LONGING FOR HOME

This past week Kaye and I spent nine days with my brother and his wife in a cabin on top of a mountain in Tryon, North Carolina.  I have a pastor friend who lets us use his cabin every year.  It’s something we look forward to, because high on the mountaintop surrounded by towering trees and facing a mountain lake, we experience a quiet solitude we don’t find anywhere else.  We spend our days and nights playing games, reading, sleeping and eating—and talking.   Barry is three years older than my only sibling and me and we invariably get around to talking about our childhood.  We both have good memories of growing up.  Dad worked eight hours a day, six days a week and Mom stayed home, cooking, washing and ironing, cleaning house, and making home a good place to come to when the school day was finished.  Our talks always make me nostalgic and more than a little homesick.  Oh, I know there were bad times, but memory is kind in its selection of just the good things.  When I think of our home at 509 North Fortieth in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, I remember a time when I felt secure, knowing I was loved and taken care of.  With my biased memory I remember only happy times—listening to the radio, playing Monopoly and catching lightening bugs in a jar.  Often in my grownup years, with its expected and unexpected burdens, heartaches and tragedies, I long for the home I knew when I was a child.

And I constantly compare the home Kaye and I have made with that home.  Have we made our children feel as secure and loved as we did?   Will their memory of home be one of security, love and happiness?  I sometimes worry that the home we’ve made may not be as good as the home I remember.  The older we grow, we more we find ourselves returning to the days when we were young, remembering one particular house that was our childhood home -- the home we knew and will always long for.

I believe there is a longing for home in each of us.  Even those who did not grow up in a happy home dreamed of having one.  The word “home” is a powerful one to all of us.   It represents a time when everything was all right.  And no matter how hard we strive to replicate it, there seems to be a sense of something missing.

But I believe the real home that we long for is what has been called our “long home,” our home in heaven.  And no matter how hard we work to make a perfect home here, that longing for home will never be satisfied until we gain our heavenly home.

In 2 Corinthians five, Paul speaks of this longing for home.  “For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven (verse 2).”  And again in verse 4, “For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened....” In the eighth verse he says that he prefers to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.

Paul speaks of this home with certainty:  “For we KNOW that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we HAVE a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

This home is eternal.  We’ll never have to move away.  This home is in heaven, where all things are made new and the tears of this life have been permanently wiped away.

This home is God’s purpose for us.  Verse five says, “Now He who prepared us for this very purpose in God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge.” Not only is Jesus preparing a place for us, but also we have been prepared by God for this place, and the Holy Spirit places the longing we feel in our hearts there.

God Himself has put our longing for home in our hearts and He promises that someday the longing of our hearts will be satisfied.  We groan in this home (our body) but we will glory in our true home, heaven.

THE GOD OF ALL COMFORT

After a visit to the United States, German theologian, Helmut Thielecke, was asked what he thought of American Christians.  He replied, “They have an inadequate view of suffering.”  I imagine that many believers in Europe and Asia and Africa, whose long history has been one of suffering, would agree with him.

We in the West have known little of suffering and persecution for Christ.  In America, especially, we believe in the cult of triumphalism where everyone is healthy, wealthy and happy.  For many, suffering has no place in the triumphant Christian life and is more often than not considered a sign of spiritual inferiority.

Paul faced this and addressed it in his second letter to the Corinthians.   Some “super-apostles” had come to Corinth, trying to pry the Corinthians’ allegiance to Paul from them. Paul calls them “false apostles.”  One of their arguments against Paul was the inordinate amount of suffering he had experienced.  This, they claimed, was not a mark of a true apostle.

Paul’s immediate introduction in 2 Corinthians (1:3-7) is the theme of suffering, so that suffering—his and theirs—might be seen from the divine perspective.   Throughout the letter Paul makes it clear that suffering and affliction are essential ingredients of the Christian life.

But Paul has learned something about God through his affliction:  He has found God to be the “Father of mercies and the God of all comfort” (vs. 3).   This is not so much a doctrinal statement as it is a personal testimony, a testimony resulting from his many afflictions.  It is interesting that he doesn’t bemoan his suffering or complain of them.  His attention is not on the sufferings but on the fact that God “comforts us in all our affliction.”  The sufferings never outweigh the comfort:   “For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ” (vs. 5).

The phrase “Father of mercies (lit., pityings)” indicates the inward feeling of God.  The “God of all comfort” indicates that feeling put into action.  He comforts us because he is the Father, the source, of all mercies.  The key word in this passage is “comfort,” appearing no less than ten times!   And appears 13 more times throughout the epistle.  “Comfort” (paraklesis) is one of the great words of the New Testament.  It can mean encouragement or consolation or comfort, depending on the context.  It means, “One called alongside to help in time of trouble.” This calls to mind Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 4:16,17, when he had to defend himself before the Emperor:  “At my first defense (preliminary hearing) no one supported me; may it not be counted against them.  BUT THE LORD STOOD WITH ME AND STRENGTHENED ME....”

He is the God of ALL comfort, Paul says.  There is no true comfort apart from God.  Apart from God suffering brings despair.  Whatever the affliction, in its separateness or in its totality,  God comforts, encourages, strengthens us.  He is the SOURCE of all comfort.  The comfort doesn’t come from counting our blessings, taking a Positive Mental Attitude, explanations, reasonings or the strength of another.  It is a charisma, a gift from God.

And when we, in our affliction (distress of any kind), are comforted by God, it enables others to patiently endure their own suffering.  So it is important that we share that comfort with others, that we comfort one another with the same comfort we ourselves have been comforted by God.

GRACE BUMPS

I hate speed bumps.

