He makes His home in you
The God who moves in
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.
“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word... and we will come to him, and make our home with him.”
— Jesus, in the upper room — John 14:23 (WEB)
“Lord, you have been our dwelling place for all generations.”
Reconnect is a mutual at-homeness. You dwell in God, who has been your shelter across all generations, and God, astonishingly, comes to dwell in you. This phase re-roots you in a two-way home: not only your long journey back toward Him, but His coming down to settle into the ordinary rooms of your life. The far side of upheaval is not just finding the way home. It is discovering that home has come to 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 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, settling into the unglamorous kitchen of your actual existence.
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.
Frame the faith only as people straining upward toward a far-off God and the Church misses half of what Jesus promised, settling into a religion of distance, ascent, and intermediaries. He described a home that runs both ways: His people dwell in God, and God comes to dwell in them. Pentecost is precisely this, heaven taking up residence in an ordinary, frightened people. Across history the Body has come alive again whenever it recovered the nearness it had let grow distant. As the recurring upheaval clears away the machinery of a faith kept far off, what it uncovers is staggering proximity. Before a watching world, the Church is not a crowd reaching toward a remote God but a people in whom that God has chosen to make His home.
Homes you build can burn, and shelters you trust can be torn down. What holds is a God who has been the dwelling place of His people for all generations and who now comes to make His home in them. Heaven has taken an address inside you and does not intend to move out. That two-way home does not depend on the worthiness of the house.
- Have I imagined reconnection only as my journey toward God, and missed His journey toward me?
- What in my ordinary life have I assumed was too unremarkable for God to want to live in?
- If heaven has made its home in me, what would I no longer need to prove or perform?
Lord, I have pictured the whole road as mine to walk, the long climb back to where You live. Thank You that You turned it around, that You and the Father come to make a home with me. Settle into the ordinary rooms of my life and stay. Let me dwell in You as my shelter, and marvel that You would dwell in me. Amen.