He makes His home in you

It is the last night, and the men around the table are frightened. Jesus has just told them He is going somewhere they cannot follow, and the room has the brittle quiet of people who sense the ground shifting. So He gives them a promise, and it runs in exactly the opposite direction from the one they expect. They are bracing to be left behind, to have to find their own long way home to God across a great distance. Instead He says something that turns the whole geography inside out. If anyone loves me, He tells them, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him. Read it twice, because the direction is startling. Not: you must climb up to where God lives. But: God is coming down to where you live. The maker of the stars, proposing to move in, to unpack, to settle into the cramped and ordinary rooms of a single human life and stay. The psalmist had it half right ages before, singing that the Lord had been the dwelling place of His people for all generations. True. But here is the other half, spoken in an upper room hours before the cross: the dwelling place wants to dwell in you.

You have probably pictured reconnection as the long walk home to God, you traveling toward Him, you finding your way back. And that is real; He has been the dwelling place of His people for all generations, the shelter you return to. But do not miss the direction Jesus runs the promise. He and the Father, He says, will come to you and make their home with you. Not visit. Not check in. Make a home, the way people move in for good. The God of the universe proposing to settle into your one small, unremarkable life and stay there. Sit with how scandalous that is. You are not only coming home to God; God is coming home to you. Your ordinary days, the unglamorous kitchen of your actual existence, become the address where heaven keeps house. So you do not have to make yourself grand enough to be worth the visit. He is not looking for a palace. He is looking to come in, sit down, and stay, in the home that is simply you.