Hatching a New Year

On Sunday, we had a dear friend of HSCC and missionary, Jim Hatcher preached to kick off our 2023 year!! Jim and Lynette have been connected to HSCC for 41 years and on the mission field for 36. Wow, what faithfulness.

Jim shared authentically about his nomadic experiences as a missionary, and how a longing for HOME is really a longing to belong.

And this longing to belong, no matter who we are, whether we’ve been raised in the Church or know nothing about God, ultimately points to the love, security, and alignment we find in relationship with God.

• What comes to mind for you when you think of home?

• Have you ever thought that God might want to share a home-life with you?

• Could God have placed a longing for a perfect Home in you?

• How might He want to use that longing to build His purposes in your life?

Jim opened to Hebrews 11 and helped us to catch a glimpse of this eternal longing for home.

In that chapter, we see the historic faith of believers, who, in their rooted trust of God’s promise, actually sought a city that God has built.

Many of these folks were shepherds, nomads, or others whom the world-powers overlook, but God used their personal stories, brokenness, and hope in their lifetime to shift cultures and people for His purposes:

By an act of faith he lived in the country promised him, lived as a stranger camping in tents. Isaac and Jacob did the same, living under the same promise. Abraham did it by keeping his eye on an unseen city with real, eternal foundations—the City designed and built by God.

They saw it way off in the distance, waved their greeting, and accepted the fact that they were transients in this world. People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home.

If they were homesick for the old country, they could have gone back any time they wanted. But they were after a far better country than that—heaven country. You can see why God is so proud of them, and has a City waiting for them.

- Hebrews 11:8-10,13-16 (MSG)

Isn’t that beautiful?

Did you notice that the way they live shows that they’re looking for something eternal?

And WHAT are the looking for?

They’re looking for home.

They were homesick.

Homesick from a God-promise that would lead to a God-dwelling.

A promise that wouldn’t be fulfilled in full until generations later…with the coming of the One, Jesus, who would make His Home with us through the Holy Spirit.

Because of Jesus’s fulfilling God’s promises through his death on the cross and His resurrected life, we' begin to experience some of this God-making-home-with-us now…and some later too.

“If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.” John 14:23 (NASB)

Abode here is the past tense of ABIDE, which we know is about our continual communing with Jesus through the Holy Spirit.

But ABODE is also an old word for HOME!

Another translation puts it this way:

Jesus replied, “All who love me will do what I say. My Father will love them, and we will come and make our home with each of them. - John 14:23 (NLT)

God’s Holy Spirit actually makes us individually and as a community a HOME for God to dwell-in on earth as we follow Him and abide with Him.

So for God’s followers, the God-promised opens in them a faith that connected their minds, hearts, and dreams a God-sized way of thinking and believing.

This way of thinking sees through the ordinary and uncertain into the plans and purposes that God had in mind from before the beginning of time.

This actually moves them to think beyond themselves, even past their own generations…

To partner with eternal purposes that God desires to accomplish through us.

C.S. Lewis says it this way:

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence;

The secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

These things….are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

• What is God stirring in you as you consider Jim’s sermon and this picture of HOME as a place of BELONGING?

• What does longing for HOME look like in your life?

• How might this longing connect to your desire for connection with God?

• What would it be like to welcome the Holy Spirit to build GOD’S HOME in your life?

Perhaps take a few moments to talk with God about this now.

Share with Him your heart and longing for HOME, and HOME-WITH-HIM.

May this begin a conversation that can open You to His desires…

And His Love can build His promises into your life too…