https://odb.org/MY/2023/02/10/come-home-3
I had the same privilege of adopting a stray kitten that came into the deck of our home when she was only around 2 weeks old. She’s now a fully grown one and a half-year adult cat with her own place and potty. Whenever she’s threatened or scared, she will run back to her place. From a stray cat on the streets, she now has a permanent abode.
I recall when I first arrived at the capital city of Kuala Lumpur many years back to further my studies at the University of Malaya or “when I started college,” as the Americans would say. In my first two years, I stayed at in-house residential colleges within the university grounds. Subsequently, I rented a room about 7 km away from the university, having bought a beaten down old motorcycle, which afforded me more mobility than just my pair of legs. Later, when I started working, I was still renting the room that I had stayed as a student until I got married. That’s when we started renting a whole house, and it was at an upcoming suburb about 20 km from the city centre where I worked. We had no choice but to go further away as that was the locality we could afford to rent a whole place to ourselves and was sort of the middle distance between my wife’s workplace and mine. We later bought our first home, and now, after moving twice, we have sort of settled in our present abode as something of a permanent address. It was a long process to finally find our permanent address.
But with God, we have a permanent home in Him the moment we accepted Jesus in our lives. We are anchored in faith in Him. He is our North in our compass of life – the only point that is truly constant and unchanging. He is our rock and salvation. He is our place of refuge, the redeemer of our soul. There is no process of renting a room first, renting a house or apartment later before we “graduate” to our own home. Straight off the bat, we have a permanent place in God. Jesus is ours the moment we accepted Him into our lives. No temporary renting or probationary period. Or, in an alternative metaphorical example, we need not start with a social visit visa before moving on to permanent residential, then to citizenship. We are straightaway citizens of heaven from day one! In fact, in John 14:2, Jesus promised that He would go home to prepare a place for us as in His Father’s house, there are many mansions. We get a house to our name the moment we are in the family.
The message today, I believe, is that if we had wandered away far from home, it’s time to come home to Jesus. He was our first real spiritual home, and He must remain our home until our very last breadth. Come home to Jesus if we have strayed from Him. Always remember we immediately had a mansion in our name on the first day itself when we became citizens of heaven here on earth. Hang on there, and we will one day enjoy eternity in the house of the Lord!
Ronnie's Thoughts 