Home

Well, welcome to another edition of our weekday podcast, Things Unseen. This week, we’ve been reflecting on special places, or more accurately, I’ve been talking about some of the places and moments and people that have proven to be special in my own life, in the hope that it will encourage us all to reflect on exactly the same thing: people and places and moments when the Lord has met with us that we should never forget. And actually, it’s something our spiritual forefathers thought was important for our spiritual well-being, that we remember the ways in which God has met with us. And we all have different places, different events that have been spiritually significant in our lives.

There’s one place, however, I hope you can put on your list: home. Some of us may have moved so often that we find it difficult to answer the question, “Where do you call home?” I think over the years, we’ve lived in about a dozen different houses that you could have called home, at least in the sense they’ve been the place where we’ve returned at the end of the day, but they haven’t all felt in the same way, “This is our home.” There’s a difference between a house being where you return at the end of the day and where you feel is really home. That’s where you sense that you belong, where your roots are, where the people you feel you belong to live. In many ways, the old adage is true, isn’t it? Home is where the heart is, where you have a sense of ease and comfort, not just physical comfort with familiar things but comfort with people—your home.

But what makes a house a home? Well, I’ve really already answered that question, haven’t I? It’s the people—not the things in it but the people who share it. In that sense, I’ve had two homes. I was brought up in a small family, an older brother by about three years, and our dad and mom. I can’t really put into words my parents’ commitment to their two sons. Plus, they were amazingly patient with the younger son, that was me. I don’t think either of my parents had any schooling past about the age of thirteen or fourteen, but especially my mother was resolutely committed to our education. She taught us the basics herself when we were small. She made learning—reading and writing and spelling and arithmetic—fun. And then, she didn’t leave me any choice about whether I would study Latin at school. I look back and I think I owe them more than I realized, and I wish I could tell them now.

My brother and my father died within a short space of each other in the 1970s, and then my mother a decade later. And what I owe to them is perhaps best measured by the fact that I still feel overwhelming sense of loss at times, powerful enough to bring tears to my eyes.

But then God gave me a second home: first the girl I fell in love with from the moment we first met, although you would understand there are two sides to every love story, and then our children and our grandchildren. “God settles the solitary in a home,” says David in Psalm 68:6, and I couldn’t have been more blessed in that respect.

But I know this isn’t every Christian’s experience. And the reason I wanted to mention it is because it reminds me not only of the importance of our natural home and family life, which is obviously one of God’s fundamental and most wonderful gifts to us, but because that’s not actually the basic family, and it’s not ultimately the family to which we belong. Yes, those families are important, but the wonderful thing about the grace of God is that He brings us to an older family. He brings us into a bigger family. He brings us into a happier family. He brings us into a wide-world family and an eternity-long family.

And today, I reflect on that because I want to remind us that family is the basic Bible way of thinking about the fellowship of the church. Here, we are given spiritual fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, sons and daughters, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. And here, no matter how dysfunctional a family we may have come from, we’ve been brought into a family that’s beginning to be functional.

It is one of the tragedies of our time that governments and institutions who should be nursing mothers to families are spending billions of dollars seeking to improve people’s sense of self and sense of self-identity, and they can never provide what the church of Jesus Christ can provide: a Savior who gives our lives significance, and brothers and sisters in Christ who love us and with whom we will spend eternity.

So just thinking today about family life, whether your own natural family life has been wonderfully blessed or perhaps sadly, tremendously dysfunctional, reflect with me today and into the future on the blessings of belonging to the family of God that stretches to the ends of the earth, that stretches into the mists of eternity. "Count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done."