At Home with the Lord

From Two Corinthians chapter 4, verse 16. So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. As we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.

For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent, we groan longing to put on our heavenly dwelling. If indeed by putting it on, we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan being burdened, not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.

So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please Him, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil. So far this reading. Thanks, John. Today we are picking up on the series of home this morning. Something that I trust the regulars at Open House are well and truly familiar with.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the series as they have been presented week after week in the last four or five weeks. So tonight, rather this morning, just another message on home, particularly where is our true home and what are we looking at. And in this series, we have discovered that the whole Bible is in fact about bringing us home. God began a relationship with us way back in the garden so many thousands of years ago, is intent on bringing us back to our true home. Could argue not just a garden, but a city, a beautiful city, a new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven to this earth.

We found, haven't we, that the gospel is the way home. Hence, the theme of the series, the gospel narrative of belonging. Well, it certainly struck a chord with me and my wife, Regina. You might know us well enough to know that we have been busy searching for a home over these last six months or so since we have arrived on the Gold Coast. We came from Perth in Western Australia and we have been here since late January this year.

And we have been looking for a home ever since, and praise God, we have found a home only this month. When it comes to the importance of home then, we understand that and certainly do not take it for granted. We found a place to call home in Varsity Lakes and it took us around six months to find it. But during that time, we learned a lot about home and particularly about buying a home and here is what I mean. We did our research, we looked at all kinds of properties.

Earlier on, we were never really quite sure of what house would suit us best or what we could afford. We always had a list. My wife was very good at keeping lists. She had a short list that at one time looked very long, but the list did get shorter and I was sure we were making progress. And then we thought we should make an offer as you do when you buy real estate.

And we did. We did make an offer. And in fact, we did it on more than one occasion. An offer to purchase, I need to have it knocked back again and again. It was disappointing, but we persevered.

We used to drive past houses that were open for inspection and say, you know what, I think I could live there. We could call it home. But what we wanted really was something special, something we both liked, something about which we could say, there is no place like home, and we would love it to be our home. All the while, secretly, at least to myself, I kept saying, Tony, you have got to walk away from this.

If the deal is not right, if the price goes north, tell him that he is only dreaming. But after six months, we did not walk away and so our offer got higher and higher, another ten thousand, thank you very much. And we finally did settle on a place. And with a click on a mouse, I did transfer the deposit and the deal was as good as done. And I recall the advice of one real estate agent who we met several months ago. He said something like, you have got to love your house before you make an offer.

You have got to fall in love with the place. There has to be a kind of a romance factor. And yet, I kept saying to myself, I have got to be able to walk away from this. If the deal is not right, I am not interested. It was a struggle between what was in the head and in the heart.

And what I learned, I think was this. There is no place like home and when you find it, you are prepared to make all kinds of sacrifices to live there, to want to be there. You have to yearn for it, you have to want for it, you have to long for it, and to love it more and more. So it is fair to say we have become a little house proud over these last few weeks, even talking about giving the place a lick of paint or spending some money on new floor coverings. Now, I want to suggest that the picture Paul is painting in Two Corinthians 5 is a picture about a house and it is about our ultimate home. It is about heaven itself and Paul is suggesting in so many words that we have got to fall in love with this place, that there has to be a kind of a romance factor, that we keep thinking about it, that we keep looking and imagining what it is going to be like to live there.

In the opening words of chapter 5, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands and so we groan longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling. Paul is talking about this heavenly home like clothes and the clothes fit. They are a perfect match. Ultimately, it suits all of those who go there and more than anything else, this is what a Christian longs for. And for as long as we are in this body, we will continue to groan for it.

Literally, we are in agony because we are not actually living there yet in our perfect home with these perfect clothes. But then this, and this is what we want to get into our head and hearts this morning and you can see it there embroidered in a picture frame, embroidered on our hearts. Verse 8: we are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. We are confident we could be away from the body at home with the Lord. How can Paul say that?

And how can he say that, and especially if you are living on the Gold Coast, enjoying life, and then he goes on to say this: and so we make it our goal to please Him whether we are at home in the body or away from it. Whether we are at home or away, we make it our goal to please Him. Whether we are there yet or here a bit longer, we make it our goal to please Him. Whether we are in heaven or on earth, the goal, the point, the aspirations we have are the same.

That is to please Him, to please God. And that is really the main point of the passage, the main point of the verse. But before we got to that, we have to know the number one rule about real estate, even our piece of heavenly real estate. And something that every agent I have ever spoken to would all agree with. The number one rule is surely this: it is about location, location, location.

