"citizenship is in heaven." We are denizens of the New Jerusalem.
this body of death and our putting on immortality; but there will remain loving offices of service, which shall never end. As members of one family, dearly linked in everlasting brotherhood, we shall in some measure be dependent on each other, and find in these outgoings of ministering love, or loving ministry (let it be called either), the very joy of heaven. Never shall the household fall asunder like so many grains of sand, or its members cease to be needful to each other. That would be like the stoppage of the circulation, as if the heart had ceased to beat, or the pulse to respond to these beatings. Surely if—when the family is scattered and broken, not one of its members having reached their home, and most of them unknown to each other—there are so many blessed household services and family duties daily rendered, there will be thousands more, of which we have here no conception, continually performed, when that family shall be all gathered into the family mansion, and brought together, face to face, in the union of an endless brotherhood and an unobstructed fellowship. What the duties of that household service shall be we know not now, but we shall know hereafter.
2. It is citizen-service.—We are "citizens of no mean city." Our "citizenship is in heaven." We are denizens of the New Jerusalem. The freedom of the city has been conferred on us; and with the rights of citizens, the duties also have devolved upon us. These we cannot discharge here. They are reserved for the day when we shall "enter in through the gates into the city."
What they may be, I do not attempt to tell. But surely in that "joyous city" there will be the intercourse of citizenship and the mutual offices of citizenship. It cannot be without a purpose that we are to be thus placed together in one city. Kings we shall be; but also citizens. Priests we shall be; but also citizens. As such we shall serve one another. The dwellers in the Jerusalem above will not be less intimate, less helpful, less closely linked in mutual services of neighbourhood and city intercourse, than the inhabitants of the Jerusalem below.