Citizens of another country
Our true citizenship
She has lived abroad for years now, fluent in the language, known at the corner market, paying her taxes, raising her children in this place she has come to love. And yet in a drawer at home lies a passport from a country on the far side of the world, and it is that document, not the streets outside her window, that says where she finally belongs. She invests here without pretending this is the homeland. She is faithful where she lives and rooted where she is from, and she knows the difference. Paul wrote to a city like that, Philippi, a proud Roman colony whose people prized their citizenship above almost anything, and he told them their truest passport was issued somewhere else entirely. Our citizenship is in heaven, he said, from where we also wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not a sentence about leaving; it is a sentence about belonging. It quietly relocates the center of gravity of a whole life, so that you can pour yourself out where you actually live, and still hold it all as one whose true country lies elsewhere and cannot fall.
“Our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also wait for a Savior, the Lord, Jesus Christ.”
— Paul, to the Philippians — Philippians 3:20 (WEB)
“Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God.”
What Cannot Be Shaken, here, is the country that issues your true passport. Picture the expatriate, faithful in her adopted city, belonging to one on the far side of the world: that is the shape of a Christian's life. This phase names a citizenship no collapse can revoke. You live here as one who belongs, finally, there, in a homeland that cannot be toppled.
If the upheaval unsettled your sense of where you belong, here is a belonging deep enough to steady it: your citizenship is in heaven. You carry, as it were, a passport from a country that cannot be toppled, and that changes how you hold this place. Not less invested in it, but differently invested, the way an expatriate loves the city she lives in without mistaking it for home. You can give yourself fully to your actual days, your work, your neighbors, your street, precisely because you are not clutching them as the last thing you have. They are not your homeland; they are your posting. Paul says you wait here for a Savior who will come from your true capital. So set your mind on the things above, where Christ already reigns, and let that settled, unshakable citizenship loosen your grip on this shakable one. You are free to be faithful here without being frantic, present without being desperate, invested without clinging, because the country you finally belong to cannot fall.
The Church is perpetually tempted to grow so comfortable in its surrounding culture that it forgets its passport was issued elsewhere, and begins defending its earthly turf as if that were home. Paul reminds a colony-proud people that their citizenship is in heaven, awaiting a Savior from their true capital. Across history the Body has been most itself as a colony of the age to come, invested but not anxious, faithful but not clinging, planted in every nation yet belonging finally to none of them. Before a watching world that clutches its borders and its certainties, the whole Church carries the unhurried steadiness of those whose truest country cannot be shaken. It serves the city it lives in, and waits for the one it belongs to.
Every earthly belonging can be revoked, redrawn, or lost; postings end. What cannot be shaken is the citizenship stamped in heaven, the homeland from which your Savior will come and which no collapse can topple. You are an expatriate here, and that is no tragedy, because the country you actually belong to stands forever.
- Where have I been clutching this place as if it were my homeland rather than my posting?
- Does knowing my passport is issued in heaven make me more present here, or am I using it to check out?
- What would change if I lived faithfully but unfrantically, as a citizen of a country that cannot fall?
Lord, the upheaval unsettled where I belong, and I have clutched at this place as if it were the last thing I had. Thank You that my citizenship is in heaven, a country that cannot be toppled, and that I wait here for my Savior. Free me to be faithful without being frantic, invested without clinging. Set my mind on the things above, where Christ reigns, and steady me. Amen.