Philippians 3:20–21

This word is not used in Scripture in the sense of familiar talk. In the Old Testament it refers to the walk... In the New Testament the word anastrophē has a similar sense of "walk, conduct, behaviour," and so it reads in every other passage except Philippians 1:27 and Philippians 3:20. There the word is politeuma, "citizenship," which for the Christian is in heaven, separating him from citizenship on earth and its politics.

It is "citizenship." To our minds that is a cold political thing. To a Greek it was everything. His citizenship came before wife, children or any other interest in life. The Spirit can take up this word to bring out a truth that matters so much to us: everything that shapes the Christian's life morally, in its deepest springs, is in heaven now. What a wonderful contrast for us who once belonged to earth! Our new relationships, interests, objects, joys and hopes are found in heaven!

"For our conversation (citizenship) is in heaven"; our real association is with Him who is there. Whatever we might have been as citizens of the earth, it is at an end now and forever. We belong to Christ on high. It is not merely that we are going there, but we belong to heaven now... We are now heavenly, and then we shall be declared and proved to be so.

Nothing is more important than to heed the moral association of things in the mind of God. For example, in Philippians 3:19, those "who mind earthly things" are in the position of "the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame!" This is God's moral connection of things. The true contrast to it is to have "our conversation in heaven, from where we also look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ."

This is the great safeguard against falling away! "Where the treasure is, there the heart will be also." The servant who says in his heart, "My lord delays his coming," begins to indulge himself and oppress his fellows. It is the same here. When the Church stops realizing that HEAVEN is the place of its inheritance, its privileges and its titles, and that the coming down of the Saviour from heaven is its hope, then its own things — earthly things — become its object.

When we first came to know the Lord Jesus Christ, we knew Him "as Saviour." So what does it mean that now "we eagerly await Him as Saviour"? When we first learned to know Him, we knew Him as Saviour of our souls — the Saviour who bore our sins. Now we eagerly await Him as Saviour of our bodies: "we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies" (Romans 8:23). It is the very same word we have in Philippians 3:20: "eagerly await," or "wait for patiently and persistently."

It is true that He is coming as the Judge, but we do not look for Him in that character. For us it is written, "We look for the Saviour… who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body" (Phil. 3:20-21).

If our commonwealth exists in the heavens, then it is "from where we also look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ." People may tell us we ought to spend our time improving things down here. But we are simply waiting for Christ to come and take us away from the things down here.

There is one more point to notice here. Christ is coming to change our vile bodies. "Vile" here does not mean morally vile; it is not an insulting word. It really means "body of humiliation."

He cannot look on this body of humiliation without making it a body of glory. Your body carries in it all the seeds of decay, and all through life it is a dying body. The more you think of Christ, the more you feel the contrast between your body and His. Everything in ours humbles us: pain and weariness, and struggles of mind, all sorts of thoughts rising up. We have to put them down, but there they are.

When He rose, He did not lay aside the Manhood He took when He became man, as some think. His holy body, which never saw decay, came out in new and spiritual conditions. That body is now completely beyond the reach of death. As Philippians 3:21 says, it is the glorious pattern our risen bodies will be made like. So it is a body in which He lives for ever.

The word translated "conformity" is the very same word Scripture uses when it tells us He was "in the form of God." It means the "specific character, the inward and essential."

Here is a phrase describing our mortal body that is just as true of the living as of the dead. Being mortal — what people usually call "life" — is the state of humiliation we are born into because of sin, and decay completes it. The transforming power of the Saviour... will then work on the living and the dead alike.

We do not look at Him only as Saviour on the cross. When He comes for us, there will be "salvation" in the final sense, as always in this letter. So he expects the last trace of the first Adam to be removed. He looks for us to be brought fully, even in body, into the likeness of the Second Man, the last Adam... It does not matter what vessels of shame and misery they may have been now: "He is able to subdue all things to himself."

All power belongs to God. What makes this passage so striking is that it plainly gives divine will and power to the Man Christ Jesus... Death is of God — His sentence on sin. In human form, God has set that sentence aside by submitting to it. His saints will see and know Him for ever in the very form in which He did that mighty act. His power is hidden now in human hands. Its next great display will be the change and resurrection of the righteous.

The power of the glory is able to subdue all things to Himself, as Philippians 3:21 shows. So it can subdue and strengthen us now.

Why are poor sinners like us going to have these bodies of humiliation made like His own glorious body? We know the answer: we are going to be like Him, so that we may be the everlasting witness to the worth of His Person and the effectiveness of His work. Think of that poor degraded thief on the cross. Think of the proud, Christ-hating Pharisee Saul of Tarsus. Then look ahead to heaven. When we gaze on these men as glorified saints, will we not see the amazing effectiveness of the work of Christ, which removes every trace of sin?