when we get frustrated in reading of the Canaanite ‘genocide’ in Scripture, we say, how can God be so unjust!!!!

Yet, in order for us to claim that, you have to take a Christian worldview and use it to make such a claim, but if God is God, then he can end our lives whenever he wants, since he also creates us whenever he wants

We have an issue with God encroaching on our individual freedoms that we believe in, and we think that we are the top of the food chain

Moses has no issues, he’s lived in the wilderness for most of his life, he’s lived with the ‘people of God’ and he knows how bad they are, let alone the pagans!

He know the iniquity and sin that they possess, and if he knows it, God certainly does!

But he also knows that God is gracious to his people, remember Moses had that incredible encounter on Mt Sinai in Exodus 34, where God said he is full of mercy and compassion and loving kindness, and slow to anger over our iniquities!

Moses knew God intimately and deeply and God and Moses had such deep relationships that in Exodus 33:11 “11 The Lord would speak with Moses face to face, just as a man speaks with his friend, then Moses would return to the camp. His assistant, the young man Joshua son of Nun, would not leave the inside of the tent.”

To speak to God as a friend, that is why Moses could say God is their protector and refuge!

So when life goes sideways, where do we most often process things?

At home, where we can let down our guards

We think and wrestle, and cry, and pray, and make phone calls from our home, where we feel grounded and safe

God is our home, he knows our struggles, even our struggles with how he works at times!

Yet, what we do is draw near to him, because he is our Refuge, he is our Home

God knows each and every sin, yet continues to love us anyway

Robert Frost writes it this way, ““Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

God loves us so much that his initial response is to always take us in, even when we don’t want to go to him!

So when Hard Things come, do we run to God, or do we run to something else?

If you learned you had terminal cancer, a few months left to live, etc, what brings you solance in that difficult news?

If God is our home, we can find refuge and protection in his wings

God’s strength is not about overcoming as much as it is persevering!

The reason this is so important, and this perspective is needed for us that God cannot be considered a refuge if there is nothing to be rescued from

You don’t need a life boat if the ship never wrecks, you don’t need insurance if you are never in an accident!

In their book, The Songs of Jesus, Tim and Kathy Keller wrote: “The devil wants us to think that God’s promises have failed if he lets us suffer. But the psalm later clarifies that God will save us ‘in trouble’ and not from it.”

It is not an accident that the Ps. 89 just before this cries out ‘How long will you hide from us God! How long will I be under your wrath!”

Then Moses responds with “Lord you have been our refuge in ever generation!”

Ultimately, our limitations contrast and exalt God’s greatness and power!

How do we wrestle with hard things in life, we come home and throw our unbearable burdens upon the unbreakable refuge of God

Deuteronomy 32: Where We Feel Safe

In these two verses we see some incredible promises about how God does act and will act

God finds Israel in a desolate and barren land, abandoned, and God cares for him!

He protects Israel, watches him, hovers over him, and catches him when he falls!

We see God live this out time after time after time in the OT stories

God gives his people prophets and good kings to return to him, he pleads for them to come back

Then God will usurp the bad kings, and raise up their replacements who are more godly, but fall for the same tricks of power once again!

Yet God ultimately knows that the way it is set up will not work, so he promises a new covenant with a new ability to follow God

What this verse rather clearly shows us, is that even when we are not searching God, God is there for us, and when he is our home, our dwelling place, our nest, we feel safe

When we feel safe, we can heal, we can process, we can do what needs to be done

In fact, suprise, suprise, researches are finding more and more correlation to saftey and healing, almost like you don’t heal well if you are perpetually in danger!

Yet, even when our lives are not safe, God still helps us find saftey, he hovers over us like a mother eagle making sure we are safe, he found us abandoned and he cares for us

Jesus: Is Our Home

I hope you’ve realized it at this point, but we’ve started this with the wrong question

We have been asking what or where home is, but Home is a person, and that is Jesus

We’ve talked about home being a place that

We can let our guards down

A place we can wrestle and process the hard things in life

And perhaps most importantly, a place we can be safe with

Yet how do we see this in a person?

