ALIENS

I enjoy listening to the songs of the '70s. I especially relate to those songs that speak of a yearning for love, lost love and the pain of emptiness when that love is missing. They resonate with my own heart these days as I deeply yearn for my heavenly home and the fullness of God's love and my complete redemption from sin and this sinful world. But that fullness must await God's time.
In a conversation last week the word alien came up and I have been thinking of it since that day. Peter says, "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul." (1 Peter 2.11) And Paul writes, "So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God...". (Ephesians 2.19) I am a citizen of heaven and with each passing day this world becomes more alien to me and I feel more like an alien in it. As I look at this world's vain ideas and aimless goals, its degenerating morality and mindless entertainments, its seeking to fix man and ecology with more money and education to the point of bankruptcy with no success possible, its whining of victimism and entitlement, its narcissism and self-focused consumption, I know I am an alien to this world and it makes my heart deeply long for home.
Lord Jesus, help me to take the grace you provide to live another day through this empty and broken alien world knowing that my citizenship is in heaven, until that day when I am called to enter into your presence forever more.

 Our Father longs in his heart to bring more people into his kingdom and so for that purpose and to encourage those who belong to the Father I remain until God calls me home and my heart is fully satisfied in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. See Philippians 1.21-26
I pray that being an alien in this world may be more to you than a fact you know and say you believe, but a transforming heart reality in your life.