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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 28, 1869

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 34, No. 14.

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HOME.

All through the Scripture, Heaven is spoken of in this strain, “Thou art my hiding place.” “He will hide me in his pavilion.” Home is a place that we can run into and be safe, or in which we can enjoy ourselves; thus a pavilion is spoken of, a place of rest and joy.
Again in Psalm xc, God is said to be our everlasting “dwelling-place,” and in Corinthians we have the word “at home with the Lord.”
Why do we long for this rest? From what does this aching void arise in our hearts? From the fact that we are not “at home.” Our members are here on the earth, while our life is hid with Christ in God; our real existence is hidden with God. The blessedness of being saved is, that we lose altogether our connection with earth, we get life with Jesus, secure, because none can touch the life of Christ. We are translated out of the power of darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. “We walk by faith, not by sight.”
It is remarkable how that verse comes in, 2 Cor. v, 6, 8. “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord; for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.” We do not walk as others around us who must see everything before they believe, who must grasp everything by their senses, and must touch, taste, and handle. Therefore the apostle says twice, “we are confident.”
What gives this strong, unbroken confidence? Just this one fact, that “we walk by faith, not by sight.” We speak of things we have never realized by our senses. We have never seen the Lord, we have never witnessed anything of glory. Have we ever been in a place like Heaven, so that we can form any idea of its beauty? No, we know nothing except by faith, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” “Therefore we are always confident, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.”
“At home with the Lord.” Blessed, blessed thought! We are inseparable from Christ; our life is hid with him in God, because he died for us on the cross. He linked himself on with us in our sins, he bore the judgment instead of us, he endured God’s wrath upon the tree, and in the resurrection we are united to him, for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. We are inseparable from Christ—he cannot part with us for a moment, for, were he doing so, he would lose some of the joy of his heart.
We are now with him by faith, and soon we shall in reality be “forever with the Lord,” an eternal word which runs on and on, “forever with the Lord.”
Let us remember Jesus in his death on the cross, bearing our innumerable sins, then taking us into union with himself in the resurrection, and so let us be separate from the world. Let us remember his death “till he come.” Wherever we are, let nothing make us forget it.
There is nothing to faith between the cross of Jesus and his coming again.
We are one with him, and soon, very soon, we shall be like him, changed into his image on the resurrection morning, when indeed with one voice we shall shout, “Forever with the Lord.”—British Herald.