Until Christ comes again, Christians live as citizens in this world and citizens of heaven. We are dual citizens who have the duty to love God and our neighbor in our earthly countries with a different kind of power than the world has. Where Rome demanded allegiance through aggression and superiority, followers of Jesus depend on a power that comes from the Sovereign King himself. This power is made known in our weakness because it makes much of his strength (2 Cor. 12:9).

The first book of the Bible I had the privilege of preaching through was the joyful letter to the Philippians. I didn’t know it then, but this little letter written nearly 2,000 years ago would be branded into my heart forever. Besides the beautiful proclamations of Christ and his glory, the main idea that struck me was the reality of a Christian’s citizenship. Paul teaches the small church in Philippi that they are citizens of heaven (3:20). This was not some random thing for Paul to write but instead would have had deep meaning for the Philippians. In fact, it would have challenged something they held very dear: their Roman citizenship.
Some Christians can find themselves focusing more on their earthly citizenship than their heavenly citizenship.
The little colony of Philippi was proud—almost boastful—of their citizenship as a Roman colony. Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) won a decisive victory for Rome years earlier and made Philippi an official Roman colony, granting its residents Roman citizenship (Gordon Fee, NICNT: Philippians, p. 161). A major part of the population was composed of proud former soldiers who had served in the Roman military. Philippi was a people and place that reveled in patriotism.
As a veteran of the U.S. Army, I understand what it means to be a proud citizen who has served my country. Yet, as proud as I am, I am also concerned that some in churches in the United States can misunderstand their identity at times. Rather than focusing on being disciples of Christ and citizens of heaven, they may tend to opt in for the popular identity of being American citizens and patriots.
Rather than being formed by the King of heaven, it can be tempting to soak up hours of the Joe Rogan podcast or to become imitators of Jordan Peterson. Rather than living out the ethical qualities of the kingdom (Matt. 5-7), some adopt a worldly view of power. Rather than striving side-by-side for the faith of the gospel (Phil. 1:27), some are merely staunch advocates of Second Amendment rights, big beards, and craft beers. While I’m not opposed to any of these things, they should not determine our prime identity.
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There is always someone praying for you… always! Someone in heaven is praying for you… and He is praying for you because you are upon His heart! Isn’t that a wonderful thought, also? In fact, the more that we come to see, and understand, about God’s love, the more we are also able to see why the Apostle John says quite simply, “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

So Aaron shall bear the names of the sons of Israel on the breastplate of judgement over his heart, when he goes into the holy place, as a memorial before the Lord continually. Exodus 28:29

Have you ever tried to read through the Bible from start to finish, perhaps with the aid of a reading plan or perhaps just jumping right in at Genesis 1:1?
How did you get on? For many (if not all) of us, reading the Bible through just isn’t as easy as we perhaps feel it ought to be.
Take the chapters upon chapters of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers that deal with the building of the tabernacle (with the lists of dimensions and materials and so on); or that deal with the priestly clothing (again, with the lists of dimensions and materials and so on); or that list the various censuses (with the numbers upon numbers upon numbers)…
Now, I’m sure that there are people will enjoy reading those parts – architects, engineers, mathematicians perhaps, who have an interest in such things; or who will have a great understanding of such things;
But some of you may be like me and the words seem just to all blur together and, to be honest, I generally get very little out of these sections of the Bible by just reading through them by myself, without the help of experts explaining the importance and relevance of what I am reading.
However, in my experience of reading through these portions of the Bible I find that every so often, in the midst of all this blurriness, something will just shine out, like a bit of metal suddenly catching the sunlight…
And Exodus 28:29 is an example of exactly that.
 Now, we know that in the design of temple, the design of the sacrifices, and even in the design of the priestly clothing God is teaching us something about salvation; and as the priestly clothing applies specifically to the priest, so this teaching applies specifically to the Person of Jesus Christ – who is, of course, our Great High Priest –
So when we find ourselves reading about the names of the people of God being placed especially over the priest’s heart we do not necessarily need so great a theological mind to understand the meaning.
 We know what it means for someone to be ‘upon our heart’. We might have found ourselves saying to someone, “I just want you to know that you’re very much upon my heart”. It means to love, to care and even to cherish.
We know what that means. It means we are loved. And so, we can know immediately from this verse that we are loved by Jesus – our names (the names of ‘the people of God’) are written upon His heart!

