Home For Good Series

Good morning. Please open your Bibles to Revelation 21.

I read an interesting stat this week. According to the American Automobile Association, 119 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles between Christmas and New Year’s. Nearly a third of our entire population will be on the move — packing suitcases, buying plane tickets, sitting in traffic, going through airport security.

And then I started trying to do the math. Which is usually a bad idea for me.  But check my work.

There are only about 132 million households in the United States.

So if there’s 119 million Americans and 132 million families, that means every single person in America is either going home, or waiting for  someone to come home.

That hits home. No pun intended.

Because “home” is never just an address. Home is where the people are who make us feel safe. Home is where the traditions live that remind us we belong somewhere. Home is the place where the recipes, the stories, the laughter, the grief, and the memories connect us to the people who came before us and the ones who will come after.

Which is why this time of year can both warm the heart and break the heart. Because for many, home isn’t what it used to be. Maybe someone who made it home isn’t at the table anymore. Or something happened this year that shattered the sense of family you always counted on. For many people, Christmas doesn’t just stir nostalgia — it stirs the ache of displacement.

But here’s the truth behind that ache:

our longing for home isn’t merely emotional.

It’s theological.

Longing for home is the longing for Eden in the human soul.

It’s the reminder that we were created to be at home with God.

And in God’s perfect timing, just days before we celebrate the incarnation — the moment God came to dwell with us — we arrive at Revelation 21, where God declares from the throne:

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.”

Revelation 21:3

The Bible begins with God walking with Adam in a garden,

and it ends with God making His home with the children of Adam in a holy city.

Christmas celebrates the day God came to dwell with us.

Revelation celebrates the day His dwelling place is with man for good.

And that is the hope of this passage:

the God who came near in Bethlehem will bring us home forever in the New Jerusalem.

So with that in mind, I want us to read together Revelation 21:1-7

[READ, PRAY]

Point 1 — Home Coming (Revelation 21:1–8)

John opens this section with a breathtaking reversal of how we tend to imagine heaven. He writes, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth… and I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” The final movement of the Bible is not human beings escaping the world to get to God. The final movement is God bringing home down to us.

And don’t miss the fact that this is Earth 2.0. Verse 1 makes it clear that the earth as we know it has passed away. We have never seen the world as God intended it. All we have ever known is an earth marred and broken by sin—and even so, we still find corners of it that take our breath away. So imagine for a moment what it will mean to spend eternity in a renewed creation, not a discarded one. This is not evacuation—this is restoration.

From the very beginning, God’s intention has always been to dwell with His people. Sin disrupted that fellowship, but it never canceled the promise. In Revelation 21, what was lost in Eden is restored on a cosmic scale. John then tells us what makes this world “new.” God does not scrape the universe and start over. Instead, everything that broke your heart here will be healed there. A loud voice from the throne announces: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore…”

You want to know what Homecoming looks like?

It looks like a world where every form of loss is reversed.

•    No more death—because the last enemy has finally been defeated.

•    No more mourning or crying—because sorrow has no soil to grow in.

•    No more pain—because everything that wounds has been undone.

In verse 1, there’s a detail that puzzles modern readers: “The sea was no more.” For many of us, the sea is where we go to relax—my wife is a beach girl; she has a Life Is Good shirt that says, “The ocean is my medicine.” So why “no more sea”? Because in Hebrew thought, the sea represented chaos, evil, danger, and separation. John is saying something far better than “no beaches”—he is saying the possibility of chaos is gone forever.