I recently spent two weeks at my parents’ home in southwestern Ohio. While there, I had a pervading thought. “It’s comfortable here and familiar, but I don’t belong here.” I have felt it before, which is why I live in Dallas-Fort Worth. However, a funny thing happened on the way home. The closer our cramped little car came to Texas, the more I thought, “I don’t belong there either.” As thoughts raced through my head, I came to the realization that I don’t really belong anywhere—at least not anywhere in this realm. As I pondered this situation an old song came into my head. I haven’t heard it in years. We used to sing it in the little country church my family attended when I was a child. “This world is not my home. I’m just passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.”
The funny thing is I remember consciously rejecting this song and others like it. I had adopted the old “too heavenly minded” saying as my motto. I wanted to make an impact. I wanted to be relevant. I decided to focus on the world around me. There was only one problem. I am a stranger in this land. That’s why I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. I am looking for a city whose builder and maker is God. Abraham lived as a stranger in the land of promise and so do we. Eventually this world will be our home after God cleanses it and restores it. We will live on the earth forever. The heavenly city will come down and God will make His home here. However, for the present, we are aliens. When we were born again we became a new creation. That’s not figurative language. We literally are new spiritual creatures. We are not bound to the lusts of the flesh any longer. We rule over our flesh.
Unfortunately many of us in the church today do not recognize our status as strangers. In fact, we barely acknowledge eternity at all. We treat the idea of eternity as a vague unknown that may or may not happen. Therefore, we tend to disregard it entirely and focus on the here and now, leaving us with an empty and unsatisfied feeling. This is a grave mistake. The enemy would love to see us short-change ourselves by storing up our treasures for this age. Have you ever thought about your life in light of eternity? The 80 or so years we spend in this realm are a drop in the bucket compared to forever.
We need to live our lives with eternity as our lens. Without this lens, we try to compensate for that “alien” feeling by filling ourselves up with relationships, material possessions, food, entertainment, and any other earthly vice you can think of. When our lives our viewed through the lens of eternity, we recognize that we are supposed to feel alien and out of place. In light of eternity, we can spend our very few short years in this life to store up treasures where it really counts—where we will live forever.
I encourage you to take a moment to try and wrap your mind around the idea of eternity. It is difficult to grasp, but with the help of the Holy Spirit we can understand it and live for it. Meditate on passages such as Hebrews 11-12 and Revelation 21-22. The revelation of eternity is a life-long pursuit and the sooner you start the better. This world is not your home—at least not in its present state. Please don’t waste the years you have here. It’s a unique opportunity to prepare for forever.
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