Home in Scripture
Christian songs speak a lot about "going home." In fact, one of my favorite old hymns is "Going Home" because the music is so haunting. But what does the Bible really say about home?
The home in the Bible is culturally a place for hospitality, privacy, protection, and Bible teaching. This is not a simple division; it says a great deal that we have missed in modern American culture. As a place of hospitality, we are supposed to welcome; as a place of privacy and protection, we are supposed to exclude a lot more than we do (mostly media, I think), and as a place for Bible teaching, we have to engage in meaningful conversations with children and spouses as well as others.
Home has great emotional meaning for us; it is more than what Robert Frost said about it, as the place where they have to take you in ("Death of the Hired Man"). Below I have listed key verses in the New Testament on HOME.
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Hebrews 11:9
II Peter 3:12
The home in the Bible is culturally a place for hospitality, privacy, protection, and Bible teaching. This is not a simple division; it says a great deal that we have missed in modern American culture. As a place of hospitality, we are supposed to welcome; as a place of privacy and protection, we are supposed to exclude a lot more than we do (mostly media, I think), and as a place for Bible teaching, we have to engage in meaningful conversations with children and spouses as well as others.
Home has great emotional meaning for us; it is more than what Robert Frost said about it, as the place where they have to take you in ("Death of the Hired Man"). Below I have listed key verses in the New Testament on HOME.
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John 16:32
32
"But a time is coming, and has come, when you will be scattered, each to
his own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is
with me.
II Corinthians 5: 6 Therefore
we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we
are away from the Lord.
7 We live by faith, not by sight.
8 We are confident, I say, and would
prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
9 So we make it our goal to please him,
whether we are at home in the body or away from it.
9
By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign
country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of
the same promise.
13
But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a
new earth, the home of righteousness.
In the ultimate sense, then, heaven is home, although that is not an oft-repeated phrase for heaven.
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