Home Place

Home Place

12/11/18

Have you ever thought that your heart is the representative of your home place?  How do we view our heart, do we even recognize its condition and functional status?  The heart is the center of our existence and is the one system that dictates our spiritual lives and communication with God.  For many of us, we may know about a physical home place that we remember but do not recognize the inner one that drives our lives to return to in order to satisfy our innermost desires and longings.  It is this desire that God placed within our lives so that we never have the ability to stop seeking out the truth about our connectivity with our Creator.  However, the world has distorted this inner truth so much and due to the lack of understanding of the function of such heart functions, we have allowed this destructive process to continue for such a long time.  God still calls us through this connection and wants us to connect with Him again and if we do return to His Word and His Ways we shall see a tremendous turnaround in our inner lives but if we elect not to choose God and stay with the world our hearts shall continue its slide and will not stop until it hits the pit of devastation.

With my family being in the ministry, it is difficult for me to say that I really have a place that I can call home or a place where I spent most of my younger years.  So, up until this day I have a place in my heart for the state of Texas and for what it is worth I still call that state my home.  I have mentioned this process before and have mentioned that my heart has turned toward Colorado since I have lived here for the longest period of time in my life.  This is a true statement and I love Colorado very much but it is the reference point of having a home place that I could mention if the subject was ever brought up.  I know that all of us take pride in the fact that we have a home place that we can think about and then talk about even though most of us who have lived in one place for an extended period of time believe we need to vacate that town for various reasons.  But we need to understand that where our home place is it is that place where our heart comes from and where our home is.  “Home is where the heart is” is a famous saying that many of us have used in our lives or have heard it in some setting.  Your home place is exactly where your heart is and that is the message that God wants us to know today because if we do not know where our heart is located then how can we effectively live a complete and whole life?

It is evident that God cares about where you set up residence on the physical aspect of your life but He is most concerned with where your heart is located and what condition it is in.  As we read in the Scriptures, the entire Bible is filled with people moving around and sometimes taking trips for years at a time in order for their hearts to become settled strong enough.  God understands that the heart that He has given you beats to a specific rhythm and one that has a required number of beats and then it is time to end the condition or find some other method of support, the same goes for your spiritual heart as well for it is the organ that is in contact with God and is in need of its Creator as its source.  While many of the verses and passages that the Bible refers to the heart may be presented on the physical aspect, the entire concept of such presentations should be indicative of what the inner heart reflects, for it is the inner heart that relates to the outside world.  It is this aspect of humans that many people do not recognize is represented and more importantly if this specific portion is not understood by the masses then it is easy to accept the fact that we do not know exactly what is going on around our lives and thus limit us to the superficial layers of our lives instead of the spiritual.  We can allow the physicians to use their knowledge and skills to heal or to fix our physical heart ailments but if we do not allow the eternal Physician heal our inner spiritual hearts our entire life and our existence will never be fulfilled and in turn be in vain.

The two passages that God has given us for this article and both have basically shown us the same types of condition the heart and how it has transformed into the sinful and separated entity from God.  Both passages also serve as examples of how we forget to examine our hearts on a continual basis and the importance of doing such a practice, for if we did and then allowed God to take away what He deems is ugliness maybe we would not have to witness and experience these situations then suffer such results that could have a significant consequence in our lives.  Once we have exampled this detail about our hearts it shows our enemy that we have ignorantly become a volatile host and will accept any type of variation since we do not recognize what truth is and is not.  When we allow God to infiltrate our hearts in the way that only He can, He promises us freedom like we have never known before, but when not allowed the only thing He can do is sit and watch His beloved creations suffer at the hands of sin.

Genesis 2 & 3 provide us with the first of the two passages that God wants to show us and once again we will look at how God created our hearts in one manner but because of the issues of the world that we allow into our lives our focus changes.  One of the things that we cannot deny is the attitude on how Adam looked at Eve in chapter 2 of this book for verse 23 states in partial: “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh:  ”There can be no misunderstanding about how Adam felt about his new woman, for he recognized her as his flesh and bone and no one can get any closer than that to another person.  But some things change and we see this in Genesis 3:12 states in partial as follows: “And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me”  It is this statement by Adam that concludes that there was a huge shift in how he looked and viewed the woman which can only be recognized as one that was not on the same level as Genesis 2:23.  So, what occurred here and why all of a sudden did Adam’s perception and belief in his bride change?  Worldly attitudes and attitudes can only be the answer for God shall never establish something and then its status change for the lesser occur it is not in His power or authority to create such a thing.

The establishment of a worldly pattern is such a fact, a pattern and can only become an issue if allowed to fester within our lives for an extended period of time.  The next passage that God shows us is in Ecclesiastes 2:1-6 and if you wish one can include the entire chapter here because it deals with the vanity that the heart harbors and just how much this vanity will consume if allowed to stay.  I would urge you to study this entire chapter and spend enough time in its content in order to grasp the magnitude that it is describing.  The first three verses of this chapter deal strictly with personal vanities and then tie them in with verses 4-6 which deal with “great” works that humanity and the world deem as important and together will receive the best honors that any civilization can produce and then hand out.  But when you look at these six verses one cannot help but recognize that every single descriptive word here describes nothing but self-gratification and glory, God is not mentioned in any portion of these six verses and if you study the remaining verses of this chapter no real mention of God living within the hearts of those described can be found.  And at the end of this very heart-wrenching chapter, in the last verse, it gives us exactly what God hands down to His children who desire to have Him in their hearts and not the world.

