November 29

Home vs. Hotel 

 And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.  ––Hebrews 13:12-14

The world is but a great inn, where we are to stay a night or two, and be gone; what madness it is to get our heart upon our inn, as to forget our home!

––Thomas Watson, Puritan preacher and author

For those of us men who travel we have found, sometimes, hotel rooms have an allure of pleasure: away from home in a place where much of the things we would enjoy in secret are readily available through virtual and live temptations.  This is all provided by the culture we live in, our feelings, and the availability of the situation. In many ways the world we live in is our hotel and not our home, as so aptly put by seventeenth century English Puritan Thomas Watson. 

Jesus came from God as a citizen of heaven. He longed for the time He would return home.  His cure for worldliness was always bringing to mind His true home, the eternal place He knew was far more glorious than whatever He was giving up for it. He impresses upon others His personal knowledge of heaven and His awareness of its promise for all who would believe.

And by Jesus’ choices to risk earth for heaven, we got a clear picture of who He was and where He was headed, making what He might have possessed instead or what was said about Him by people pale in significance. Everyone who Christ encountered saw it, that firm gaze on an eternal kingdom that made it easy to say “no thanks” to every temptation away from His true home.

Jesus was not worldly, because this world was not His home, nor His hope. 

God’s man, like the God-Man, risks forceful choices in the direction of his ultimate hope of heaven. 

Thank You, Father, for the clear logic and answer to the temptations we face.