Looking For Home Series

I was praying about what I should share today, and I was searching for something that would address a wide range of needs, for those who are Christians and those who aren’t; and the Lord led me to 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Let me assure you that Marshall was a Christian. He had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. He may have had his struggles, but we all do; and hopefully our message this morning will help us understand why we seem to struggle so much in this thing called life.

You often hear people say, “I’m trying to find myself,” but they’re really trying to find something greater; they’re trying to find a home. In the movie “Patch Adams,” Hunter Adams said, “All of life is a coming home – salesmen, secretaries, coal miners, beekeepers, sword swallowers, all of us – all the restless hearts of the world, all trying to find a way home.” And he continued to say, “I had lost the right path, [but] eventually I would find [it] . . . in the most unlikely place.”

Many of us can feel lost, heading down a path to nowhere. We can feel the darkness of loneliness, isolation, and emptiness, and all we want is a place of rest and security; we want a home. Adams said, “All of life is a coming home,” but he also confessed how he felt lost. How many of us are searching for home, but we don’t know the way?

Adams said that he would eventually find the right path, but in the most unlikely place; and some of you will find your home in what the world sees as an unlikely place – you will find your home in Jesus; and those who already know Him need to understand that, until we reach our home in heaven, Jesus is to be our home. But this longing for home explains so much as to why life seems so hard and why we feel so dissatisfied.

Many Are Longing for Home (2 Corinthians 5:1-10, NLT)

1 For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. 2 We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. 3 For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies. 4 While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. 5 God Himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee He has given us His Holy Spirit.

6 So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. 7 For we live by believing and not by seeing. 8 Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. 9 So whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please Him. 10 For we must all stand before Christ to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done in this earthly body.

In the movie “Garden State,” Andrew Largeman said, “You know that point in your life when you realize that the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of a sudden, even though you have [a] place where you can put your stuff, that idea of home is gone . . . When you move out it just sort of happens one day . . . and you can never get it back. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist.”

I don’t know how many of you have had the experience of leaving home to go off to college or work, or even get married; and then when you return to visit, whether it be your parents’ house or even your hometown, it just doesn’t feel the same anymore. Perhaps when you return you’re treated more like a stranger. Many of us have had to face the hard reality that the place we grew up in is no longer our home.

Those who become followers of Christ quickly realize that the house of this world is no longer their home. In verse 1, we read how our body is just an earthly house – a tent – just a temporary dwelling place, and not our permanent home. The Bible says, for example, that when Abraham “reached the land [that] God promised him, he lived there by faith – for he was like a foreigner, living in tents” (Hebrews 11:9, NLT). How many of you feel as though you’re living in a tent; a temporary structure that’s always being packed up, moving from place to place? And all the while, you’re searching for where you really belong.