Finding Home
Where do we find home? Where do we call home? We could focus on our actual houses or our neighborhoods. Afterall, where we call home can be a great source of pride. I’ve lived in three main places in my life, Pittsburgh, Charleston, and New York, and I’ve noticed in each place that people have a lot of pride in where they are from…where they call home. Where we are from helps to form us, to define us, to make us who we are. The same is often true of our families. You might have a lot of pride in your family name. Maybe home for you is less of a place, but a person or people, those around you who have helped you become who you are. The idea of home touches on something deeper than simply a physical place or location. Tim Keller defined home this way, “[home is] a place that absolutely fits and suits us, where we can be, or perhaps find, our true selves” (from The Prodigal God). Home then is much bigger than a location. It has more to do with our identity, how we define ourselves, with who we are. In a sense home gets to the core of our very being.
Remember the great ancient Greek aphorism? “Know thyself.” It is a fundamental human need to know oneself, to understand who you are. In fact, Socrates, argued that you can’t really know much else until you understand or know yourself. Essentially, when we talk about home, we’re talking about our need for an identity, for understanding who we are. Another way you could put it is that we are trying to come to peace with who we are. We are trying to find peace, security. . .those are certainly things I associate with home. As Keller said a place that fits us, that suits us. We are so desperate to find that peace, that security, that we often spend most of our lives in search of it. As we already said, it might be where you’re actually from. But maybe your identity got tied up in your wealth and success, maybe it was your career, your education; it might be your possessions, clothes, furniture, house, boat, car. . .and as we said it might also be in other people, your family, your spouse, your kids.
But, there is a problem with all of the people, places, and things in which we might want to establish our identity. . .and that is they will all end up disappointing us. They will all change. The kids will grow up and move out, our loved ones will age and eventually pass away, the town we grew up in will change and all these strange outsiders from foreign places (which might be as close as the town next door, but they’re not real locals like us!) will move in and clog the place up with traffic. The people, places, and things that we call home, from which we derive our identity, change and something is lost, we experience death.
This is how Jesus opens up the section about our life in Matthew chapter 6. He says, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal…” (v. 19). He is describing the problem with our home here on earth. . .it dies. It disappoints us. Just take a look under my truck. I love that thing, but it has been driven for 15 years in Northeast winters. It has seen a lot of salt, and it is rusty. Every year now something drops off of it due to rust. I know its days are numbered. It will disappoint. It will not last. We have all experienced this reality; we all know it to be true. More often than not we have experienced this with things that matter far more than an old truck. We’ve lost someone we loved. A relationship ended. A friendship changed and grew distant.
The simple answer is to find our identity in God, right? Jesus goes on after warning about the fleeting nature of this world to say, “but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (vv. 20-21). So just find your identity in God, and you’ll be fine. Well, if I stopped there, which is too often what Christians and the church do, it would leave a great big question hanging out there.
How do we know our identity, our home, is safe in God? How do we know we’re truly secure with him? How is he different from everything else in this world? It all hangs on who God is. If He is our home, if our identity is in Him, which is what we see Jesus telling us here, then we need to know who He is. We need to understand Him before we can even really understand ourselves. Jesus reminds us of whom God is when he talks about our needs more specifically. He tells us to not be anxious about our lives, what we will eat, what we will drink, and what we will wear because God knows we need these things. He knows us and our needs intimately. Jesus reminds us that God is a generous Creator and Provider.
He gives the examples of the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. God provides food for the birds even though they have done nothing to deserve it. They have not worked for it. They didn’t plant the seed, or plow the field, or reap the harvest, and yet God feeds them generously. Then the flowers of the field that literally last only a season at most and some just for a matter of days and weeks…God has clothed them in greater splendor than Solomon, who was known as the wealthiest and most extravagant king of Israel. It is a picture again of a recklessly generous God. One that delights in clothing his creation in beauty. Again, the flowers have done nothing to deserve this beauty. Jesus says they neither toil nor spin, but it is who God has made them to be beautiful. It is who they are, their identity, and he says how much more will he feed and clothe us? We are of more value than the birds and the flowers. Jesus is speaking into our identities right here. He is telling you how valuable you are to God. You are worth more than anything else in all of creation to him, and he is the same God to you…recklessly generous.
That’s one of the wonderful things about having our identity in him, about having our treasure in heaven, is that he is eternal and does not change. He will not disappoint us like the things of this earth. He will not change on us and surprise us by leaving or getting sick or dying. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And what all of this is pointing to is the ultimate way in which this unchanging God provides for us. It is important to remember that Jesus is the one speaking and teaching in this passage. Jesus always works to expose the ways in which we put our faith and trust into things that will eventually hurt and kill us. In short, Jesus always exposes the lies in which we believe. He does this in order to point us to himself. He wants us to recognize him for who he is.
Jesus sums up this section by assuring us that our heavenly Father knows all of our needs and then calls us to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these other things will be added to you. When he says to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness he is talking about himself. Jesus is the one who ushers in the kingdom of God with his coming. Mark records it as Jesus’ first words in his gospel. He proclaims, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand”…in other words, it is here because he is here (1:15). And the righteousness of God is Jesus himself. Paul tells us in his letters to the Corinthians that Jesus is our righteousness. Jesus is talking about himself. He is the great gift of God to us. He is the ultimate way that God provides for us, for our bigger and deeper need of finding a home. He saves us from this world of death without us having to do anything to deserve it. Like the birds and the flowers, we did not work for it, we did not earn it, we did not and do not make it happen. Rather, he gives it to us freely in His Son Jesus Christ. He is pointing to the fact that he was going to do everything required to save us, to protect us, to bring us home to right relationship with God. He was going to defeat sin and death, the decay and destruction of this world, on the cross. He was going to do it all for us, so that we might be free, so that we might find peace and safety.
The only way we will be freed from serving temporal things like money and possessions, and the only way we will find any comfort or relief in the face of loss and death here on this earth is through the Good News that Jesus came for us, to save us from death. Jesus came to set us free. That message tells us who we really are. . .we are the beloved of God. We are so valuable to him that he would give up his own life to save us. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). We are the objects of that love. We are his very own. That is our identity. The place where we absolutely fit, that suits us, where we can be and find our true selves is in Jesus Christ. He is our home. He is our rest. He is our peace. Amen.
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