When you buy your home, it is about where you are and that is what attributes value to the house. The city, the suburb, where you are at, that is what gives value to what you want to invest in. And we are going to consider the location of the home Paul talks about, where it actually is and then the yearning or the desire, the longing that comes with that. And finally, the work that we do while we long or yearn for that home. So this message this morning has three points: the location of home, the longing for home, and the living for home.

You guessed it, there are three l's, three points this morning. Location, longing, and living. First, location. Where is it at and how do you find it? Now it is a bit like maybe the way you would talk to your GPS or to Siri or Google. You know, you can be anywhere in the world and say, Siri, take me home, and she does.

And she will find you on a map and then direct you to your home. And so we have this question spiritually too. How do we get to our ultimate home? That perfect place for you and me. Where is it at for you?

You may have heard the story of a missionary couple back in the early nineteen hundreds. Henry Morrison was a missionary to Africa. He spent forty years there serving with his wife in Africa and the day came when they returned home from the mission field because they were weary, somewhat older, and not keeping particularly good health. They happened to be on the same ship as the president, Teddy Roosevelt. And he was coming back with all his entourage from a three week hunting safari in Africa.

There on the docks was a huge crowd of people ready to welcome the president and his wife. You know, there were loud cheers, a media scrum, banners on the gangplank, and the band was playing, all part of the welcome home for the president and the First Lady of the United States of America. But for this missionary couple, there was literally no one there to greet them, to welcome them home. Not a single person showed up to greet them. And so Henry said to his wife, well, this is all wrong.

God is not fair. Forty years we have spent serving the people in Africa and no one seems to care. And the president goes hunting, he is away for three weeks, it is a big deal. It is not fair. No one is welcoming us home.

The story differs a little bit, but his wife says to him, well, we are not home yet, are we? And that is the point, is it not? We are not home yet. We have not arrived yet. And no matter how comfortable your house is, no matter how secure you feel living here in Australia, none of us are home yet.

Paul wants to explain that to us. We are not home yet. In this body and in this life, we are not at home. In fact, Paul goes on to talk about the body as a tent, a tent. And let us not forget that Paul knows all about tents because he himself made them for a living.

That was his trade. He says there in verse 1, for we know that if this earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not made by human hands. This body is an earthly tent and what makes it a tent? Well, for one, it is temporary and, two, it is vulnerable. Paul says in the previous chapter, we are all like jars of clay.

You can go back in chapter 4 and read that we are described as crack pots really. That is our experience living here in this life. The body is like a tent. It can be torn down. It is susceptible to wind and rain.

It can be broken and even collapse completely. It is easily moved and easily shaken and it is temporary. It is quick and easy to put up and quick and easy to pull down. It does the job while we are away from home, but it is not a permanent structure. I think Jesus recognised that while He was on the earth when He referred to His own existence as living in a tent.

There is a point in the Gospels where a man comes up to Him and says, Lord, I want to follow You. And Jesus says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head. Jesus is saying that animals might have homes, but the Son of Man in effect is homeless while living in this world on this earth. And what is true for Jesus is true for His disciples as well. We are all homeless while we are on this earth.

The world is not our home. We are not there yet. Our ultimate home is not a tent, but it is an eternal dwelling, a building not made by earthly hands but built by God Himself. As Paul says in verse 1, an eternal house in heaven not built by human hands. See, this is more than just a contrast between a tent and a house.

This is more than a contrast even between a tent and a tabernacle and a temple. Although it can be helpful to be thinking of that Old Testament parallel. What Paul actually has in mind here is a contrast between something weak and disposable and something that is eternal, permanent and lasts forever and ever. Something unbreakable and something permanent. There could be no doubt that Jesus had this in mind when He said to His disciples, do not let your hearts be troubled.

You believe in God, believe also in Me. My Father's house has many rooms. If that were not so, I would not have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you. And while He prepares a place for us, He is also preparing us for that place. As Two Corinthians 5 says, the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit guaranteeing what is to come.

You see, God is busy shaping us and moulding us, but essentially not for this life, for this body, but for the life that is yet to come, for even heaven itself. And today, right now, we have this deposit, a guarantee from God, the very presence of His Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, that He is alive and living in us. And He is the one who will also raise us to our eternal dwelling, which means the home of heaven, the home for our resurrected bodies. And so if you are busy looking for a true home, if you are looking for true comfort, if you are looking for that feeling of safety and security, then I can tell you this: you will never actually find it in this life. It is not.

It cannot be found here. We live in a world racked by the consequences of sin. Having said that, I do hope that your home is comfortable and that your home is a positive one at that, but remember this and I certainly need to remember it well having just bought a home. It will never be our true home, not ever, not here. It is in the wrong location and after all, is that not what all the agents tell us?

