“Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,To God’s elect, exiles, scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia,” NIV

The other night I had a dream. I was in a city. I don’t know which one. Perhaps it was a composite of several. But I had this thought, ‘I really like it here!’ There was, perhaps, a sense of being reluctant to leave the familiar behind. However, in the next moment I found myself thinking something like this: ‘If I were in heaven I would realise that it is far better than anything I’ve known on earth.’

Peter says God’s people are ‘’strangers in the world.’’ Paul writes that ‘’our citizenship is in heaven’’ (Philippians 3:20). We have been born from above. As I often say, ‘We don’t belong here, and we won’t be long here. Not really. Life is fleeting. It is, as the Bible tells us, just a breath; it quickly disappears like the morning mist.

C.S. Lewis writes in ‘Mere Christianity’: ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.’

PRAYER: ‘O Lord, you alone know what lies before me today; grant that in every hour I may stay close to you. Let me be in the world, but not of it. Let me use this world without abusing it…Do not let me embark on anything today that is not in line with your will for my life, nor shrink from any sacrifice that your will demands. Suggest, direct, and guide every movement of my mind; for my Lord Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.’ (From ‘A diary of private prayer’ by John Baillie).