Foreigners By Design

Acts 8:1-8

A great wave of persecution began that day, sweeping over the church in Jerusalem; and all the believers except the apostles were scattered through the regions of Judea and Samaria. (Acts 8:1)

SCRIPTURE DEPICTS CITIZENS of heaven as foreigners, strangers, aliens, nomads, and other descriptions to distinguish us from a purely earthly existence. Such words are at times comforting and other times unsettling. They remind us that we are rooted in eternity, but they also remind us that we don’t quite fit in here. And sometimes our foreign status is pressed upon us in extreme ways; persecutions have broken out since the earliest days of the church and continue in many countries today. Millions of martyrs testify to the incompatibility between the Kingdom of Heaven and earthly agendas.

As discomforting as that is, our alien status is by design. We see in Scripture and history that virtually every time God has scattered his people (or rather allowed an oppressor to scatter them), it has somehow advanced his Kingdom. This is one of the ways God gets his salt and light into the farthest reaches of the world. He is not the author of persecution, of course; but he has always demonstrated an ability to incorporate even the worst of human decisions into his overarching purposes, planning for them and compensating for them ahead of time. The dysfunction of patriarchal families, the decisions of evil kings, the persecutions of his people—all have served his purposes. He knows how to accomplish his plan in spite of—even in conjunction with—the tragedies of life.

Don’t despise your alien status in this world. There will be times when you feel at home, when things are going well and you seem to fit in. Thank God for them. But thank him also for the ways he accomplishes his purposes through the hard rejections and subtle exclusions you may experience. They will ultimately serve his purposes, as well as yours. Your mission in life should never be compromised by the world’s resistance to it.

{Lord, give me the endurance to persevere through hard times and injustices and the perspective to see your higher purposes in them. Make me fruitful regardless of the condition of the soil I’m planted in. Accomplish your purposes in me and through me. Amen.