Recently the powers that be placed speed bumps in our alley.  Now you have to creep through there, driving half on the grass to avoid knocking your wheels out of alignment.  They put speed bumps on our church parking lot that are so high you feel like your oil pan is going to be torn off when you ease over them.  I know they are there for a good purpose—to slow you down—but I still hate them.

I’m not too crazy about grace bumps either.  You know what I’m talking about—the bumps in life that make you slow down, take notice, focus your attention and knock your wheels out of alignment.

Paul describes one of his grace bumps in 2 Corinthians 12, where he speaks of the thorn in the flesh that was given him.  To Paul, it was a bump that slowed him down, interrupted his progress and made it difficult to carry on his ministry.

I’ve hit a couple of grace bumps lately.  One that definitely warned me to slow down.  After a physical collapse while preaching, the doctor thought I was having a heart attack—I had all the symptoms.  He put me in the hospital and after a million dollars worth of tests, they declared that I was not having a heart attack.  My problem was 25 years of accumulated stress, preaching 40 to 42 meetings a year, preaching two and three times a day, going to graduate school, trying to write books and articles and numerous other things.  The doctor asked me what I was going to do about it.  “Cut back, I guess.”  He paged back through my file and said, “You told me that three years ago.”  What he didn’t know was that I had said it in 1984 too, when I had similar problems.

But now he gave me an ultimatum—either slow down or get out of the traveling ministry.  I have decided to do the former.  What I thought was just a bump was really a grace bump, an act of God to capture my attention and make me slow down.

I suspect many of us have the same problem.  The Bible says we are to walk in the Spirit, not RUN in the Spirit.  “As you have therefore received Christ as Lord, so walk in Him,” not Run in Him, Paul tells us in Colossians 2.

We hit a thousand bumps in our lives, things that break our hearts, interrupt our progress, slow us down, or just plain stop us.  Like Paul, we want to talk about the thorn, but God wants to talk about His grace.

Grace bumps are meant to make us weak, so we can be strong in the Lord.  God said, “My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”  And we will never become strong in the Lord till we become weak in ourselves.  It was said of King Uzziah that he made engines in Jerusalem, “invented by cunning men, to be on the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones withal.  And his name spread far abroad; FOR HE WAS MARVELOUSLY HELPED, TILL HE WAS STRONG.

BUT WHEN HE WAS STRONG, HIS HEART WAS LIFTED UP TO HIS DESTRUCTION” (2Chronicles 26: 15,16).  That’s the paradox of the Christian life: weakness out of strength and strength out of weakness. 

The point of our weakness becomes the place of His power.  His grace IS sufficient, but we seem not to discover that till we hit a bump.  God will make His grace sufficient for whatever we need.  A woman in Atlanta asked me after a service if I had enough grace to be burned at the stake.   (I didn’t think the sermon was that bad).  I said, “No, I don’t because I don’t need it right now.  All I need is enough grace to stay in Atlanta for three more days.”

The conclusion of the matter is this: “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

WARNING: GRACE BUMPS AHEAD

RAISED FROM THE DEAD

On October 19, 1999 on Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Praise the Lord program, TV evangelist Benny Hinn, told Paul Crouch that the time is coming in which thousands of dead will be raised when their bodies are placed in front of the TV while TBN is broadcasting.

“People around the world,” said Hinn, “who will lose loved ones will say to undertakers, ‘Not yet.  I want to take my dead loved one and place him in front of that TV set for 24 hours.’”  Hinn gave no Scriptural grounds for this “prophecy”, only that he had seen it “in the Spirit”, which, of course, is not verifiable.  This is the same man who said God told him there were nine members of the Trinity and that women were originally supposed to give birth through their sides.

Last week a woman told me that she had died and gone to heaven.   “I saw Jesus,” she said, “and he told me the future and then sent me back.”

Two weeks earlier a man informed me that the dead are being raised all over the world.

In recent years many religious books and religious magazine articles have appeared chronicling the experiences of people who died and lived to tell about it.  Most of them “died” on the operating table.  Some went to heaven; others hovered over their own body, watching the surgeon fighting to resuscitate them.  And the doctors were successful.  But a person heavily sedated for surgery is not a reliable witness.  EXPERIENCE CANNOT AUTHENTICATE ITSELF.  Suffice it to say that those who experienced “clinical” death were dying but not dead.  They were almost dead but didn’t quite make it.

Every once in a while a report filters in from some obscure place that someone has been raised from the dead, someone who was REALLY dead and buried.   But if a really dead person ( I mean someone like Lazarus— dead, embalmed and buried four days and stinking) was raised from the dead, you would not hear about it from some obscure grapevine.  It would be splattered across the front page of every newspaper in the country.  Ted Koppel would have him on camera before he could get out of his graveclothes.  According to Jesus in Luke sixteen, once a person has crossed that line into the world of the dead, he can never return.

But there is a greater issue here.  This is based on the same standards as the world’s—that death is the worst possible thing that can happen to a person.  That may be true for the lost, but not for the believer.  For the believer, death is not the worst thing that can happen to him.  Paul wrote to the Philippians that he had a desire to depart and be with Jesus, which he said, “IS FAR BETTER.”  To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, he said, and the Psalmist said, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.”  In the New Testament no one who had ever been in the presence of the Lord wanted to leave.

I will tell you thing: if I die and am ushered into heaven and into the presence of the Living, Glorified Lord, and behold Him in all His exalted glory; if I am lifted out of the world of sin and heartache and tears and suffering and all my burdens taken away, and some bozo places my hand on a TV screen and jerks me from the presence of the Lord back into this sin-filled world, I’m going to throttle him!  If I die, leave me alone—

I’ll be far better off there than here.

LifeStyle Ministries
P.O. Box 153087
Irving, TX 75015

©Ron Dunn, LifeStyle Ministries, 2001