Coming Home (Genesis 35-36) [Jay Thomas]

Have you ever returned home? By home, I mean where you were raised, and all that represents: your old house, schools, hang out haunts, college campus? I bet a flood of memories come back. Some of us did not know Jesus back then and we can feel the regrets and loss with those memories. However, as it often happens, God meets us in that nostalgia and He reminds us of the intervening work. His grace. His providence. His guiding of our lives. We came to those places as new people and we then get reinvigorated to press on. You see, those place represent our earthly origin stories, but in seeing those places in the big picture of God's gospel story, we see that home is actually ahead, the place God is moving us, as He works into us the glorious truth that we do not belong to a certain city, a house, a high school, a clique, a former athletic prowess, but rather we belong to Jesus. Our identity is Jesus. And Jesus is our home. Genesis 35-36 is that kind of story, that invites us into its pages.