You look around and see things you recognize– commuters on their way to work, construction in the streets, shop clerks opening for business. All typical stuff, but none of it feels familiar. You’re not sure how you fit in. You’ve lost all confidence that you know the rules for how to act or what to say. You feel out of place- conspicuous, yet totally inconsequential to the place you find yourself in.

Welcome to being a stranger. Anyone who’s ever lived in a foreign country has felt this feeling, but sometimes the sensation doesn’t even require that you travel abroad. The upper-middle class guy who has to go downtown for a meeting might get a brief taste of it. The woman in an all-male office environment. The child who is briefly separated from Mom in the department store. This is what it feels like to be a stranger, and it’s how God’s people are meant to live on this earth.

Throughout the Bible, we regularly see God’s people being uprooted from any home they try to establish and scattered into other lands to live among other peoples. This continues to this day; we are not supposed to be at home here.

It’s okay to long for “home.” But that longing for a place to call our own should drive us to pursue God all the more. The Bible reveals to us what “home” will be like, and that knowledge should make even the best this world has to offer us lose its appeal. We’re strangers, saved to a new kingdom. Here, we’re just passing through.

Look for signs that the people in your church are becoming too comfortable in the cultures in which they find themselves:

Get super angry/offended over political debates: We are to avoid foolish debates and disputes about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.
Isolation/fear/hatred of foreigners: We should have compassion for those who do not know Christ, and we should have more in common with believers from other lands than we do with non-believers in our own land.
Orienting life around products of culture (sports, stories, idols, identities): Christ alone is worthy of our worship, and we must not find our identity in anything but Christ.
Social status/concern with what people think: We do not fear men, but God. We are not ashamed of His gospel.

If you observe these things in people who claim to be followers of Christ, they’ve likely lost sight of the fact that this world is not their home. They need to be reminded that we belong on the margins– unaccepted, uncomfortable, and disenfranchised.

The remedy? Point them to the One to whom we belong. Remind them of the kingdom of our citizenship. This world as we know it will pass away, but God’s kingdom will reign forever. As long as we’re here on this earth, we are strangers. Strangers don’t get tangled up in the affairs of this world.