Who Owns Your House?

Before I moved my blog to this site, I wrote about living in 21 houses during the course of my marriage. After that, I started thinking about the circumstances of those varied homes. Five of them were homes that we (and the bank) owned and the other sixteen were rented.

A person has a far different relationship with a rented house than with one that is owned.  We were in our last rental house for two years.  Though I was thankful for that home and appreciated many of its features, it was still not really “mine”.   When we first moved in I hung some pictures and arranged some furniture to decorate it, but it was never been a place that I had great dreams of remodeling, because when you rent you don’t invest money in making changes to something that doesn’t belong to you.

Then God dropped a little thought along those lines into my mind.  If a house is a symbol for our own lives, then I wonder how many of us treat God like he’s a renter instead of the owner of our “house”?
A renter pays a price to dwell in a home, but is not permitted to make decisions about the property and can only make the changes that he clears with the landlord first.  I guess some preachers would say that this is a person who has made Jesus their Savior, but not their Lord.  He has paid the fee on the cross which should have been enough to fully purchase the “house”, but once He in the house, many doors are bolted and padlocked to deny access to Him. “God, you can have this area of my life, but I want to retain control of these other places”.

When I own a house, I dream BIG!  On a few occasions in my life, I have had the opportunity to make changes to those homes that I have owned.  Some were necessary and functional – like putting a new roof on a home when the current one was leaking or damaged.  Some were much more fun – like adding a roof over a section of a back deck to provide a shady place to enjoy the outdoors.  Others added beauty to a space – like painting a room a different color or adding pretty new light fixtures.  Once we even added a new room to the mobile home we owned when we first married.
Just like those improvements, God wants to spend lavishly on us.  He can make necessary and functional changes in our lives like helping us to change our attitudes in the middle of our circumstances or helping us to forgive someone who has wronged us.  He can make enjoyable changes like guiding us to discover new things about our gifts and talents that give us opportunities to do things we never imagined.  He can bring beauty in our lives through the many blessings He is able to provide. He can even enlarge our “house” to show us new possibilities in our lives that will stretch us beyond what we ever dreamed we could experience.

Oh, how much He desires that we would treat Him as Who He is – the one who fully purchased us and the One Who should have full control of our lives – not to impose His will on us, but to dream with us – to plan the remodeling – the great Designer who can show us His vision of what the house can be.