The Road Home

   In 2004, the group Mercy Me came out with their song, Homesick.  By just reading the title of the song, you can surmise that it’s about someone missing home…obviously! But as you listen to the lyrics, you realize that the home that’s being missed is not a home located here on this earth or in this life. It's not even a home where the singer has lived before. Here’s how the chorus reads:

   I close my eyes and I see your face. If home’s where my heart is then I’m out of place. Lord won’t you give me strength to make it through somehow. I’ve never been more homesick then now…

    It can be confusing to be homesick over a place that you’ve never been or even seen. Why would anyone consider such a place home in the first place? But when our eyes are opened to a new world devoid of pain, suffering, disease, and death, we begin to understand how corrupt and tarnished this current world we live in is. Thus, our hearts begin to long for something more than this world can offer. I would argue that every person feels a bit out of place in this present world. Solomon wrote that God has placed eternity in the hearts of men. Meaning, we all long for something more than living for a time and then death and then annihilation. And this is no accident. We desire more because God has made more. Jesus promised His disciples that when He left He would go and prepare a ‘place’ for them. The promise He made is also true for us. Those who follow Christ look forward to a ‘new heaven’ and a ‘new earth.’ We can and should look forward to an eternal home.  

    Speaking to a church in London in November 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence.” –Stations on the Road to Freedom.

   Heaven becomes a reality and our deepest desire at the moment we sincerely believe God’s promises. Death loses its power and intimidation when we come to realize that it’s but the last station in our life on the road home.

   Because this world is all we’re familiar with, it becomes tempting to hold on too tightly and forget what we were made for…a better & eternal home. In addition, Jesus said, those who try to keep their lives will lose it, but those who lose their lives for me and the Gospel will save it. We must be willing to give up trying to fulfill our deepest needs in this life. This world was never meant to satisfy us. Its purpose is only to point us to the better one coming.

   A week after Easter Sunday 1945, a 39 yr. old imprisoned pastor opened up his Bible in a classroom turned prison and now a makeshift sanctuary for that morning’s service. He began by reading the passage from Isaiah 53:5, “…he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” He read another passage, and then spent the remaining time explaining what the verses meant to the prisoners in attendance. A few brief moments after he closed the service in prayer, two men dressed in plain clothes walked into the room and one of them said, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready to come with us.” Knowing that his time was up, he remarked to a fellow prisoner and friend, “This is the end…for me the beginning of life.”

   In the early hours of that next morning, Dietrich walked up the steps of the gallows at Flossenburg prison; he bowed and prayed one last time; and after a few short moments, he was executed for his public outcry against unfair treatment of the Jews during Nazi control of Germany and for his spying and work to have Hitler assassinated in the now famous ‘Valkyrie’ plot. The camp doctor who witnessed his death would later write about the event, “In almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

    Love casts out fear. The more we love God the less we will fear death and its repercussions. It is but the last doorway home.