Our Citizenship is a sermon teaching us that believers are citizens of Heaven. And as citizens, we should live like the living and not like the dying, so that others will want it too.

Key Verses:
Philippians 3:19-21

In Philippians chapter three, we will be looking at only three verses. We will start with verse nineteen which may seem like an odd place to begin, and you will get a little more of the flow of thought if you begin a little earlier. But there is something I want you to note in verse nineteen, we will come back to that in a moment. Please read with me verses nineteen through twenty-one. Paul writes to the Philippians:

Philippians 3:19: “Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.)”

Philippians 3:20: “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ:”

Philippians 3:21: “Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”

Citizenship In Biblical Times

I want you to notice particularly in verse twenty, “For our conversation is in heaven.” We will talk tonight about our citizenship. There are a number of places in the Bible that talk about citizenship. Jesus talks about it in the prodigal son parable. The prodigal son went and joined as a citizen in a far country. So, citizenship was not an idea that was unknown in biblical times. Again, there is a number of places where the Bible talks about it.

In Acts chapter twenty-two, Paul was asked by a Roman captain:

Acts 22:27: “Then the chief captain came, and said unto him, Tell me, art thou a Roman? He said, Yea.”

Acts 22:28: “And the chief captain answered, With a great sum obtained I this freedom. And Paul said, But I was free born.”

Think about what is being said there. This Roman captain in the Roman army asks, “Are you a Roman?” and Paul says, “Yay” – “Yes, I am.” Now that might cause you to think a little bit because Paul was Jewish. He was Jewish but not born in Rome. His hometown was Tarsus.

How is Paul a Roman? Apparently, his father was a Roman citizen. So, his father was not Jewish? No, he did not say that. Apparently, like this Roman captain, he had purchased his Roman citizenship. You could do that. You could buy your citizenship as a Roman citizen. That is not the only country or empire that has done that, others have done it as well. But you could buy your citizenship as a Roman and be an actual Roman citizen.

When the captain says that he paid a lot of money to be a citizen of Rome to be able to be called a Roman, Paul said that he was free-born. What does that mean? It means he was born a Roman citizen. His parents were Roman citizens. That should not be too hard for us to grasp. If you are an American citizen and you have a child, then your child is an American citizen. Or, if your parents were American citizens, then when you were born, you were born as an American citizen. That is not a strange concept.

I am not going to go into the exact method used for someone to become a citizen of this country or other countries because in some cases it does become somewhat complicated. But there are different ways to become a citizen. Some have to apply for citizenship and as I just indicated that might not be an easy path to follow. Some are born into citizenship as Paul.

But in order to be a citizen of Heaven, you have to be born again. So, Paul was born a Roman citizen, although he was Jewish, and later he talks about being of the house and lineage of Israel, and a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and of the tribe of Benjamin, and all of that which is true and accurate – there is no contradiction here. He was in fact a Roman citizen.

Live Heavenly Minded

In verse twenty, it says, “For our conversation is in heaven.” The word “conversation” there is not a mistranslation, but it is just a different word usage than what we think of today. Today, when we think about “conversation” we mean when two or more people come together and talk something over. A lot of people do not say “conversation” anymore, they say “we have a chat.” But you can have a chat and you can have a conversation and it is difficult to tell the difference, whether you are doing it online, over the phone, in person, or whatever, but it is two or more people talking together. The usage of the word here and in many places in the New Testament indicates a lifestyle or manner of living, but the word here actually means citizenship, our citizenship. So, our citizenship is in Heaven, and that is what Paul is saying here.

It is a great blessing, I consider it so and I trust that you do too, to be a citizen of the United States of America. I am thankful to be an American citizen and I count that a great blessing. But it is a far greater blessing to know you are a citizen of Heaven. Let’s take a look at these three verses. Paul said earlier in the seventeenth verse:

Philippians 22:17: “Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample.”

Paul said to be followers “of me.” That is a pretty big statement to be followers “of me,” as in, “follow me, I know where I am going.” Or “Follow me, I’m going the right way.” Or “Follow me. I know what you need to know, and so, follow me.” Is that true? Is that exactly where it is at? Yes. He says, “be followers together of me,” and why could he say that? Because he was following Jesus. He was very close to the Lord Jesus. In another place, Paul says, “Be followers of me even as I am of Christ,” and that clarifies the whole thing. He is saying to “follow me just as I followed Jesus. Just the same as I follow Jesus and am going with him, and you follow me, and we will all be with Him together.”

