In his commentary on Paul’s letter to the Philippians, D. Martin Lloyd-Jones wrote:
“We have a new citizenship, we are in Christ, and because we are in Christ, we are seated in the heavenly places with him. Certain things will happen to us before we finally arrive in heaven, but our citizenship is as definite now as it will be then. There will be a physical translation when we die, but spiritually we are there already, we belong there.”
What, then, does this citizenship mean? Why does Paul use this term to describe the Christian? I think it is to illuminate a contrast. The contrast between the Christian and the non-Christian.
Because, you see, when we look with the eyes of flesh to compare ourselves as Christians with those who are not, there is only the ability to see the fleshly differences. So beyond physical differences, we might see some behavioral differences pertaining to our church habits.
But the Christian lives in a spiritual realm...has his citizenship there, and in that realm there is infinite difference between its citizens and the citizens of this world. Until the Christian sees those differences, he has no power or incentive to behave ‘other-worldly’.
The Bible explains the vast differences between the Believer in Christ, and the unbeliever.
First of all, there are only two kingdoms, and everyone belongs to one.
Either you are a citizen of the Kingdom of heaven, or you are a citizen of the kingdom of this world.
The Kingdom of God, or the kingdom of Satan.
The Kingdom of Light, or the kingdom of darkness.
The Bible talks about the prince of the power of the air (Eph 2:2), who controls the lives of those who are not believers, and Paul contrasts this picture with terms that relate to the believer; such as. “Heirs of God and fellow heirs with Jesus Christ” (Romans 8:17) and “fellow citizens with the saints and ... of God’s household” (Eph 2:19)
The point that I want to make clear to you here, is that these terms are all in the present tense.
It is not a future thing that we look forward to ~ it is not a state or status that we hope to attain to ~ it is not an honorary title like might be given to a well-loved celebrity in his old age by a prestigious university or fraternity.
I recently saw a news blurb, where a famous American was bestowed Knighthood by the Queen of England. They made clear on the newscast that as an American, he cannot now call himself, “Sir -so and so”, as can a British subject like actor/director, Richard Attenborough, for example. He can put KBE at the end of his name, standing for “Knight of the British Empire”; but the title is honorary, and does not endow him with rights as a British citizen.
This is NOT the type of citizenship we’ve been granted in Heaven.
As believers in Christ we are raised up with Christ (Col 3:1), we have been delivered from the domain of darkness, and transferred to the kingdom of His beloved Son (Col 1:13), we are seated in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph 2:6).
Our current, full citizenship in Heaven is a very well-founded New Testament truth, and we must begin to understand and believe in our hearts that we are, now, as fully accepted and established by God in His heavenly home as we shall be even when we get there, if we are to ever function effectively and victoriously as His ambassadors in this present, evil age.
So I want for us to look today at the characteristics of this Kingdom, to which we belong as citizens.
The first characteristic of any kingdom, is the King himself.
He is the center of focus, the one to whom allegiance is given. The kingdom operates according to his decrees, his laws, and the kind of king he is, the kind of character he has, dictates the character of the entire kingdom.
If you look back at Philippians 3:18,19 you will see the character of the prince of this world, in those who are his subjects.
“For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things.”
So let’s chart these characteristics of the kingdom of this world:
1. First, and so tragic is this truth that Paul wrote it while weeping, they are enemies of the cross of Christ.
Now, we live in a day when it has become a social faux pas, sometimes even ammunition for a law suit, to offend someone by speaking the truth. Society has found a new way to communicate peaceably and neutrally and avoid all conflict and challenge, and they’ve dubbed this new way of talking, “Political Correctness”.
I am very probably in gross violation of this political correctness, when I say that all unbelievers, no matter how nice they are, no matter how noble and courageous they are, no matter how religious and faithful to their religion they are, no matter their status in society, no matter the level of their giving to charitable causes, no matter how pretty they are, no matter how influential they are by virtue of their fame or their wealth or their position...ALL WHO HAVE NOT BELIEVED IN THE SHED BLOOD OF CHRIST FOR SALVATION AND HIS RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD TO GIVE THEM LIFE, are enemies of the cross of Christ.
Some of them say, “Oh, I believe in God and I believe in Jesus, and I’ve read the Bible, and I have nothing against Christians, but church isn’t for me”.
Or something very similar.