These two passages beg us to ask ourselves exactly what are we harboring within our home place.  Your heart is the most important feature your existence can produce it is the centerpiece of your house and the most desired portion of your life by two eternal entities.  If the house is weak one Ruler shall do everything He can in order for you to understand how to make it strong and prosperous the correct way, the other ruler shall tempt you in buying up useless real estate around you with the promise of vanity purchases that at first are given easily but eventually become weights of burdens that hang around your neck like a yoke, but you look glitzy.  This type of glamour looking heart may look tough on the outside but with all of the “shields” around the surface nothing can get inside where the actual beating and function occurs which can lead to only one thing a blackened and decaying heart that will eventually rot its way outward and end up stopping all life that you need for existence.  This is the prime example of a weak or compromised heart for it does not know what is good for its rhythm and what is bad and can only produce one outcome, death.  This is a wretched old home place that the world will lie and say to you that all looks good, but inside you are a time bomb waiting to explode and your life being over both physically and eternally.

A few years back I watched a documentary series on the dust bowl that plagued our land for a long period.  The call to move westward as one of great magnitude and took guts for people to move across the country without modern day advances in moving and travel.  As the soil began to revolt against its own positions on the ground and fly in the winds, it was said that this wind and systems would carry dirt from Colorado and land in other states such as Kansas or Oklahoma, or in other originating directions as well.  But from whatever direction the dirt would blow it would always come through the window seals of the houses or from the cracks in the floors or even from under the door.  However the dirt came inside it was the fact that it came inside even though the defenses were up and in place, it found its way in and then started building up not only on the inside of the physical house but also invaded the inside of the humans’ bodies.  It was what was building up inside the humans that became dangerous to life for the lungs and heart need clean blood pumping in order to effectively and efficiently complete their job and if these standards are weakened in any way we all know that no matter how strong we may believe we are our body’s shall give way to the mess and cease to operate in a normal pattern.  It was this reason that so many people did not make it out alive when the dust bowl storms finally subsided and we can see quite a parallel to the spiritual aspect of things as well for if we try and place our own defenses up against the dust bowl winds of our enemy alone it will only be a matter of time before the junk that he spreads will infiltrate our spiritual hearts enough to render us lower than God’s established standards.

We have been blessed with a wonderful house that has a great foundation that was truly fashioned in good taste and building and while there are a few areas that one can feel the outside air coming in those areas are few and far between and are not considered to be hazardous by any means.  A few years ago, we found out that we had a mouse in the house and the only way we figured this out is that one night as we were watching a program on TV, both my wife and I saw it quickly scamper from one side of the room to the door that led to the crawl space, which was only about two feet or so.  We paused the movie and began searching for this little rodent and it seemed like the thing just disappeared, but we found a tiny hole of where the old cable TV used to run in and could only imagine that it was at this place that the mouse gained access.  I stood there for a second or two in amazement trying to grasp exactly what that mouse had to do with its body in order to go back and forth through this tiny opening then my wife hit me and told me to stop standing there and to find the thing as soon as possible.  We traced the mouse’s trail and found where it had entered, placed poison in its wake and within a few hours we never saw the mouse again nor have we witnessed one again unto this day; hopefully, it shall remain as such.

How many petty things do we get caught up in that draws our attention and focus from God and His Ways?  Pettiness only grows and goes in one direction if it is allowed to live within our lives, just ask the Early Church members; you can read about them in the epistles of the New Testament.  Through this pettiness growth period, we find that the hold that is present from the world has taken roots within our heart and really has no intention of giving up its ground that has legal rights over.  One of the best biblical scenarios we have that provide us with how this fight occurs is when Jesus goes into the Temple and overturns the moneychanger tables and demands from the priests why they have allowed this action to take hold in His Father’s house.  The moneychangers had permission to be there from those who controlled the Temple so they had legal rights to be there, it is the same Kingdom principle when we allow the world access to our heart because we voluntarily give the world and its ruler access and the legality to be there.

It is a guarantee that the moneychangers inside the Temple had no clue that it was a grave error for them to be in there, but the priests did yet they allowed the process to occur and then become a welcoming custom.  The Temple is God’s home place just as our hearts are His home place as well and if we allow and then continue to support the presence of the world in our hearts He shall not fight for His return until we ask Him back into our lives and then look out, the tables will be overturned again and the Temple cleansed according to His Ways and not the ways of the defeated.  It is easy for us to become caught up with the glitzy sides of the world and to be convinced that there is nothing wrong with their presence in our lives, but what we do not realize is that if we allow the world and its products into our lives then it is the spiritual access that we give it that will grow roots and begin to influence our lives in the opposite direction of God.

If our attention is distracted enough it is even easier for the world to take a hold in our hearts, for when our eyes and hearts are focused on other things around us there is no way possible that we can demonstrate God’s Word to its fullest which is the key ingredient for us to begin our downfall.  Look at all of the spaces that we face every day and how many choices we have in front of us that can influence our inner and spiritual elections.  Church, the question now turns toward you and this question needs to be asked concerning how many distractions we have allowed to turn our heads and heats from the eternal truth of the Word of God.  We are in the same position of being fooled as anyone else that takes a breath, but we have a true defensive mechanism that is at our disposal yet it seems like our authority that the Bible says we have is shrinking on a constant basis yet increasing according to the standards of the world.  This is the clue that we are not seeing and it is the very clue that God has been doing His best in trying to grab our attention with, for it is the single clue that says we are not right with Him and we need to change our heart direction before it is too late and God has to once again walk into our Temple and clean house.  As of now we still have this opportunity to allow God to clean up our home place before He must do it on His own terms, which onion do you wish to be, the slice or the peeled?

DLB