You and I need to be thinking about our eternal home, looking at our location in heaven. And certainly, that is what adds value to the place God has prepared for us there. So we look to heaven, we long for heaven and this is our second point this morning: longing or desiring heaven. In many ways, this life is spent longing for our true home, yearning for it, even groaning for it, says Paul. And really, that is what Paul is doing from verse 2 onwards.

He is adding depth and meaning to the picture of who we are. Meanwhile, groan longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling. Here we are, not just longing like people who are away from home, like people who want to get back home because they are feeling somewhat homesick. We are not even longing like a homeless person might be longing for shelter. We are actually longing because we are naked.

We are vulnerable. We are exposed people and we want to be clothed. We want to be protected. That is the kind of language Paul is using here. What Paul is doing in this passage is giving us some explanation about these mortal bodies that we live in and then comparing that with their future resurrected bodies.

Clearly, these were real questions back in Paul's day. Questions like, well, what happens when we do die? Are we separated from our bodies? Do we become disembodied spirits? Are we naked in that sense?

And yes, he is saying, between our death and Jesus coming again, there is a period when our spirit is separated from our body. Well then, what does the resurrection of the Christian really look like? We could answer that by thinking of the resurrected body of our Lord Jesus, but this is not what this passage is about. The point is that our mortal bodies are much better, are not much better rather than having no bodies at all. Our mortal bodies are not much better than having no bodies at all.

That at present, we are really living in some pretty ratty clothing and so we, all of us, are longing to be clothed with something more permanent, even these things called heavenly bodies. And once we know that is possible, we begin to long for that, for our heavenly dwelling because it is perfection. None of us want to be naked souls in that sense for eternity. We just do not get that. That is really weird.

We just do not want to be naked bodies in this life either and so we groan. We groan for it all to be fixed, for an eternal dwelling, something that lasts throughout this world and even into the next world, something that is perfect. To put it simply, we long, we groan for our immortality. I mean, why else does the world chase the fountain of youth to want to stay forever young? And why do big drug companies make a fortune out of selling health supplements or pills that promise to do so much for these temporary earthly tents that we live in?

Ultimately, it is to avoid even our own death, to avoid wasting away in this earthly temporary tent. We long for our heavenly dwelling because as Ecclesiastes reminds us, He, that is God, has also set eternity in the hearts of men. It is in our hearts to want to long for this perfection. We know it is reality, we miss it because we do not have it and so we long for it. And if we chase it thinking we can achieve it in this life, we will never find it.

It can only be found beyond our own death. Like the rest of the world, we idolise health, good looks and even physical fitness. As you can see, I am not against these things and in retirement, I recognise the need to take good care of this earthly tent that we live in. But it is when we make idols out of them and turn them into the number one priority and depend on them for our well-being, when we are saying, by these things I am attaining immortality, by this I am going to stay forever young and this tent then is my eternal home, and yet all the while we remain in bodies that are mortal, that are temporary and they all come with a used-by date. It is ironic that on the one hand, the world chases immortality and yet on the other, there are laws being drawn up that make it easier for people to die both at the end of life and at the beginning.

About this, the Bible is clear. Immortality can only be found beyond our own death. That is where our true home is. What I mean is we need to embrace our mortality, the fleeting temporary nature of our life on this earth, recognise the reality of our death and then actually embrace it in order to receive immortality. We need to accept how vulnerable we are to become invulnerable.

That is how to find true life. I want to highlight just a positive and a negative side to our longing. The positive side is true when you have been living in a place that is not your house for a long time. If you have been living in a granny flat or house sitting or you have been camping for an extended time or you are on the road as a grey nomad travelling and you are just longing for that hot shower or longing for your own bed or your own pillow, it is a great feeling, is it not, to know when you have come home?

And our anticipation for our ultimate home is not unlike that because we know it is going to fit us perfectly. We are going to find it perfect. Only a hundred times better because it is a place of no sorrow, no tears, none. It is a place of perfection with perfect bodies, perfect relationships, perfect work, and imagine that, a perfect church, that would be great. Perfect spirits, the ultimate place of rest and comfort and life, ultimate joy and love. That is our hope.

That is our longing. That is what we can anticipate. Let me read to you how the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah sees it. The Lord says, at that time I will gather you and at that time I will bring you home. I will give you honour and praise among all the peoples of the earth when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes, says the Lord.

And for a people living with the very real threat of exile and deportation from their beloved home in Jerusalem, what a hope, what an anticipation. But there is also a negative side to our groaning as well. We groan and we long but we do so because we groan with burdens and that is what Paul says in verse 2. Meanwhile, we groan longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. And in a spiritual sense, we are naked because we are all vulnerable.