You know the most amazing thing I’ve ever accomplished?

it’s convincing Tabitha to marry me somehow!

You know that there are a lot of thoughts that go through your head on your wedding day, but with Tabitha she said marrying me was the easiest decision she made

The reason she felt that way is that for Tabitha and I, our home is where we are, we find our home in each other

In fact, coming to this realization is how I came to know that I would marry Tabitha

Story of John’s Wedding and heartache

In Scripture, we see this laid out in various ways

Ecclesiastes 3:11 “11 He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end.”

Jesus speaks to this in John 7:37–39 “37 On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38 The one who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.” 39 He said this about the Spirit. Those who believed in Jesus were going to receive the Spirit, for the Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified.”

Even Paul shows that pagan Athenians knew of this idea in Acts 17:23 “23 For as I was passing through and observing the objects of your worship, I even found an altar on which was inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” Acts 17:26–28 “26 From one man he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live. 27 He did this so that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28 For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’”

The church has also worked on this idea too

Perhaps most famously Augustine said

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

In modern times, the great theologian and writer CS Lewis said it this way

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

It is this idea of a God-shaped hole, or longing that nothing in this world can quench

Money, fame, power, material things, food, etc, nothing will fill it, there is still a haunting emptiness that follows us

So we see that a person can be our home, and that our hearts yearn for such a person, but they cannot meet the expectations that come with that level of need, nor are they made to!

That brings us right back to Jesus

Jesus is a home for the weary laden, where you can let down your guard

Matthew 11:28–30 “28 “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.””

You can let your burdens, worries, cares, and all of life down, and give it to Jesus, a friend that will meet you where you are and bring rest to your souls, no matter what your world, family, or even your soul might be going through!

Jesus is a home where we can wrestle with hard things, both this world and our own struggles

John 6:66–69 “66 From that moment many of his disciples turned back and no longer accompanied him. 67 So Jesus said to the Twelve, “You don’t want to go away too, do you?” 68 Simon Peter answered, “Lord, to whom will we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.””

Jesus might call us to hard things, and we will have to wrestle with God, but that is not a bad thing, we should rejoice that we can!

John 16:33 “33 I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. You will have suffering in this world. Be courageous! I have conquered the world.””

Yet the struggle is not always internal, sometimes the world pushes in on us and we wonder where we went wrong!

Sometimes we didn’t go wrong, it’s just a broken world, but we have a Savior with us to help us overcome the world that Jesus already conquered!

Jesus is a home whom we can feel safe and secure in

John 14:1–4 “1 “Don’t let your heart be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? 3 If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am you may be also. 4 You know the way to where I am going.””

Jesus himself gives us assurance that he is going to heaven, and is preparing a place for us!

Saftey based on Jesus’ promise!

God is our home, he is one we can come to trust on no matter what life may bring

He is a refuge in times of difficulty, and the one who can deal with the hardest things of life

He is the one who reminds us that we are safe and secure under his watch, nothing can snatch us from his hand

He is the one who reminds us that our home is not this passing world but, awaits us in heaven above!

He is worthy to be trusted, worshipped, and certainly worth running to as our home, our dwelling place, refuge,

Our home is found in, with and through Jesus

Let me close with some lines from the wonderful song, “In Christ Alone”

No guilt in life, no fear in death, this is the power of Christ in me From life's first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny No power of hell, no scheme of man, can ever pluck me from His hand Till He returns or calls me home, here in the power of Christ I'll stand

Benediction

2 Peter 3:10–13 CSB

10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief; on that day the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will burn and be dissolved, and the earth and the works on it will be disclosed. 11 Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, it is clear what sort of people you should be in holy conduct and godliness 12 as you wait for the day of God and hasten its coming. Because of that day, the heavens will be dissolved with fire and the elements will melt with heat. 13 But based on his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.