They will assure you that they hold Jesus in high regard, and have only the utmost respect for Him, and they pray to God all the time, and they believe in angels, and they are trying to live life as best they can, because they know God is watching. Remember...they practice political correctness also...
But they are enemies of the cross of Christ.
God became a Man, out if His great love for us, even while we were enemies.
He went to a Roman cross of execution and hung there and poured out His blood and died, even while we were enemies.
The only way to be pleasing to God, the only way to be right with Him, the only way to get to heaven, is by being a friend of the cross of Christ. Not a friend only, but a servant. The cross of Christ is the key that opened the gates of Heaven for all who believe, and all who have not believed, no matter what they say, remain, enemies of the cross of Christ.
As a result of this first and fundamental characteristic, these characteristics follow:
2. Their end is destruction
3. Their god (king/ruler/master) is their appetite. Their fleshly lusts and desires, which they follow after with maniacal abandon, and heaven help any who get in their way.
4. Their glory is their shame.
“They are filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.” (Rom 1:29-32)
They glory in their shameful lives!
5. They set their minds on earthly things. Their concentration, their energies, their goals, their desires, are all set like fence posts in concrete, on fleshly pleasures and earthly things.
They are enemies of the cross of Christ, and there is redemption for them in no other, than Him.
Now, contrast this with the citizen of the kingdom of heaven.
For the citizen of heaven, Jesus Christ is their King. They owe and surrender all their allegiance to Him
Their goal is to please Him. Their lives are dominated by Him, and none else.
Their first concern is the will of God and doing it.
Their most pressing concern is His good pleasure.
Their priority in prayer is that His will would be done over their own, and they surrender their will to His will, so that the desires they pray for would be His desires. He is all and all is for Him.
The second characteristic of this Kingdom that differentiates it from the kingdom of this world, is that it is a different government, under a different kind of law.
Throughout the 6th chapter of Romans, Paul presses the point home that where the believer was once a slave of sin, he is now freed from that bondage.
Where he once yielded the members of his body as instruments of unrighteousness, now he is to present himself to his new King, as one who is alive from the dead, and yield his members as instruments of righteousness.
We talk about free will; having a free will and being free agents to make our own decisions; but this is not so.
Outside of Christ we are not free. We are slaves to sin and to Satan, and live in obedience to sin and to Satan, whether we recognize him or not.
But as citizens of heaven, we are free from sin, and slaves of righteousness. Bondservants. Servants of love and righteousness.
Citizens of heaven are aware of a different kind of law; a law of liberty.
They look back on the law they slaved under before they knew Christ, and they can see that it was a life that is no longer for them.
Things that enemies of the cross of Christ do; priorities they hold to; philosophies that govern their actions and reactions, no longer have any appeal or power over the citizen of heaven. He is free from the law of sin and of death, and dwells securely under the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.
We all look forward to the rapture of the church. We talk about it, read books about it, go to bible studies on end times prophecies, and we just get real excited, when we think about being snatched out of this world; don’t we?
But a transfer has already taken place, and often we are not aware that in God’s economy, most of the benefits we desire that have us so anxious for the rapture, were really instated at this first transfer, and are in effect and available to us now!
“For He delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” - Col. 1:13,14
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” - Eph. 1:3
This blends in to the third characteristic of this Kingdom of which we are citizens; we are entitled to different rights and privileges.
As citizens of heaven, we are entitled to do certain things that the citizens of this world cannot do.
We have free and constant access to the King. In fact, we are encouraged to go there and find audience with Him.
“Let us ...draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and may find grace to help in time of need”
-Hebrews 4:16
We are citizens of a Kingdom ruled by a King who wants our fellowship. He is infinitely concerned about us, and is quick to confess that He knows us. He calls us friends. He counts every hair on our heads (Matt. 10:30)
Nothing can happen to us without Him knowing about it; indeed, allowing it.
Wherever you find yourself, in whatever circumstances here on earth, He is with you and you have audience with the King.
Psalm 61:2 says “From the end of the earth I call to Thee, when my heart is faint...” Yet he hears the feeblest cry from the farthest corner of the globe, because we are His citizens, and entitled to 24/7 access to the Throne.
Bessie Ten Boom said, “No pit is so deep that God’s love is not deeper still”.
We have the right to pray and move God’s hand for others. Jesus said that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us and grants our request.
