Citizens of Heaven

Philippi was proud of being Roman. It had been settled with veterans of the civil wars, given the legal status of a city in Italy, and its citizens dressed, spoke, and governed themselves in imitation of the capital hundreds of miles away. To be a Philippian was to be a Roman living abroad, loyal to a city most had never seen.

Paul picks up that pride and turns it. Our citizenship, he writes, is in heaven, and we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. The church in Philippi is a colony too, an outpost of a capital they have not yet seen, and its members carry the manners and loyalties of that other city. When the Savior comes from it, he will transform their lowly bodies to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control.

Paul sets this against another way of living. There are people, he says with tears, who live as enemies of the cross. Their god is their stomach, their glory is in their shame, their mind is set on earthly things. Whether these were the same false teachers as earlier in the chapter or professed believers who had drifted, the description is of people whose appetites have become their loyalty. Their citizenship is here.

The one idea for today is that where you belong determines how you live. Paul introduces this by describing his own running: forgetting what is behind, straining toward what is ahead, pressing on toward the goal. He tells the mature to take this view, and he urges the Philippians to follow his example and to notice the others who live the same way. Then he draws the conclusion, at the start of chapter four: therefore, stand firm in the Lord.

The turn toward life is a question of orientation. A colonist looks toward the capital. It shapes what feels like home, what counts as success, what is worth eagerly awaiting. If your citizenship is in heaven, then a good deal of what your surrounding culture calls progress will look like a detour, and some of what it calls loss will look like the road. On the first day of a new month, take a few minutes to remember what city you belong to. Then stand firm.