Citizens of Heaven
But we are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives. And we are eagerly waiting for him to return as our Savior. - (Philippians 3:20)
I have four granddaughters and one grandson. The youngest of the girls, Allie, age two, is always so excited to visit our home, which is filled with all kinds of toys. Allie will be happily occupied with the toys for a while, when suddenly she will say, “Home!”
“What?” we will ask.
“Home!” she declares again and walks out the door, as though she had just grabbed the car keys and was about to drive away. When Allie wants to go, she wants to go. She is a bit of a homebody. I’ve never seen this in a little child.
When you become a Christian, you become a citizen of your real home, heaven. Philippians 3:20 tells us, “But we are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives. And we are eagerly waiting for him to return as our Savior.”
Sometimes we will look at life, and it all just leaves us cold. We will think, Home! But the “home” we are actually longing for is our heavenly one.
E. M. Bounds wrote, “Heaven ought to so fill our hearts and hands, our manner and our conversation, our character and our features, that all would see that we are foreigners, strangers to this world, natives of a nobler clime, fairer than this. . . . Heaven is our native land and home to us, and death to us is not the dying hour, but the birth hour.”
David said, “We are here for only a moment, visitors and strangers in the land as our ancestors were before us. Our days on earth are like a passing shadow, gone so soon without a trace” (1 Chronicles 29:15).
The world is not our home, but it is our present location. And one day, we will go to our real home.
Copyright © 2013 by Harvest Ministries. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
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