House

“Why is it that you were looking for me?  Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house?” Luke 2:49

House – This “house” is empty.  In fact, the word “house” in this verse is not really there at all.  By inserting it, we might get the idea that there is part of life that is God’s and part that is ours.  What a mistake!  Literally, the Greek says, “I must be in My Father’s these.”  It is a very unusual sentence.  We add other words to make sense of it in English.  But perhaps we are too anxious to fill in the gaps.  Perhaps what Jesus is saying is considerably deeper than we imagine a twelve year old might say.

This verse is about the scope of our commitment.  Do we have a spiritual part of life and a separate business part of life?  Does Jesus give you advice on your P&L?  Does He interview your new hires?  Is He there at the planning table?

If we take this statement of Jesus and fill in the gap, we will be lead in the direction of seeing his commitment as “part” of his life, the part that he committed to his Father’s house or his Father’s affairs.  But what if we read the verse as it is?  What if we recognize that it is a statement about existence, not a statement about partitions?  The meaning of this odd Greek construction must be supplied from the context.  That is exactly how we should look at our own servant leader lives.  We need to let God supply the meaning to our lives from the context.

There are no partitions of involvement in the life of a servant leader.  There is only “my Father’s these”.  All of who I am is about what God wants.  The context of my life supplies the meaning.  Life is not about you.   It’s about abiding under Him and under the others we serve.  We know that it’s about everything we have, everything we are and everything we hope to be.  We know that it’s about perfect completion of His purposes.  And now we see that it’s about context.  What is the context of your life?  Is it all about God?