“For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding” (I Chronicles 29:15).

These are surprising words, coming as they do from the great and wealthy king David. Nevertheless, the words are intensely realistic. David’s power and wealth would last only a few more years and he would soon be so forgotten by the world that modern evolutionary archaeologists doubted (until very recently when an artifact bearing his name was excavated) that he had ever existed.

What was true of David is surely at least as true for us today. Even such great men as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). The Apostle Peter also noted that all true Christians were “strangers and pilgrims” who should, therefore, “abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul” (I Peter 2:11). And James, a leader in the early church, said: “For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away” (James 4:14). Even Moses, who lived 120 years, acknowledged that our lives are “soon cut off, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).

In the meantime, while we are sojourners for a little while on Earth, “our conversation [literally, ‘citizenship’] is in heaven.” Furthermore, we have been sent here by our heavenly king for a great purpose, to serve as “ambassadors for Christ” (II Corinthians 5:20) to a lost world.

The Son of God sent by His Father “that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:17), paid the price to redeem the world, and returned to heaven. He now says: “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you” (John 20:21). That is why we are here. He has “committed unto us the word of reconciliation,” and we are to beseech lost men and women to “be ye reconciled to God” (II Corinthians 5:19,20). HMM