Returning the cause to the people for whom it was created is the only way to save it, and to stop the many discriminations that girls and women still face….First, we have to honor the actual meaning of words, like “woman.” We have to insist that those meanings are important. We have to go back, again, to first principles. That is the only way forward.

“Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough Covid,” The Washington Post recently declared. This was in keeping with the newspaper’s official new language policy: “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”
“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”
“It’s a very contested space at the moment,” explained Australian Health Secretary Brendan Murphy—a nephrologist, a doctor of medicine—when he was asked the same question at a hearing in Melbourne. “We’re happy to provide our working definition.”
The meaning of “woman,” the Labor Party’s Anneliese Dodds, in Britain, observed, “depended on context.” (Never mind that Dodds oversees the party’s women’s agenda.)
“I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” Labor’s Yvette Cooper added the next day, March 8, International Women’s Day. She declined to follow suit.
What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”?
Jackson, Dodds and Cooper—and, no doubt, every individual formerly or currently capable of becoming pregnant on the masthead at The Washington Post—would call themselves feminists. Champions of women’s rights. (So, too, one imagines, would Dr. Murphy.) Once upon a time, it was women like them who proudly declared, I am woman, hear me roar. It was women like them who stood up for women and womanhood.
But now these exemplars of female empowerment—educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence—seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word.
It wasn’t simply about language. It was about how we think about and treat women. For nearly 2,500 years—from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to Seneca Falls to Anita Hill to #MeToo—women had been fighting, clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny. But now that they were finally on the cusp of the Promised Land, they were turning their backs on all that progress. They were erasing themselves.
How we got from there to here is the story of an unbelievable hijacking. Two, actually.
It was only five decades ago, in the 1970s, that women—mostly white, middle-class and from places like New York, Boston and north London, and fed up with being sidelined by their comrades on the left—forged a new movement. They called it Women’s Liberation.
At the start, Women’s Liberation was seen as the domain of women with money—like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and, in the United Kingdom, Germaine Greer and Rosie Boycott. But soon it became the movement of everyday mothers, daughters, wives, working women, poor women, and women regularly beaten up by their boyfriends and husbands.
They embodied a politics of action: protesting, writing, lobbying, setting up shelters. They formed sprawling, nationwide organizations like the National Organization of Women, the National Abortion Campaign and the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
And at the center of their politics was an awareness of their physicality, a keen understanding that the challenges women faced were bound up with the bodies they had been born into. Exploitation at home and at work, the threat of sexual violence, unequal pay—all that was a function of their sex.
Nothing better summed up the ethos of Women’s Liberation than “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which was published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Every feminist had a copy or had read one. It sold something like four million copies. It was a bible. That’s because “Our Bodies, Ourselves” rejected the old, Puritan discomforts with female sexuality that, feminists argued, had prevented women from realizing themselves, and empowered women by educating them about their own bodies.
By the 1980s, women had won several key victories. Equal pay was the law (if not always the reality). No-fault divorce was widespread. Abortion was safe and legal. Women were now going to college, getting mortgages, playing competitive sports and having casual sex. In the United States, they were running for president, and they were getting elected to the House and Senate in record numbers. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.
In the wake of all these breakthroughs, the movement began to lose steam. It contracted, then it splintered, and a vacuum opened up. Academics took over—hijacked—the cause.
There was an obvious irony: It was women’s liberationists who had successfully made women a topic worthy of academic scholarship. But now that the feminist professoriat had the luxury of not worrying about the very concrete issues the older feminists had fought for, feminist professors spent their days reflecting on their feminism—exploring, reimagining and rejecting old orthodoxies.

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