“Our citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.” We are pilgrims in this world, journeying toward our true and eternal home. This doesn’t mean that we should regard this world with indifference. Everything that exists is God’s creation, and it is He who ultimately governs all things: the movement of the stars, the orbits of the planets, and even the course of human history—however often that history may seem to have spun completely out of control.
After all, if things are indeed out of control, they are not beyond God’s control, but beyond our own. For, sadly, we so often surrender the freedom He has given us. We risk becoming like those of whom Saint Paul speaks with such deep sorrow in today’s Epistle, “whose end is destruction.”
But this is not what God wants for us. His purpose is to “change the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed unto the body of his glory.” He desires that we recognize anew within ourselves the image of the One to whom we belong, and freely return to Him. He has already done everything necessary to make this possible: He has redeemed us from bondage to sin, death, and the devil, so that we may set out upon the journey that leads to our true and eternal home.