“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord.”
—Psalm 84:1-2
Deb and I and our family have lived in multiple houses through the years, but we’ve moved our home from house to house. Home is where the people you love live. I tell Deb all the time, “Honey, if you leave me, I’m going with you.” Because she is home, and we are at home together.
We all have a homing instinct, a desire for home and heaven. God put it in us, this desire to be with God, to know God and to be with Him!
Home, I pray, is a great place for you. I understand home does not necessarily have great connotations for some. But for so many of us home is place of belonging, it’s a place of comfort and safety.
We should have our faces set and our attention and our focus on that day when we stand before the Lord. Because heaven is not just a destination, heaven is a motivation to live our lives for Him!
I hope you’re enjoying the journey by passionately, earnestly, expectantly seeking God in your life by faithfully following Him, and that every day of your life you will enjoy Him and enjoy His presence.
He has given us grace; He has given us glory every step of the way. And when we see Him, I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it all! When Christ comes for us and we look into His face, we will celebrate forever this journey home.
GOD HAS GIVEN US A LONGING FOR OUR ETERNAL HOME.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
by Dr. Paul Chappell
“But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we. And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”
Numbers 13:31–33
In 1871 a doctor named Brewster Higley moved from Indiana to Smith County, Kansas, to claim land under the Homestead Act. He built a small cabin and began to improve the land as was required under the law. Dr. Higley enjoyed living there, and the next year published a poem called “My Western Home” in a small local paper. Soon a friend wrote music to go with the poem, and the song we know as “Home on the Range” was born. In 1947 Kansas adopted it as their official state song.
One of the things Dr. Higley apparently liked about living in Kansas was the positive attitudes of those around him. He described that in his poem when he wrote, “Where seldom is heard a discouraging word.” The words that we hear from (and speak to) others have a profound influence on our thoughts and actions. Negative, critical, and discouraging people have a negative impact on our lives. The ten spies who brought back a bad report from their visit to the Promised Land took away the confidence of the Israelites, and they refused to cross the Jordan to fight. We need to make sure we are helping people do right rather than holding them back by our words.
Today's Growth Principle:
Given the enormous power of our words, we should choose them with care to encourage and build up others.
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