I Wanna Go Home
By John Gavazzoni

More often than not, as I think back, when a subject for an article begins to percolate in my thinking, it's after some reflection on said subject, that a title pops into my mind, and I think, "yeah, that kind of says what I want to say in a nutshell." So, it is with this article. The phrase popped into my mind, and I knew it came from a song, but I neither remembered the rest of the lyrics or who the artist was. I did remember how musically the refrain went as "I wanna go home" was repeated.

So, I did an internet search....ain't the internet wonderful.... of "I wanna go home," and there were two links to two different songs with that title, the more recent by Michael Buble, and another older one whose tune I remembered, that is, in that part of the song when "I wanna go home," was lyrically and musically repeated. That older song was recorded by Bobby Bare back in 1963. Side note: the older one of the two was sung with the lyrics clearly enunciated; the more recent done, as with so much of music and movies, in a sort of mumbling style, which I'm sensitized to given the measure of hearing loss I suffer from. It's not that it only SOUNDS like mumbling to me, it's that they REALLY ARE mumbling and it's more apparent to those of us with hearing loss. It seems you're "cool" in the contemporary culture if you don't enunciate clearly. You're so sexy when you mumble; Thank you, James Dean...infer, please, the note of sarcasm... for that cultural shift in verbal communication.

Back to our subject: I listened all the way through Bobby Bares song, and thought, "oh, yeah; not only does the title express my thoughts, but the whole of the lyrics: a guy far from home in a big city, feeling lonely and longing for home, a home of cotton fields down south. Setting aside for the moment differences of spiritual maturity in understanding what home is for the believer in Christ particularly, and for all of humanity in general, in a range from the crudest to the most refined, we are all, at the same time, at home, yet also away from home. We all live, and move, and have our being in God in one dimension, but we're also, in another dimension, strangers, sojourners, pilgrims in a strange land.

In the incarnation of the Lord Jesus, God summed up the sending of us all into the world. The origin of our being is not traced to our physical birth in this world, but to the timeless Being of God. From "there" we were sent into this world, and from the earliest days of our consciousness, we have all intuitively yearned to get back home. Our spiritual God-kinship cries out to our creaturehood, "this world is not (your) home, you're just a-passing through." Listen, hear the plaintive cry of all creation, "I wanna go home." It's at the core of the subjection of our creaturehood to vanity/futility/frustration. We wanna go home, but we can't get there, and we keep inventing ways to get back, and it's that compulsion that is at the root of sin....trying to do what only God can do. Only He can bring us back home.

Sin is always, first, a religious issue. Reading, especially The First Epistle of John in Jonathan Mitchell's Translation of The New Testament, one finds a wonderful insight uncovered by our brother's pursuit of the root meaning of the word conventionally translated as "commandment." The Greek word takes us beyond God's written legislation, to what's going on within us. Reading each place in that epistle where the conventional "commandment" appears, read instead, "...His implanted goal (impartation of the finished product within; inward directive of the end in view." We have within us, in most cases latently, but in the case of those whom Jesus has called into the first stages of a saving relationship with Himself the first awakening within us of "the imparted/implanted goal."

That goal, native to our being within the Being of God, is....please notice....imparted to, implanted in, us. As soon as that goal, "Christ in you, the hope of glory," is awakened, you're on your way home... home being, the Father, and all His family together. But there's the sense also of a false imparted/implanted goal within our flesh, within our creaturehood, that leads us to making all kind of effort to get home, and therein is our sin. That flesh-impartation is contra-distinctive to the impartation within our spirit. You say, "But, brother John, is the drunkard, the whore-monger, the murderer, the thief, the liar trying to get home? Here's how the process goes: the trying leads to the futility that leads to resentful rebellion. "OK, God, you're demanding that I come home, and I've tried and tried and tried, but I can't find my way. You're unjust, and I'm going to treat you as the unjust god you are." Of course, most of this goes on in the depth of the subconscious mind.

The death of every revival, the death/distortion/final-failure of every spiritual movement occurs as the flesh goal comes in on the coattails of the Spirit goal, and men take it in hand to get home, and teach others how to get home. The end is just one more energy-of-the-flesh enterprise unique only with its particular distinctive. There's a cacophony of voices out there claiming to have found the secret to getting home. Each voice claims a more accurate way, and none of the others, by comparison, gets it quite as right. "So, keep all those cards and letters coming, folks, until the next installment when I'll add more inspired details about getting you home."