“Our citizenship is in heaven.” “Therefore, my brethren dearly beloved and longer for, my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord” (Phil 3:20; 4:1). Your polity, your citizenship, is in heaven. If you simply accept the fact that you are a citizen of another country, then you are not really a citizen of this country. Nothing can be more definite than that if you belong to another country, you do not belong to this one.
This is a great point. The first thing to accept is that the earth is not our place, but that heaven is our place. You may say that we are not in heaven yet; still, it is our country, and therefore this is not our country. I quite admit we are subjects here, but subjects and citizens are quite different; we are subjects, but we are not citizens; we are bound to obey the powers that be, but our citizenship is in heaven.
I believe it is of immense importance to apprehend that fact, and I do not think anyone can form a just idea of the alteration it would effect in him. Practically, there is nothing that a man abhors more than to be displaced from the earth. The earth suits the natural man.
First of all, the earth could not be your rightful place because the One who is your Life (Col 3:4) was rejected here, and He has been called to the right hand of the Father. “The light of the world” has gone away, and if you seek the light (IMO, the presence of Jesus’ person in His body, thus believers have the presence of His Spirit, and now in His absence they are the only light of the world—NC) you will find that it is in another place, and that you cannot find it here. “But if we walk in the light, as He is the light, we have fellowship one with another” (1 Jhn 1:7).