We have the right, acting as His ambassadors, to introduce anyone we want to the Kingdom and usher them into equal citizenship with our own. We don’t have to ask Him first, and our guest doesn’t have to take a test or get shots or meet some other requirement first ~ other than laying their sins at the foot of His cross as they pass into life. What a privilege we have to do that!
Now if we stop and consider the characteristics of the heavenly Kingdom to which we belong; Our King, His government of love, the rich blessings of our rights and privileges as citizens of that Kingdom, then we can more acutely share the joy Paul must have felt leap up in his breast as he penned the words, “...from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ”.
But there is one more thing I want you to consider today, concerning this citizenship we’ve been studying.
It is a citizenship by birth.
In Acts 22, Paul has been arrested and is about to be scourged (whipped) by a Roman soldier. But Paul stops the scourging, and injects fear into the heart of the Roman centurion standing by, with one question.
“Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman and uncondemned?”
You see, being a Roman citizen put a person under the protection of Roman law, and a citizen could not be punished or imprisoned without due process of law. This Roman centurion could have been put to death later, had he carried out the scourging before discovering that Paul was a citizen.
The interesting part of this story comes, when the centurion’s commander, having heard the centurion’s report, comes out and says to Paul, “I acquired this citizenship with a large sum of money”, which was legal and a common practice for anyone who could come up with the means. Citizenship could be purchased.
But Paul was apparently born in a Roman province, and was therefore considered a Roman citizen by birth. And this was his response to the Commander, “But I was actually born a citizen”, by which he avoided the scourging.
I’m sorry to say that I think very, very many Christians go for many, many years as Christians, living as though they are some kind of second class citizen of heaven. They live and think as though they are just barely acceptable to God, as long as they tow the line. They seem to be laboring under a perception of their position before God that it is a tentative citizenship they have purchased with their works and will expire at some point if they don’t continue to rack up maintenance points.
But Jesus said that the believer is born from above. In fact, He cites it as the only way to see the kingdom of heaven.
In II Corinthians 5:17, Paul said by the Holy Spirit that “...if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”
At the moment of our salvation, there is a death, and a resurrection.
We die to sin and self and the kingdom of this world, and are immediately given new life by the Holy Spirit. Not a renovation, a regeneration. Not a making over, but a making new.
We are “...born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”. (I Peter 1:3)
I want to finish by talking about this hope. This living hope we’ve been born to.
In our text, Paul writes (vs 21) “...who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory...”
Now that word, “humble”, does not simply mean ‘lowly’, as your New International Version translates it.
The word has to do with humiliation...not humility.
Sin’s effects have made it vile. Subject to weakness and infirmity. Our physical presence in this kingdom of darkness exposes our bodies to all kinds of humiliation. We are imprisoned in it, eagerly waiting for the coming of a Savior, who will transform this body of humiliation, and conform it to His glory.
Now bear in mind that the one writing these words, on the day of his conversion looked up from the dust of the road outside Damascus and saw the literally blinding light of the glory of this One he is talking about here.
Our great hope, citizens of heaven, citizens by birth, is that this Savior, this Lord Jesus Christ, whom we eagerly await, is going to come!
He is going to come, and He will instantly, by the very power He now has to subject all things to Himself, transform these bodies of humiliation and death, into perfect, glorified, glorious bodies, like His own.
In this age of motion picture entertainment, when special effects have become so sophisticated and computer generation allows movie makers to give the illusion of just about anything they want to happen, we’re seeing more and more stories where someone is physically changed into some super or glorious state.
But for us, born citizens, it is not a tale. It is a truth.
By virtue of His accomplished work on Calvary’s cross, and His resurrection from the dead, our Savior was crowned with glory and honor, and to Him was given dominion over all things. Hebrews 2 says that all things are subjected to Him, and He wields the power to subject all things to Himself; and by the exertion of that power, He promises to conform us to His glory ~ the very glory that blinded the unbelieving Paul on the road to Damascus, blessed the believing apostles on the mount of transfiguration, and will cause the nation of Israel to weep and mourn as for an only son, the day His feet touch down on the Mount of Olives.
Believers in Christ, you are citizens born; sons and daughters in the celestial kingdom, with all the rights and privileges inherent therein; and I will end with the exhortation Paul gave to His readers in Philippi:
“Therefore, my beloved brethren...so stand firm in the Lord,...”
“Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be. We know that, when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him just as He is” - I John 3:2
