We Have Set Our Sights on the Wrong Horizon

Below is an excerpt from the final chapter of Mark Buchannan's wonderful book The Rest of God - Restoring Your Soul By Restoring Sabbath. The final chapter was entittled "Reflect and Anticipate: Stopping to Glimpse Forever" and it was about setting ourselves to yearn for Heaven. As you can read in some of our responses in this Q & A, our family here in Cebu has been caught with the "anticipation bug" for New Jerusalem of late. We want to go Home.
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Buchannan writes:

"Faith," the writer of Hebrew says, "is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (11:1 NKJV). What he has in mind is, not any earthly hope, but a heavenly one--a city whose architect and builder is God. There Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, cheering and coaxing us on. Faith is clarity about that. It is a tenacious conviction that this world is not enough and was never intended to be. It is a steadfast refusal to seek ultimate things--ultimate pleasure, ultimate fulfillment, ultimate purpose, ultimate understsanding--where God has not laid them. Not one ultimate thing is stored down here. God has kept them for our homecoming, and none can be filched beforehand.

The eclipse of heaven, as one writer calls it, is a massive loss to the contemporary Western church. We have become so earthly minded we're of little heavenly good--or earthly good, for that matter. In fact, the current malaise in the church, the weariness and jadedness we see all over, is I think largely due to this. We have let consumerism tutor the church in its creed of more, better, brighter, faster. So we have fostered expectations that no church, no home group, no pulpit, no band of brothers, no brand of worship, no conference, no Bible school can ever deliver. The shortfall between what we dream and what we get is vast. All is weighed and found wanting in our sight.

Only we set our sights on the wrong horizon.

The truth is, we're always a bit restless. We're supposed to be. This is not a flaw in our faith, it is faith's substance. It is a divine ruse to keep us from making permanent settlement this side of eternity. Our citizenship is in heaven. Between now and then, here and there, we live as sojourners, Bedouins, exiles, tent dwellers. There is always a litte sand in the sheets. There is always a sense that over there is better than right here. If ever we achieved perfect Sabbath here, unbroken rest and restfulness, then the eternal rest that Sabbath hints at would become irrevelant.

(part 2 to be continued)