House

We own a house. I still can't quite grasp that fact, but we own a house. Okay, so, well, the bank owns most of it. But our names are on the mortgage of the house. What is an ordinary thing for most people in their 20's or 30's has now become our norm in our late 40's.

However, with the reality of home ownership has also come the headaches of home ownership. Since we took possession about four months ago, we've had a number of things that have broken, needed repair—one of which is a huge deal. And none of them were things we could say, "Let's wait on that for a while." Those are the moments we most miss having Trustees to call and say, "Can you fix this?" Instead we either go online and find out how to fix it ourselves (thank you, Google) or we call a repairman and invite him (or her) to come into our home and do the repair.

And all of that got to me to thinking in a new way about a passage from 1 Peter that I've read many times. Peter tells those who are "exiles" that they are being built into a house. He says it this way: "You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 2:5). I've kind of glossed over that "spiritual house" business before. But what if Peter didn't just choose that word by accident? What if, instead, he chose that word because of what houses represent, what they are like?

Houses are places for people to dwell in, to have fellowship in, to share life in. Jesus wants to come and live within us, dwell within us, have fellowship with us and share life with us. He wants to live in our lives—in our hearts, as we often put it (see Ephesians 3:17).

Houses are places of protection from the storm and enable us to go through the storms unaffected. We apparently had a storm or at least a strong wind last night; I could tell by the fact that my recycling was all over my yard and the neighbor's yard this morning (and it was wet). But I didn't hear it. I was safe inside my house. We can stand strong in the midst of the storms of life because our spiritual house is built on a solid foundation (check out Matthew 7:24-27).

And houses are, as we've learned, places that need repair. Things break. Things don't work like it's expected they will. And sometimes we can repair it while other times we need someone to come in from the outside and help us fix it. We get broken. Our lives face obstacles that cause damage, hurt, and woundedness. Sometimes (rarely) we can fix those things ourselves—"pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps," as it were. But most of the time, we need the Great Repairman (or the "Great Physician") to come in and do the repair work. Sometimes that means tearing something out. Sometimes it means a minor remodel. But on this we can count: the end result will be so much better than what we started with...if we let him do the work.

You are a spiritual house, being built by Jesus. What is he working on in your building plan today?


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