Home.
That word will conjure up different things for each of us. Smells, memories, feelings, longings.
We want our children to see our home as their home. And as life goes on, we hope that they will still look forward to spending time with us, and that there’ll be a place in their heart for our home.
But the question we want to consider today is this: Can we do anything to help our children love home? And more importantly – should we? The answer, by the way is yes. But perhaps not in the way you might expect.
What Is Home?
As an adult reading this, where do you consider ‘home’ to be?
Some of us find that question easier to answer than others.
Some have moved around a lot in life, living in different parts of the UK or the world. For some, it’s hard to pin down that one place that you can truly call home.
But even if you’ve always lived here in the place you live now, you might still find it hard to say what is home.
Is it your parents home? The place where you spent your childhood and maybe have many happy memories.
Is it the place where you live now, your house that you’ve put time and effort in to making your own.
Behind all of this is a deeper question.
What is home?
What makes something feel like home? What makes one place rather than another significant to us?
I’d suspect there are lots of ways you could answer that.
It’s the place where we feel safe.
It’s the place where the things that surround us bring joy and remind us of something that matters to us.
It’s the place where we feel we can be ourselves, and feel like we belong.
Home is where we’re loved.
Home is a hugely significant theme in the Bible, even if doesn’t necessarily always use that word.
We think that most people reading this post desire after that sense of home. It’s a human desire. We want that sense of safety and warmth and belonging.
The Bible’s explanation for why we want is because humanity was created that way.
The Bible’s Story Of Home
At the beginning of the Bible, God makes a perfect world, and he puts people into it. He creates a home for them which he calls Eden, and it’s a home that fulfils all of those desires we have for home.
It’s safe.
It’s a place where the original people, Adam and Eve, belong. And they know they belong there, because they live there with God who walks and talks with them and makes it very clear to them that they are loved and that they matter to him.
It’s a physical world, and the stuff around them brings joy – over and over again God declares the stuff good. He creates plants and declares them good. Animals – good. Sun, moon and stars – good. And the Bible makes it clear that the stuff is there to be enjoyed, and to remind them of something that matters to them, just like the stuff in our home does.
The stuff of the physical world speaks to them about the God who made them – everything around them act as signposts to the glory of God, as Psalm 19 says:
“The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the works of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech”.
Eden is home. And humanity was created to live in the security, belonging and joy of that physical world that could be called home in it’s truest sense.
And the goal of God’s creation, the thing that humanity is called to do in creation, is rest with God. God makes a world in which we can rest, secure and loved, with him. That’s what we’re made for. Home.
And because of that, that’s why home is something that matters to us. That’s why we all have this innate sense of home and why we long for it.
And of course, for many of us longing is exactly the right word to use when it comes to thinking about home. Home is more of a sense of something we don’t have than we do. We get glimpses of experiencing home, but often it seems just out of our grasp, or seems to be something from a distant memory rather than a present reality.
And even for those of us who do enjoy a sense of home… we still feel frustrations and a desire for something more.
When Home Went Wrong
The reason that the Bible gives for that frustration is the fall.
The Bible describes humanity as turning it’s back on God, and God’s response to that was to make Adam and Eve leave Eden.
Eden could no longer be home.
But that’s not the end of the story. God doesn’t leave humanity without hope. Through Abraham and the patriarchs God makes promises. A significant thread to those promises is a promise of home.
God promises Abraham that his descendents will enjoy a land that he will them, in which they will be blessed and find rest. He promises home.
But as history unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that Canaan, the land God showed to Abraham, was never going to be the Eden-like home that we all want.
Eventually Jesus comes onto the scene. He, and the other New Testament writers, don’t abandon this search for home. In fact, they show that what was promised to Abraham was always meant to be greater than Canaan (Rom 4:13).
To truly restore home, what is needed is a new creation. A new heavens and a new earth where all of the brokenness of the world will be undone.
In his resurrected body, Jesus begins that new creation.
And as Jesus begins to rescue a people for himself, he starts to build his new creation further (2 Cor 5:17).
The new creation is here in you today if you are a Christian. Home is here, in the now.
But only in part. We live in the now but not yet. As we’ve seen, the new creation (home) is in one sense here now. But it’s also not yet here.
We live in the not yet of home too.
It’s not fully here yet in that our physical bodies are still marred by the effects of living in a broken world – the beginning of 2 Corinthians 5 makes that clear.
But it’s not just our bodies that feel the effect of sin.
The whole world groans under the effect of sin too. It is still broken, and it is still not the place where God walks among his people.
This world, as it is, isn’t home. Not if you’re a Christian. We are in part a new creation now. But we are not yet home.
We live in the now but not yet.
The Bible describes us as exiles. We’re living in a foreign land, away from home.
Hebrews 13:14 says it like this:
“For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come”.
And so in one sense, we’re just like Abraham and the people of Israel. We rest on the promises of God for a land to come, just like they did. But we have even greater confidence that God will fulfil that promise, because he’s already done all that’s needed to secure it for us.
Now back to the topic at hand.
Should We Help Our Children To Love Home?
Well of course a good parent will try to create a safe, comfortable space for their child(ren) – we want to do that.
But we want to suggest to you that there’s another home to get your children to love. And that home isn’t here.
To love our children well, we want them to recognise that this world can never be all they want it to be. Not least because they do not see the Lord face to face, but for all sorts of other reasons too. We want our children to have an appropriate sense of grief at the brokenness of this temporal home, and we want them to have a deep ache for their home to come. We want them to know that they live in the now but not yet.
So we want to learn to speak of it often, with joy. As they come against brokenness in their own lives or in the world around them, we want to remind them of why things are as they are, and point them to the time when the brokenness will be fixed.
We want to invite you to do the same, with your children.