Your Vision: You are a Citizen of Heaven
Forgive me if you can for making this claim: a Christian is a different kind of creature from the rest of the world. I’m not saying we’re better because we’re not. We have, however, been reborn and transmuted from the kingdom of darkness into the Kingdom of God. That makes us an entirely new creation and places us firmly in a system that is vastly different than the systems of the world.
I can guess what you might be thinking right now, “So how come so many Christians live the same kind of lives as the rest of the world? How come so many Christians are hateful, vengeful, envious, lustful, and suffer the same calamities as the rest of the world?”
Well you’re right in your observation. But this is not supposed to be the case. If you are a Christian, your case is different. You’re not supposed to be living as the rest of the world lives. You’re not supposed to be suffering as the rest of the world suffers. You’re not supposed to be addicted to tobacco, alcohol, drugs, porn, and pain killers like the rest of the world. Your financial condition is not supposed to be in shambles. Your relationships are not supposed to be estranged. The sicknesses and diseases of the world are not supposed to afflict your mortal flesh.
But we Christians, as supposed new creatures, are rarely living according to the power, authority, grace, and righteousness that have been freely given to us. We ignore the primary teachings of the Bible and strip away all of the things that should take us out of the world system and into the Kingdom system.
This is my point in posting this series on God’s vision for our lives. If we can just manage to understand His vision for us and believe it long enough to have it become part of our lives, then our case will indeed be quite different.
When you join the Kingdom of God, you are no longer a citizen of your country here on earth. Your citizenship is transferred to heaven. In the earthly realm people and national governments will still consider you to be a citizen of one of world’s nations. But the Bible tells us that we become citizens of the splendor and greatness of God’s Kingdom.
Philippians 3:20
For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ,
On earth, as the citizen of a nation such as the United States, you are protected by that nation through their police and armed forces. The nation gives you rights and privileges based on their laws and governing documents.
Being a citizen of heaven gives you the protection, rights, and privileges of God’s Kingdom, where liberty, freedom, health, wholeness, joy, peace, and abundance are the norm.
This is not at all comparable with earthly citizenship. In the Kingdom of God, you are truly a different creature from every other member of the human race because your spirit has been joined and woven like a tapestry with the Spirit of God. No other creature on earth is like this. You are no longer subject to the destruction and situations that happen here on earth.
You now have the full power, force, and authority of the Kingdom of your citizenship backing you. You now have powerful weapons of warfare to use against spiritual enemies. God’s army has absolute power in this universe, and when you possess His weapons and defenses, you are unconquerable—wickedness cannot overcome you. You will not fall the way the world falls. You will instead rise on wave after wave of the glory and splendor of your heavenly home. You are indeed a peculiar creature—unique and different from every other!
Copyright © 2012, Craig Tanner. Image copyright © Craig Tanner
Scripture: The New King James Version (NKJV). (1996). Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc.
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