Citizens of Heaven | Philippians 3:17-21

If you believe that heaven can be attained in this life, then there are significant implications to how you will live. Your attitude will be that you need to bank everything on this life – live literally like there’s no tomorrow. You will find suffering, sickness and pain something abnormal and to be avoided at all costs, as those things are absent from heaven. You will have the temptation to accumulate as much wealth as you can in order to create your heavenly home here on earth. You will want to live how you please, gratify every desire you have and follow your heart in order to make this life like your heaven.

This is essentially the message of the prosperity gospel which is all too common in our context – the promise of health, wealth and happiness – live a life of heaven on earth. Yet this message is actually nothing new. The early church faced their own prosperity gospel preachers. In fact Paul has in mind a form of prosperity gospel in our text this morning. These false teachers are so focused on living their best life on earth, that they have actually lost sight of heaven itself. What we will see in this text is that because our citizenship is in heaven, we are to live here on earth holding to a future heavenly hope.

Preacher: Rev. Antonio Coppola.

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