Cross thoughts: Christian ideas seen in Sudanese every day life.
Home is the place where you live or the place where your parents live and where you grew up. Your homeland is the country you have come from. If you are a citizen of a country, then you have the right to permanently live there. Citizenship is the legal right to be a citizen of a particular country.
I am aware that since the separation of Sudan and South Sudan in July 2011 some people have wrongly had their rights removed. They have been made stateless. They are not officially recognised as a citizen of any country.
Yet all Christians can have a different view, a positive perspective, when we look upwards and ahead. Do not be continually disappointed, grumbling at your status in this world. That is too easy!
“But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body”,Philippians 3:20-21.
What does this mean for us in our daily lives?
No government can take away our heavenly citizenship, because Jesus Christ has secured it for us.
Hardships and hurts in this present life must encourage us to look forward to the much, much better life that is still to come. We share in Christ’s sufferings now. We will share in His glory then, Philippians 3:10-11.
Like Paul, we are to “press on”, to keep going. Our calling as Christians is to go “heavenward”, always making progress on the journey towards the region of our spiritual citizenship, Philippians 3:12, 14.
We must direct our hearts and our lives to heaven, where God lives in all His fullness. Successful Christian life in the present keeps at the top of the mind the tremendous prospects of our future home. Our Lord Jesus Christ is coming again, Philippians 3:20.
To think God’s way about this we must see the second coming of Jesus Christ as God’s planned way to bring to fruition His own saving work. “We belong to a far-off homeland and wait for the King of that land to come and fetch us. Our names are on the citizenship rolls there and our place is secure, but ... while we wait here we must live as if we were there”.[1]
[1] Alec Motyer The Message of Philippians BST (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press) 1984.
August 2013.