We have the burden of afflictions without any protections, any defence. In fact, the whole book of Two Corinthians is about Paul's sufferings and afflictions because of his calling to be an apostle, to serve the church. He talks there about his hurt and pain while living in this vulnerable tent. And not that I know you well, but I know enough about people to say that we all suffer storms. We all suffer hurt and when they come, the storms batter and bash the sides of our tent.

You know, if you have ever been camping in a tent in a storm, you know it is absolutely crazy. Storms make us cold while we are clothed in our rags and all too often, it can be described as the afflictions that we may have to succumb to in a broken world, including our own broken sinful human nature, and that causes pain and real hurt and so we groan. There is a quote from a British politician, a Christian from the early nineteen hundreds. Thomas Brooks said most famously, afflictions are but as a dark entry into our Father's house. What he is saying is, how small our afflictions.

We pass through the dark in order to get into the light. It lasts just for a moment compared to all eternity and then we are forever in the perfect light. What is the perfect light? Well, Revelation talks about it this way. It says, we will know it because we will not even need the sun to shine.

They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun for the Lord God will give them light. In the previous chapter, chapter 4, Two Corinthians, Paul says, our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. Paul talks about our suffering in this earthly tent in Romans in that classic chapter, Romans 8, and there he uses the language of childbirth and the reason there is a reason for that. Childbirth represents the most intense pain but the birth of any child is a combination of the sheer miracle of God, of God's life-giving creation and then sin's curse all rolled up into one event. There is anticipation and affliction.

There is pain and joy all rolled into one. About that, he says, we know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to this present time. And so there is a real sense in which we all long for home and in our longing for home, Paul also urges us to live for home, to live for home. That is to completely reorientate our lives so that we look, we hope, we anticipate what our future home will one day look like. We do not just know about our location.

We do not even just long for it. But now this: Paul is actually calling us to live for it. To live in the light of our future, that is our calling. To live as he says, by faith and therefore make it our goal to please Him in verses 6 and 7. Therefore, we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord for we live by faith, not by sight.

We live for the eternal. We are not living for these temporary earthly dwellings, the homes that God gives us nor even these bodies in which we live in. That simply means that we are not just living today for Friday night when we knock off at the end of the week. Well, we are not working just to achieve our retirement. We are ministering throughout all of life.

We are disciples twenty four seven. Every single part of our life including our evenings and our weekends, our days off, the weekends and in my retirement and yours too. We are doing so to please the Lord for the glory of God. Paul is talking about that in all of life. He has been saying that ministry is an all-of-life experience and so we live and act and commit and we serve and we love and we rest and we play by faith for the glory of God.

We determine all our days and every part of our day based on this ministry of pleasing God and service to other people. I want us to take that to heart this morning. If you do your day just so you can get back home at 17:00 or you can finish your week on Friday evenings to get to the weekend or if you work from year to year just to achieve a time of annual leave, or your whole working life to achieve retirement, you are missing out. That is not what life is all about. You will never ever be content if that is all you live for.

You will never really be free because you know how quickly it passes you by. But if you reorientate your life, if you begin to live your life in the light of your true home, of your eternal dwelling in heaven, for the ultimate rest and for the weight of His glory, then you will have a full and a complete life even now. That is what Jesus says about His reasoning for His coming to earth. He says, I have come that they may have life and have it to the full. That fullness of life starts now and will one day be complete in eternity, even as we long for it in our new location in heaven, our true home.

There is no doubt that for now, you and I will have freedom and contentment and even joy in our trials and afflictions because we recognise we are not home yet. You know, Christians are criticised for being irrelevant, completely out of touch and seemingly detached from this world. Often the criticism is made, Christians are so heavenly minded, they are of no earthly good. We should challenge that thinking this morning. Well, you know, I am always amazed, whether we are reading Colossians 3 as we did at the start of the service or here in Two Corinthians 5, that when we have such a strong focus on heaven and our future that we actually can afford to become the most down to earth, realistic, in-the-moment people on the planet.

But if all you live for is for Friday nights or your retirement, you are actually never able to engage with this world to live in the moment because your life always has to be about something else. But if we live for eternity, for our true home, then we can be fully in the moment, fully engaged, and consider so many ways how God calls us to live in that moment. And so Paul can go on to say, we are confident of this. I would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. There is nothing that is actually grounding him, keeping him, no goal that he has in this earth.

It does not compare to what he has with the Lord and with his true home with the Lord. And surely that is your goal and mine too as His disciples. It is where we have to learn our true confidence comes from. We always have to have our ultimate home in mind and so we live by faith and to please God. They are one and the same thing.

