“Home” has always had a special meaning for people; it was the place you generally slept; the place where you generally felt safe; the place where you could mostly be yourself. But now it has become something different. “Home” is no longer the place you leave to go out and conduct life. It is, instead, the singular place. And in this singular place, it is as if a gigantic “reset” button is being pushed on our lives.

The entire Christian dynamic is one of loss and gain. As Christians, we are constantly called to give certain things up – to lose them. But that loss is only part of the story, for Jesus steps into whatever gap is left by that which we let go for His sake and fills it up. Consider the great call of discipleship Jesus gave in Luke 9:

Then he said to them all, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

There are many things we can take from this verse, but chief among them is that the road of following Jesus is fundamentally about self-denial. We are, in our sin, worshippers of ourselves. We have become our own gods, choosing whatever way seems best and most advantageous to us at a given moment. And to follow Jesus means rejecting this kind of self-lordship. It means losing our lives. But lest we think that Jesus is anti-personal fulfillment, we need only keep reading to what He said next:

“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will save it.”

Read More