Our Heavenly Citizenship

​Ephesians 4: 14 – 32
 
The Apostle Paul wrote the Ephesian Epistle from his prison in Rome around A.D. 60, to strengthen the believers’ faith by teaching them the significance of their heavenly citizenship, and its requirement to live as God’s testimonials. From its prologue, the Ephesian narrative described an unusual realm that we can only tag as ‘heaven-on-earth,’ where the church is earth-bound but with a heavenly milieu: it’s neither completely one nor the other. However, we are clear on one point – the radical power to live an earthly transformed lifestyle can only be derived from God. The Kingdom of Heaven is here with us, albeit in an incomplete sense, as we “grow up in all aspects into Him… until we attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:15,13). How that is achieved is then partially exposited by Paul in the rest of his Letter. We will only focus on a limited segment.
 
The reminder by Paul that we are no longer children is an apt analogy (Eph 4:14), for youngsters soon develop a will of their own and would resist any reasonable parental demands despite the latter’s’ best advice, and would even at times, by craftiness and deceit, get their own way; if we allow them to get away with it. In this context, the believers are encouraged to not be misled by the trickery and cunning of others into theological unorthodoxies, but to consider themselves as one covenant community in Christ, committed to practicing the truth in love (Eph 4:15a; the Greek form does not indicate a verb for “speaking,” but is a participle, a verbal adjective, literally translated as “truthing in love”; cf., Eph 4:25). The writer’s thought is about engagement – by living the truth before each other. Biblical ‘truth-living’ is demanding and is a reason for our routine nominalized faith in practice, as it involves taking responsibility for how we interpret the world around us in the light of others and the Scriptural standards. Undertaking responsibility requires responsiveness, which is not a mere subjective state, but a way of responding to what is before us with the resources that are available to us as social beings in Christ. That is how Jesus responded to our needs; even in His silence, He speaks.
 
Further, Paul spelt it all out explicitly how this community was going to transform itself (Eph 4:25-32). He began by informing the Ephesians that they are not to revert to the meaningless condition of their pagan past (Eph 4:17), which resulted in hardened hearts and ignorant minds (Eph 4:18). The outcome of such a combination was a pervasive self-centeredness and an uncaring and materialistic attitude (Eph 4:19). It is an excellent practice to remind ourselves where we would be today, if not for God’s salvific action in our lives. Paul’s motive was for the Ephesian community to embody corporately Jesus’ way of life. They must renew their minds and think from their new position in Christ, being righteous and holy in recognizing and eradicating destructive community routines which subvert others’ integrity (Eph 4:20-24). Understandably, he is only able to list a salient few which are particularly toxic among any group of people (Eph 4: 25-32). 
 
It is appropriate to remind ourselves that Paul was writing to believers about an unmistakable darkness of double mindedness that still plaques us all, often contradicting the Christian values inherent in our heavenly citizenship. The crux of his letter was to foster a Spirit-empowered community mindset and behaviors, characterizing the heavenly nature of an earthly church.