I Peter 2:11 “Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against your soul.”
Hebrews 13:14 “For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”
I John 4:4 “Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.”
II Corinthians 5:20 “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.”
On July 24th, 1969, the Apollo astronauts returned from their historic mission. After reentry into the earth’s atmosphere and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, they were picked up by a U.S. Navy Sea King helicopter and airlifted to the USS Hornet aircraft carrier. They had made it home … almost.
In additional to the transit from the Pacific Ocean to the United States, the astronauts had to endure another portion of the mission before being released to see their families and begin their victory tour – they had to be quarantined.
For the next 21 days, the astronauts’ home was the Mobile Quarantine Facility where they were carefully observed and studied to confirm that they didn’t bring back a lunar pathogen that could destroy the human race. Though such a thing was calculated as highly improbable, its consequences were so severe that the quarantine practice was deemed necessary. After all, the astronauts had walked through a land that was not their home, where they were strangers and pilgrims. Their human bodies would be unprepared for the possible environmental factors that awaited the opportunity to war against their immune systems.
Sometimes Christians feel that we are strangers in a foreign land. In reality, we should because we are. We are strangers and pilgrims. We have no continuing city in this world. Our human bodies face the scourge of sin that wars against our immune systems. We seek the completion of our mission and our return to our permanent home.
Yet, we are not to quarantine ourselves from the needy foreign land that surrounds us. We are to step out onto the alien soil day-by-day and live as ambassadors representing our home and our king. We are to live with a firm knowledge and confidence that greater is he that is in us, than he that is in the world.
PLEASE PRAY FOR A RESOLUTE SPIRIT TO STEP OUT INTO OUR NEEDY WORLD AND REPRESENT CHRIST. We must never live in our version of a Mobile Quarantine Facility. Instead, we are to regularly wipe the foreign dust off our shoes as we walk through this alien planet day-by-day.