So, consider how you walk because there may be other people following you that you do not even realize are following you. They may be paying attention to you, and I talked about this before. You could be influencing people that you do not even know that you are influencing. So, consider that and consider the example you are leaving.

And then in verses eighteen and nineteen, Paul talks about how some people are leading away from Christ and that is very true. I am going to tell you this and it may strike you a little odd, but I believe Christians can lead people away from Christ. I really do, by their behavior, by their conduct, by things they say and do. They can actually lead people away from Christ. People look at it and say, “If that is Christian, I don’t think I want to be one.” So, Paul says to take note of them and do not get caught up in their conversation.

In the World but Not of It

In verse nineteen Paul says:

Philippians 3:19: “Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.)”

I was talking to somebody just recently who said, “There was one point in my life I was so heavenly-minded I was no earthly good.” I have heard other people say that and it is true. People get so caught up in things that they do not remember that they have a life in this world, and you do. You may say, “Preacher, you are always telling us to not be a part of this world.” Jesus said you are in the world but not of the world. You have to realize that if you are in the world.

How are you going to reach the world if you are not in the world? You must have contact with other people, and you need to have contact to have a good testimony. You cannot reach the world if you are not in it. But you should not be of the world and following the world’s practices.

When Paul says their “God is their belly,” it means selfishness, self-centeredness, satisfying the appetites of the flesh, and going after that. And then he says, “whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.” These folks are not so heavenly-minded that they have no earthly good, they are so earthly-minded, they have no heavenly good. That is what he is saying here. They are so caught up in the hear and now that they do not even think about Heaven. Or, if they do think about eternity, they do not share it with others. They just move on their way.

Now, I am sorry to say this, but there are some groups and some churches that teach you to live that way. They say, “You are born again, you are going to Heaven, no doubt about that. As a matter of fact, you may not even have a choice in the matter, but the truth of the matter is, you do not have to worry about it, you are going to be there.” By the way, you are singing about the sweet by and by, but we are living in the nasty now and now. That is true, there is truth in that. They will say to you to just go ahead and live your life in this world, it does not matter how you live.

Our Citizenship Is In Heaven

But Paul says something else in verse twenty:

Philippians 3:20: “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ:”

Paul says, “our conversation is in heaven.” Is he denying that he is a Roman citizen? He is not. In this life, in his earthly life, Paul is a Roman citizen. But he says he has citizenship in Heaven. There are people who have dual citizenship, did you know that? You can do that, and I have known a number of people who do that. There are different examples of this in different countries, but I will give you one that is pretty easy. There are people of Jewish birth who are American citizens but at the same time, they are citizens of Israel. I have known people like that, it is legal. It is quite legal.

It used to be legal in the state of Florida but is not anymore, they have changed the driver’s license law. But you could live in New York or some other state and have your driver’s license there and you could also have a Florida driver’s license, particularly if you are one of those people, we call snowbirds. They allow you to drive back and forth and have dual driver’s licenses. I do not think they do that anymore, but they did years ago. It does not matter anymore because your driver’s license is registered nationwide anyway.

So, we can have dual citizenship and we do. We have citizenship here on earth, but we have to remember that we are citizens of Heaven. “This world is not my home” as the old song says, “just passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.”

Stand By Your Convictions

Paul goes on and says, “from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ:” From whence? From Heaven where “also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

I was challenged to do this years ago and I made a habit out of it. I am not telling you that you have to do it, but it works for me. Take a pen, some people do not like to write notes in the Bible. If you do not want to write notes in your Bible, that is fine, I will not argue that point with you. It may be the only copy you have but I will remind you that it is the words that are holy, not the paper. Nonetheless, if you feel that way, then stand by your conviction and I mean that sincerely. That is your conviction, then stand by it.

By the way, let me just take a short side trip here. Stand by your convictions. What you believe to be true and to be right, you stand by that. If you say as a Christian, I do not believe in thus and so, then you should not do thus and so. If you say as a Christian, I should do thus and so, then you should do thus and so. What if nobody else does it? If it is right, you do it whether nobody else does it or not. And if it is wrong, do not do it even if everybody else is doing it. You stand by your convictions.

