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Have you ever been in a foreign country? If you have, you know that to the natives of that country, you were a foreigner, an alien, because your citizenship was in another nation. Foreigners are distinguished easily by such things as the clothing they wear, their personal habits and their manner of speech.
Christians are depicted as aliens on the earth: “For our citizenship is in Heaven; whence also we wait for a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phi 3:20). This principle is the basis of every exhortation in the New Testament that calls Christians to be distinctive people. Old father Abraham is projected as an honorable example to us in this respect:
By faith he became a sojourner in the land of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God (Heb. 11:9–10)
The most fatal weakness that individual saints suffer is the failure to separate temporal from eternal things. We must always be vigilant against walking by sight instead of by faith. It is because of failure at this point that the church lamely limps along when it ought to be marching like a mighty army. When we live on this earth like it is our eternal home, we will live according to its ways; we become “naturalized” to its culture. Such is an absolute denial of God’s Heavenly purpose for us:
Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are upon the earth (Col. 3:2).
And be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind (Rom. 12:2).
The Lord emphasizes our alien status to the world when He calls us “the light of the world” and “the salt of the earth.”
When we truly realize our alien status in this world, it will do many things for us:
- We will no longer be surprised, or even dismayed that the world largely rejects our message.
- We will not be tempted to adopt its ungodly ways.
- We will not put so much stock in material things, except as we may use them to honor our true king.
- We will spare nothing to support, advance and enlarge the Heavenly kingdom upon the earth.
Our king said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). We are aliens on the earth.
[Note: I wrote this article for, and it was published in the August 14, 1975, edition of the Granbury Gospel, weekly bulletin of the Granbury Church of Christ, Granbury, Texas, of which I was editor.
Attribution: From thescripturecache.com; Dub McClish, owner and administrator.