They go hand in hand. There is no difference. Faith is all about pleasing God and doing that because He has blessed us with His promise of a heavenly home. It gives us a deep, grounded, deep-seated joy within us to anticipate even afflictions that this life and this world will offer us, but it does not rob us of the hope that awaits us in eternity. But Paul does go on to say that our motivation is not just this bright hope for tomorrow, this future hope.

I do not know if you picked it up in the passage, but there is another motivator there and I hope you can see it in the text. It is a very realistic and very sobering reminder of judgment this morning. It is there in verse 10. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. Is our heavenly home dependent on what we do, on how we perform?

No. It is only dependent on what Jesus has done for us. But is what we do dependent on our heavenly home? Yes. A thousand times, yes.

Is salvation determined by what we do? No. But are we judged for what we do? Yes. And Paul wants to remind us to influence us even now that recognising the judgment to come makes a very practical difference to the way we live our lives even now in these earthly tents.

Paul wants to remind us that no matter whether we die or when Jesus comes back again, we all pass before the judgment seat of Christ. We do not forget of course that Christ is the judge who died for the penalty of our sins, that He hands the sentence over for our sins and says, I am going to take it upon myself. But we also do not forget that Christ is a judge who deals with everything, who deals with every sin, every deed. And the point of this passage is not what is going to happen to our souls in between this body and the next. You know, when does the resurrection come? Is it before judgment or after?

It is not about those theological questions. The point is judgment is real and what we do with this life in these temporary bodies really does matter. It cannot earn us our heavenly home. Jesus does that completely. But heaven, our heavenly home, changes our life on the earth even now.

It does so positively because we are longing for it. We want to desire it. We recognise what we have now is not perfect and it does so in other ways because we recognise nothing goes unnoticed by God and what we do today and tomorrow really does count for eternity. So what it boils down to is this and what we must really finish on this morning is that we must set our minds and our hearts on the reality of eternity and heaven, as Colossians reminds us, on things above. The reality is that just as heaven meets earth in the knowledge of our true home with God, so the future meets the present and impacts our lives completely now.

We need to be thinking about this eternal home a lot and perhaps a lot more than we already do. That has been the theme of this series, has it not? Over these last few weeks. How it is that again and again, the Bible, with all its different authors and hundreds and hundreds of years, is about taking us home, taking us back to the garden where God had fellowship with man, where we could walk with Him in the cool of the day, to the tabernacle then the temple and then of course, the Bible will tell us about Jesus whose body became the temple for us, the very dwelling place of God on earth. The Bible is always about heaven meeting earth and it has happened in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Think about that. Heaven came down to earth. Jesus Himself healing diseases, banishing demons, raising the dead, calming the storms. It was all about heaven, that place of perfection, impacting this earth. And Jesus came and the Holy Spirit is poured out to everyone, everywhere.

And so the gospel goes out into all the world and the church grows like wildfire. And again, it is all about heaven meeting earth, about heaven impacting this earth because when heaven impacts the earth, the future meets the present and you and I as Christ's disciples today make a difference. We are Christians. We are Christ's representatives. We are called to bring that perfection of heaven to impact on our lives and in our world today.

The Bible is full of stories about the Christian witness throughout history, the multiplication of disciples who through persecution and all of that come to know and love the Lord so much stronger because they recognise they are not home yet. As we have been saying, none of us are home yet. Heaven is our home and even while we are yet on the earth, Paul says, in some ways, we are clothed with Christ. And in the reading today, heaven meets earth. Right here in this time and in this place, even as we have opened the Bible this morning and heard God speak to us.

The promise of our heavenly home impacts our present reality. It is right here among us now. It is in this moment. We are the people who can do the most earthly good because we are so heavenly minded. Still to come of course, but it is changing us today and we have His Holy Spirit as a deposit guaranteeing what is to come.

Let us thank Him for that in our prayer. Shall we pray? Lord God, You have given us a great and a wonderful salvation in and through the work of our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. This morning, we have come to see another side of that, of the implications that it has for eternity, but also to our living for You day by day. And like Paul the apostle of old, we want to say that we want to live in order to please You, Lord.

Grant us such an awareness of our eternal home in heaven with You that we can impact this world and make a difference in our own lives for You, to please You. Help us to live by faith, only Lord. Grant us spiritual eyes and hearts that know how to see, how to really see this morning, and how to behold the wonder of Your grace and that perfect, perfect home that awaits each and every one of us who knows Your work for us on the cross to be true. Help us to live our lives in order of that, we pray. We ask it for the strength that You give us even day by day.

In the strong name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.