Citizenship

Where is your citizenship?  If the answer is a country of this world, you may want to consider changing your citizenship.  Why? I’ll let the Apostle Paul answer that. In Philippians, a book of the New Testament, Paul writes, “But our citizenship is in heaven” (3:20).  This particular statement is made as Paul is admonishing his readers to walk according to his example and not according to those who walk as “enemies of the cross of Christ.”  Paul was making a distinction between those who have believed on Jesus Christ and those who are more interested in the world than what Christ has done for them. The distinct characteristic that Paul points out is a difference in citizenship.  The believer is a citizen of heaven - of a kingdom that is not of this world - and from that kingdom the believer “awaits a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

You, believer, possess a citizenship in the Kingdom of heaven!  A place you have not seen and are not familiar with right now but that you will see for yourself when you have sloughed off your temporal body.   A place that it is far beyond anything that you could even begin to imagine. The believer is a citizen of heaven and, one day, will be reunited with the Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ, to be transformed according to His power and in His likeness to live in His eternal home forever.  Paul wanted us to know that this will really happen as long as we consider our current existence in this world as just passing through. If our hearts are allowed to be “married” to this earthly existence, if we find our treasures here and choose to take our citizenship in this world then we will have not rights of citizenship in the Kingdom to come.  We will have forfeited any rights to the eternal possessions of heaven. We will have traded that which is eternal for that which is temporal. As Paul puts it: we will “walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.” Our end will be “destruction”. Our god will be our “belly”. We will take “glory in our shame”, and we will set our minds on “earthly things”.  This is the condition of the worldly citizen.

So, again, where is your citizenship?  If you find yourself today in a place where you have traded your heavenly citizenship for citizenship in a foreign land that is passing away, I encourage you to remember the place of your eternal inheritance.  Remember that your Lord has fitted a home for you in a Kingdom that has no end. Repent and ask the Lord Jesus Christ to once again grant you rights of citizenship to Heaven and to communion with Him forever and forever.   

Philippians 3:20-21