Day 7 of 7
Citizenship in Heaven
The allegiance that relativizes all others
Scripture Readings
Today's Scripture
We end the week where every faithful citizen must finally stand: feet on the ground, eyes on another country.
Philippians 3:20-21 — "But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself."
1 Peter 2:11, 17 — "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul... Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor."
Hebrews 13:14 — "For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come."
The Big Idea
A Christian holds two passports. One belongs to an earthly nation, and it matters. The other belongs to heaven, and it matters more — it sets the ranking for every other loyalty. Strangely, this does not make Christians worse citizens of earth. History says it makes them the best ones, because only people who are not desperate about this world are free to truly love it.
Reflection
A passport from another country
When Paul wrote "our citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20), he chose his city carefully. Philippi was a Roman colony, and its people were fiercely proud of their Roman citizenship — the most coveted legal status on earth. A colony's job was to live like Rome far from Rome: Roman law, Roman dress, Roman loyalty, planted in foreign soil.
So Paul's sentence carried a charge. Your real colony, he tells them, is heaven. Your real Emperor is Jesus. You are heaven's outpost planted in Philippi — live like your capital city, right where you are. Think of a family living overseas for work: they obey the local laws, learn the language, love the neighbors — and still set the table, keep the holidays, and raise the kids by the customs of home. That is a colony of heaven. And notice what its citizens are doing: "from it we await a Savior." That word was loaded too; "savior" was a title Roman emperors loved to claim. Paul quietly takes the title from Caesar and gives it to the only one who can hold it.
This is the Bible's settled picture of God's people. Hebrews 11:13-16 says the heroes of faith admitted "that they were strangers and exiles on the earth," because "they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city." Hebrews 13:14 makes it ours: "here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come." Augustine built his greatest book on this very idea — that all of history is the story of two cities woven together:
"Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self." — Augustine, The City of God
Every nation, party, and platform belongs to the first city — built on self-love, impressive and temporary. The second city is built on God's love, and it lasts. The question of this whole week has really been: which city owns your deepest loyalty?
Exiles who show up anyway
Here is the surprise. You would expect "exiles" to keep their heads down and wait for the bus home. Peter says the opposite. 1 Peter 2:11-12 — "I urge you as sojourners and exiles... Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God." Sojourner is an old word for a resident foreigner — someone living fully in a place that is not finally theirs.
And the conduct Peter prescribes is shockingly engaged: "Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution... Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor" (1 Peter 2:13, 17). Remember, the emperor was Nero. Peter does not tell exiles to flee the empire or to seize it. He tells them to out-love it, out-serve it, and out-honor it — from a heart that fears only God.
This was Jesus' own prayer for us on the night before he died. John 17:15-16 — "I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world." Not out of the world; not of it either. Jesus deliberately rejected both easy options — the bunker and the blender. His people are sent into the public square with their citizenship papers from somewhere else.
C.S. Lewis looked across two thousand years of this strategy and recorded the result:
"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Think who he is talking about. Believers who built hospitals for plague victims, fought the slave trade for decades, founded schools and orphanages — almost all of them people soaked in the hope of heaven. It is the same paradox Jesus stated in Matthew 6:33: "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." Lewis turned it into a rule of thumb:
"Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Why does aiming at heaven help the earth? Because despair and panic are terrible fuels. The activist who believes this world is all there is must win now, by any means, or all is lost — which is exactly how politics turns cruel. The citizen of heaven can work just as hard, minus the desperation. Losing a vote stings, but it cannot touch the treasury. Colossians 3:1-2 — "Seek the things that are above, where Christ is... Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth." That is not a command to ignore earth. It is a command about load-bearing: build your hopes on the floor that can hold them.
Nothing you do will be wasted
There is one more gift hidden in heavenly citizenship, and N.T. Wright states it as well as anyone alive. Because Jesus rose bodily — and because God's promised future is not the scrapping of this world but its renewal — the work you do here gets carried forward:
"You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are — strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself — accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world." — N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope
Look where the Bible's story actually ends — not with souls floating away, but with a city coming down. Revelation 21:2-4 — "And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God... He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore." Heaven is not the escape from city life. It is city life finally healed — justice without corruption, community without contempt, a public square with no spin in it.
That is why Paul can end his great resurrection chapter with a work order: "be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:58). Not in vain. The honest vote, the welcomed neighbor, the truth told at cost, the prayers for leaders you didn't choose — none of it is sandcastle work. It is foundation work for a city under construction.
The King who crossed the border first
Step back and you can see that everything this week hangs on one historical claim. Tim Keller put the stakes plainly:
"If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead." — Tim Keller, The Reason for God
If the tomb stayed shut, this plan was just civics advice. But if Jesus rose, then there really is another country, its King really is alive, and your citizenship there is not a metaphor — it is the most durable fact about you. And look how you got it. You did not earn that passport. The King of the heavenly city crossed the border in person, lived as an exile in ours, was rejected by both the religious establishment and the Roman state — and let their verdict fall on him so that heaven's verdict on you could be "welcome home." Philippians 3:20-21 says this same Jesus will return and "transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body." The story does not end with us going up so much as with him, and his city, coming down.
Jim Elliot, a young missionary who would give his life at twenty-eight, wrote in his journal the math of people who live this way:
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." — Jim Elliot, Journal
You cannot keep your earthly city; no one ever has. You cannot lose your heavenly one; no election, border, or empire can touch it. So go be the best citizen your zip code has — honest, generous, prayerful, unafraid. Hold the first passport loosely and the second one with joy. Your King is on his throne, and your labor is not in vain.
Going Deeper
Close the week by writing a short "two-passport" prayer in your own words. First sentence: thank God for the specific earthly place he has assigned you — name your town. Second: thank him that your deeper citizenship is already secured by the risen Jesus. Third: hand him the one political fear you have carried all week. Then pick one practice from this plan — praying for a leader by name, the three-questions rule, the listening meal — and put it on your calendar for next week, as a citizen of heaven on local assignment.
Key Quotes
“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”
“Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither.”
“Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”
“You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are — strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself — accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world.”
“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”
Prayer Focus
Thank God that your deepest citizenship was settled in heaven before you ever registered anywhere on earth — and that no election can revoke it. Ask him to loosen your grip on outcomes you cannot control, and to send you back into your city on Monday with both passion and peace.
Meditation
Hebrews 13:14 says, 'here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.' What is one thing you have been gripping as if this city were the lasting one? What would seeking the coming city change about how you hold it this week?
Question for Discussion
Lewis claimed the Christians who did the most for this world were precisely the ones who thought most about the next. Does that match your experience, or does heavenly-mindedness sometimes become an excuse to disengage? What makes the difference between hope that fuels and hope that floats away?