A Sojourner With You

There is a line in this Psalm the church has carried with her as a confession of identity ever since Abraham. "For I am a sojourner with you, a guest, like all my fathers." David, the king of Israel, on the throne of David, in the palace at Jerusalem, calls himself a guest in his own land. He looks down the long line of his fathers — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, all the way back — and sees the same word over each life. Sojourner. They were here for a time. They lived in tents or in stone, in slavery or in palace, and the years went by and the years ran out. He measures himself the same way: "O LORD, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am!" This is not a complaint. It is the prayer of a man who wants to live the right number of days at the right altitude — neither pretending he has all the time in the world, nor squandering the time he has.

The Lord Jesus came into the world as the truest Sojourner there ever was. He had no place to lay His head. He moved through villages and harbors and homes that were not His, eating other men's bread. He went to His own and they did not receive Him. And He went home through a tomb. So when the believer confesses, as the psalmist did, "I am a sojourner with you, a guest like all my fathers," she is confessing a road her Lord has walked first and now walks with her. The Christian is not a citizen of any earthly city in the absolute sense. We are pilgrims toward a country we have not yet seen, but it has seen us. The exile of Christ has earned us the home we are walking toward. So make me know my end, O LORD — not to scare me, but to set my hope in the right place. My hope is in You.