The Prodigal House Owners. QT September 15, 2020. Ezekiel 9:1-11.
Because of our family background, my wife and I didnamprsquot think we could own a house. We had a poverty mentality even though we had good jobs and saved some money.
My wife especially had a desire for a house in the country that we could enjoy and share with our small group members.
I wasnamprsquot so keen on it because owning a house means a lot of work to maintain the property.
Unlike owning an apartment where the care money pays for security, cleaning, maintenance and improvement, owning a house means we have to handle all that ourselves. The idea of designing our own house and the landscaping was attractive but the work was not.
So we prayed about it and, after a positive QT from Job 38 where God speaks to the complaining Job about designing the world, we bought a piece of land in YangPyeong and planned a house so that many people could worship in reasonable comfort. We put in a special prayer room because weamprsquod seen that in the movie War Room. One of our small group members had made us a sign with that title for it.
But the problems began almost immediately. The first one was that we had to change the property we had bought for another property in order to be the right distance from the road for construction purposes according to the government. Then the builder put the house in the middle of the property without consulting us.
We wanted it in a different spot. On and on the problems went until in the end we didnamprsquot even want the house because it wasnamprsquot the one we had planned! We didnamprsquot see that we had lost sight of the original plan, which was to have a house focused on worship.
Our selfish desires had taken over and pushed God aside. We had made an idol of the house but because it wasnamprsquot what we wanted anymore we tried to get rid of it by selling it. Not once did we praise God for the problems and open our minds to what he had in mind. Not once did we wake up to our sin and repent. Until now.
We bought the land in 2015 and built the house in 2017 with Pastor Kimamprsquos sermon on Rev. 10 in our ears: ampldquothe mystery of God will be accomplished.amprdquo But we didnamprsquot believe that for our house. The application in that sermon was to stop complaining, to close our mouths. We didnamprsquot do that either.
But God and the house wouldnamprsquot leave us alone.
My wife seemed to become addicted to searching for country houses on the internet. She took to asking me every week if I was okay living in our apartment even though we had little sunshine because we were on the ground floor. But our apartment location beside a mountain had many good points including a big living room for our small group meetings with many childrens.
We rented our house instead of selling it and our latest tenants proved to be a problem for our neighbours who complained more and more about the tenants and their three dogs. The neighbours wanted us to move back. We belonged there, they said. I said no. God has many ways of speaking, but I didnamprsquot want to listen to any of them when it came to our house.
Then covid-19 arrived and the stress from perpetual planning and preparing for my school to stay open became so great I rented a cottage in the country to escape to on weekends. I was grateful for all the yard work I had to do there because cutting grass, making brick patios, and trimming trees exercised my body and kept my mind away from school. But all the activity was exactly what I would be doing at our YangPyeong house if we lived there.
My wife received more phone calls from our YangPyeong neighbours who had been inside the house and reported the damage. Then the tenants themselves asked if they could leave in October instead of January because the wife was pregnant and they wanted to move. We still didnamprsquot want to move to our house but we realized we needed to repent for turning our backs on God in the same way that the kings and people of Israel and Judah had turned their backs on God and polluted the temple with idols as we read through 2 Kings. And now Ezekiel. It was our story.
Finally, on Monday, Sept. 14, I told my wife that I was feeling pushed by God to move to our house. How did she feel? She said it was the same for her.
My wife knelt at my feet and I prayed desperately asking Godamprsquos forgiveness for our sins against him and to please show us with his word what action we should take because feelings werenamprsquot enough.
We wanted a mark like what the man dressed in linen with a writing kit was giving to certain people in Jerusalem. The testimony in the next dayamprsquos QT passage of Ezekiel 9: 1-11 was the story of a man who couldnamprsquot afford a house but was given one and then fell into idolatry over it. It was like reading our story! We needed to keep our promise to God about our house.
We gave thanks to God and told our story to our small group members, asking for their advice. In the end we decided to keep our promise to God and move to our house because he had kept his promise about making a house where he could be worshipped. He loved us enough to take us through a little hardship until we woke up and repented.
Application: Prepare our apartment for renting and make prayerful plans for repairing and occupying our house in November.