But something we need to stop and realize is, that everybody does not have the same convictions. There are things I do not practice as a matter of conviction, but you do not generally hear them preached in the pulpit. Why? Because that may be my conviction, it may not be yours and the Bible is not adamant about it. It does not absolutely say, “thou shalt not,” it does not say that there. There are things that it does, the Bible makes it very clear there and we should hold to those things. Everybody can have their own convictions. I will give an example. There was a matter that came up years ago here and if you were to ask different pastors, the number of pastors you asked on this matter is probably the number of answers you got. They are going to have different viewpoints on it. So, I prayed about it and studied the scriptures, talked to the Lord, and I came to my convictions, what I believe the Lord was telling me. I am not forcing it on other people. Other churches, other pastors, feel what the Lord is telling them to do.

So, if you do not want to mark in your Bible, do not mark in your Bible. I do, I underline things in my Bible. Brother Chris was preaching last Sunday night and Wednesday night and I made some marks in my Bible and I wrote down what he got wrong. No, I did not do anything like that. He did not get any of it wrong. I made notes on what he was saying, and it was good.

One of the ways I mark in my Bible is sometimes I will be reading along, and I come across a prayer promise. So, right by that verse, I put a little double “P” in my margin, “PP” which means prayer promise. And then, I did not come up with this, but I was challenged with it years ago and thought that was good, every time I come across a verse about Jesus coming again, I write in the margin “SC” for second coming, a verse about the second coming of Christ. You would be amazed how much the Bible talks about that.

I had that conversation a long time ago with another pastor here in town and he said, “I am not a premillennialist, I am not a postmillennialist, I not an amillennialist, I am not panmillennialist. I believe it will all pan out in the end.” I said that I did not take that position. Well, what difference does it make? It matters how you interpret the Bible. That is the difference it makes. It governs your theology. It governs your hermeneutic, the way you interpret the Bible. If you interpret the Bible literally, you are going to come out one way. If you interpret the Bible figuratively, you are going to take it another way. If you are going to take a passage that is not literal in its analogy, you are going to get a different meaning out of it. But if you take it all literally, you are going to come to another meaning. So, I said it matters how you interpret the Bible. He said, “Only a small part of it.” I said, “Well, possibly a third, and I do not call that a small part.” Does that make sense to you?

Looking for the Lord from Heaven

So, what does it say here? “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ:” What is that saying? We are looking for the Savior from Heaven. You may say that you thought we are going to Heaven, and yes, we are planning on going to Heaven, and we should be planning on going to Heaven, and we need to live like we are going to Heaven. We will say more about that in a moment.

But we are looking for Him from Heaven. There is a difference there. “Won’t I see the Lord when I get to Heaven?” Yes, and the New Testament tells us that we will see Him and be like Him because we will see Him as He is. I look forward to that with great anticipation. But it is saying here that we look for the Lord to come from Heaven. Why? Because He said He would. He promised to do so. And if He promised to do so and we believe His Word, then we have to believe that Jesus is coming again. There is no way around it. So, the verse again:

Philippians 3:20: “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ:”

Who is coming? The Lord Jesus Christ. Who is coming? The Savior. And if you go over to Titus, the same writer Paul writing to Titus says, “We look for God our Savior.” Oh wait, I thought we were looking for Jesus? We are. Is it God the Father? No, it is the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. There are not three gods, there is one God. We sing about that when we sing “Holy, Holy, Holy. God in three persons, blessed trinity.” That is the idea there. So, who is coming from Heaven? Our Savior, Jesus. Then who is coming? God. What does it tell us here of who is coming? The Savior and that is Jesus Christ. You cannot get away from the deity of Jesus Christ. So, when the Savior comes, that is God coming. By the way, we talked about this morning. The prophet Isaiah talks about the virgin birth and said, “you will call his name Emmanuel” which means God with Us. God was here and He was here in bodily form.

So, we are looking for the coming of the Savior. Citizenship is already there and when the Savior comes, He is coming to take us home. When He takes us home, our citizenship is already there and one day we are going to live there, we are going to be there. But you already have citizenship there. When you get to Heaven’s shore — you see that more in hymn writing than in the scriptures, that phrase “Heaven’s shore.” It helps us to think that way when we get to Heaven’s shore.

When you get to Heaven’s shore, they are not going to check you in and say they are glad you arrived. And as a new immigrant, you will have to go over there and apply for citizenship. It is not going to be like that. You already have citizenship there. You already do. You are part of the family; you are part of the kingdom.

