By Mark Buchanan

Our citizenship is in heaven. Philippians 3:20

RIGHT NOW, not one thing on earth is as it should be.

Everything’s tainted. Everything is, at best, provisional. Nothing quite works. This should not surprise or dismay us. The whole creation groans, waiting for you and me to come into our complete birthright, for that day we’re sworn in as full-fledged citizens of the kingdom.

Between now and then, we need perspective. We need to view the broken earth from the glory not yet revealed. That glory at present is hidden in clay jars, in these thin brittle containers of ourselves and our relationships. But one day, in a blink, that will all change.

For now, we rehearse the ethics of the coming kingdom, we enact the citizenship code of heaven, long before it arrives, years before we get there. We learn to act out of, not the lowliness that still plagues us, but the transformation that awaits us.

 In hope of that transformation, in eager expectancy of the One who accomplishes it, we start living here as though we’re already there . . .

Do you see each other from the window of heaven, as the new creations you are in Christ? Stop beholding each other from a worldly point of view. By faith, not sight, take hold of the One who is coming, and of the work he will finish once he gets here. Practice today what you’ll inherit forever.

Not that any of this is easy. It’s messy. It’s hard. I find a twisted pleasure in gossiping, faultfinding, pigeonholing.       I derive a bitter satisfaction in dredging up another’s mistakes.

It takes discipline and humility to do otherwise, to see others as new creations when there is scant evidence to support the claim, and when I’d rather muckrake. Many Christians look more fallen than redeemed. They look, not renewed, but shopworn, the same old same old.

And me too. I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. But what are our options? We can keep letting self sabotage intimacy. We can keep falling into the snare of blaming and hiding and withdrawing. We can keep joining Satan as accusers of the brethren.

Or we can practice seeing others as new creations. We can take up, here and now, the privileges and responsibilities of kingdom citizenship. We can adopt the perspective of heaven.

I’m learning this, slowly, but maybe the hardest lesson yet was with Betsy (not her real name). Betsy was in her late 40s and had been a Christian most of her life. Only, that was hard to credit. She was a trial: barb-tongued and hot-tempered, with skin both prickly and thin. She was quick to blast another, and quicker to wilt when it got dished back.

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And Betsy loathed me. She scorned virtually every aspect of my ministry – my preaching, my leadership, my pastoral care, the way I dressed – and this to my face. Who knows what she said when my back was turned? The truth is, I loathed her too. I wanted her to leave, and told her so.

And then God got me. I was cutting the grass one sweltering summer day, meditating on the letter to the Philippians as I crisscrossed the lawn. I was thinking about what it meant to see myself and others from the perspective of heaven, as citizens of a place we hadn’t arrived at yet.

And guess who God brought to mind?

Yes, yes: Betsy. Was she a new creation? Was she a citizen of heaven? Was I enough of these things myself to see her, even her, not for who she was but for her she would be when Jesus was finished with her?

Then God reminded me of something else in Philippians. In chapter two, just before Paul calls us to have the same attitude of Jesus – humble, servant-like, selfless, obedient, sacrificing – he makes this little remark, subtle and subversive: “consider others better than yourselves.”

I was stunned. I had to stop what I was doing.

“God,” I said, “you don’t mean, you couldn’t mean, that I’m to think this way of . . . Betsy? Do you?” He did.

And then God took me through a painful and wonderful discipline. He showed me His Spirit’s work in Betsy’s life, her Christ-like virtues, hidden and tiny as embryos, that one day he would perfect and reveal in glory. Her generosity. Her compassion. Her heart for the broken.

That day was an epiphany. It freed me to love Betsy, but not only her. Now, whenever I find myself struggling with anyone – my close friends, my wife or children, my enemy – and I find that I’m looking at them from a worldly point of view, I re-enact the discipline of that day. I seek heaven’s perspective. And it makes all the difference.

Betsy left the church anyhow. I don’t know if she still loathes me, or even thinks about me. When I think about her, I don’t always love her: there are times I’m so earthly minded I’m of no heavenly good.

But there are other times – times I’m heavenly minded enough to be of some earthly good – that I see her from eternity’s window. And then I’m crazy about her.

Mark Buchanan is a bestselling author and a Vancouver Island pastor. This piece is from a new anthology called Hot Apple Cider: Words to Stir the Heart and Warm the Soul. Copies of the book are being given out at World Vision’s Girls Night Out events in several B.C. locations April 14 – May 2.  Info: www.gnolive.ca.

April 2008