We Will Be Like Him

And what is Jesus going to do when He comes? We already talked about it, He is going to take us home, but look what else He is going to do in the next verse:

Philippians 3:21: “Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”

Isn’t that interesting, “our vile body”? What does that mean? Our sin-prone, sin-filled life. It will be changed. We talked about it this morning and Paul writes about this in I Corinthians chapter fifteen, “that which is corruptible must put on incorruption.” That which can get sick, can suffer injury, must become that which has total immunity from sickness and vulnerability to injury – cannot be sick, cannot be injured. This mortal must put on immortality. That which can die must become that which can die no more. That is why I Corinthians chapter fifteen is one of my favorite chapters in the Bible, from John chapter three to I Corinthians chapter fifteen, because I Corinthians chapter fifteen is all about the resurrection and teaches us so much about it and you learn so much there, and it tells us about the change that is going to occur. So, here he says again, same writer, “Who shall change our vile [sin-prone, sin-filled] body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”

Paul writes, “according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.” Jesus can change us. This new resurrection body, it cannot get sick, it cannot get hurt, it does not die, but there is more. We have a life that is eternal, life that can never end. We become part of eternity. We have been talking about that. Eternity is a different realm than time. There is no question about that. Do they ever intersect? They have to intersect. But eternity is a different realm than time. Time is temporary and has a beginning and an end. Eternity has no beginning and has no end. It goes on forever. So, two different realms. We are going to leave the realm of time and we are going to enter the realm of eternity. We are going to enter it as eternal beings. How long does this change take?

I Corinthians 15:52: “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

I Thessalonians 4:17: “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

So, we will no longer have the limitation of being weak, we will no longer have the limitation of being ill, no death, no sorrow, no crying, Revelation tells us. And in addition to that, it says we will be like His body.

Remember, we talked about this so many times in the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. From when He arose at sunrise on that Sunday morning. The first people at the tomb were who? The ladies got there first. Then they come back and tell Peter and John. Then Peter and John go there. Then Mary meets the Lord Jesus, the resurrected Christ and she talks about it and some do not believe her and some of them do. Then that evening, they are in that upper room with shut and locked doors because the Lord had been crucified and they do not know if they were going to be next. As they are talking, Jesus suddenly was there. They did not hear a door unlock, they did not hear a latch turn, they did not hear a hinge squeak, they did not hear a window raise, He was just there. Why? Because in His resurrection body, He was not limited by time and space. Does that make sense to you? Will you have a body like that? Yes.

Imagine the places you could go to! You could think about it that way if you want. Isn’t that wonderful to not be limited by time and space? Have you ever been to a place where you say, “Well, I have to be here right now but I’d rather be somewhere else.” But the truth of the matter is, you are not limited by time or space. We have a body “like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”

Live Like the Living, Not Like the Dying

Here is the point of everything we have been saying tonight if our citizenship is in Heaven. If it is, then we should live here on earth like people who are from Heaven. We should not live like people who are going to perish here on earth, we should live like people who are going to live in Heaven. If you think of it that way, it will change your whole perspective on things. It will. You will not be discouraged, and you will not be depressed, and by the way, I am not picking on anybody. Anybody can get depressed. You can.

Some of the greatest Christians of all time have battled depression. We have talked about one of them this morning, Elijah, who battled depression. Other people have had depression, great people of faith have battled depression. It can happen to anybody, and sometimes, you cannot help getting depressed, but you have to make up your mind that you are not going to stay there. That is easier said than done, I guarantee you. But it will help you to realize your citizenship is in Heaven. Live like people who are going to live, not like people who are going to die. If our citizenship is in Heaven, then it just makes sense that we ought to be actively recruiting other people to go there. That, ought to be our business, ought to be what we are all about.

Thank God for the citizenship we have here. Thank God for it. Thank God for citizenship we can look forward to, citizenship in Heaven that will never end — that is where we are going, folks. Let’s live lives that indicate that we are going there so that other people will want to join us.

We will finish with this. Have you ever had somebody talk to you about a place they have been, and you have not, and they talked about it in such wonderful, glowing terms that make you think you want to go there? That has happened to me, did it ever happen to you? Isn’t that the way we ought to be about Heaven? Shouldn’t we be talking about it so that other people will want to go? I think so.

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