Our Citizenship is in Heaven

This is our first time in this part of Colorado, and we are really enjoying it. It's wonderful to be here. My wife and I have, for the first time, all six of our grandkids together, which is sort of like a circus. So it's sort of interesting, but we are enjoying it. We're so glad to be here with all of you. I had the chance to come here.

I was sort of surprised when they assigned me. I figured this was sort of one of those areas where they have lists of ministers wanting to come to. We go wherever they send us to go. We are very happy to be here and spend this feast with all of you. If you were in ancient Israel back thousands of years ago, you would be keeping this feast with a totally different understanding than you are today, than we are today. They would have kept this feast as a harvest festival, thanking God for the physical blessings that He had given to them, and looking forward to the time in the future when God would be with them.

But it was a very vague idea at the time of Moses, at the time when they went into the Promised Land, exactly what the future events of this time was all about. You and I are here because we are here to celebrate a great harvest of human beings into the family of God at the return of Jesus Christ to establish God's kingdom on this earth, and to reign for a thousand years. The Millennium. A Latin word just means a thousand years.

Now we have to be careful sometimes. We can confuse the word Millennium with the Kingdom of God. They're two different terms. Millennium means a thousand years. The Kingdom of God is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God has always existed. God has been on His throne forever. God is on His throne now.

And God will be on His throne forever. That's never going to change. God is still the Creator, the Sustainer of the universe. He's still in charge of everything. So the Kingdom of God exists, and yet here we live in this mess. Well, we know the story. We always have to begin at the beginning. We know what the story is. We know that Adam and Eve were given the opportunity to choose between good and evil. They chose to follow Satan, and they were kicked out of Eden. They didn't walk out of Eden with their heads held high.

They were kicked out of Eden. And they were kicked out of Eden, and God said, You will have a different ruler over you for a period of time. And at the end of that period of time, I will take it back. Satan doesn't reign on this earth today. You know, Paul called him the God of this world. He doesn't reign on this earth today because somehow he's more powerful than God.

He's overthrown God. It's like he tricked God, showed up in the Garden of Eden, and caught him off guard. That's not what happened. God let him in, and here we are. And he said, okay, you can have them for a while, but only for a while. Satan hates this time because I'm not sure what entirely he understands, but he knows enough to know that his time is limited. God didn't give him humanity forever because God's kingdom never went away.

He just got a piece of it for a little bit, and even that he's restrained. When you look through the Bible, the Bible is all about God restraining him, saying, oh no, no, no, no, no, you can't kill Job. Oh no, you can't do that to Israel.

Oh no, you can't do that to the church. He's always restraining him. God's kingdom is not gone. And that's an important part of what I'm going to talk about today, because we're celebrating a time when Jesus Christ is coming back to reestablish that kingdom here, and we want to be part of that. The question is, what impact does that have on your life and my life today?

I mean, this is a great time. We're staying in wonderful accommodations. We get to go out to restaurants. We get to do things. We get to come to services. We get to fellowship. It's like Mr. Shaw said last night, as wonderful as those things are, and they are gifts from God. If that's all we get out of this time, then all we did was have a vacation. And this is supposed to be a whole lot more than a vacation. We are here because God has great expectations for you. Maybe I'm sort of important to God.

Maybe I'm here because God wants me. No, no, no. You're here because God has great expectations for you. He expects something from you, and He expects a future for you that He has planned out.

He expects it for you. He anticipates it. He wants it. And it's for you personally. You've received a personal invitation from the Creator of the universe to attend the most incredible events in human history. Now you might say, oh, that sort of needs it. He said, no, no, I want you to understand, if nothing else from this feast of tabernacles, you go home. I don't care if you're 75 or 55 or 25 or 10 years old. You are here because you have received a personal invitation from the Creator of the universe to attend the most incredible things He's going to do in all human history.

And He has expectations for you and me to be part of that. He expects it from us. So what does that mean when you go home? What does that mean when you go home back to the fact that you've lost your job or that you have a job that you don't like? Or you go back home and you're dealing with your financial problems or your health problems or the problems with your friends or the problems at school or the problems that are involved in your church.

Every little church has its own little problems. It's human beings. Read Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians. You get it. It's all there. When we go back to our real world, when this little world that we're in, this little bubble that we're in is gone, when we go back to our real world, what does this mean? What does it mean to say, I attended eight days, went to a place, I attended an eight-day festival. The waiter this morning, when we went to get breakfast, was asking me about the United Church of God, why we're here.

Is this like our Mecca? We all come here. No, no, no. I said, there's nothing particularly spiritual about this place. We're here and we're going to have services and we're going to have Bible studies. We're going to have children's studies and teen studies. He was sort of interested in that. It's a little strange, though. We didn't come here to ski or do all the other things that people do when they come here.

We came here to worship God and to receive our invitation. You say, what does that mean? Okay. Paul says it this way. We won't turn there. But Paul says in his letter to the Philippians that our citizenship is in heaven. You know, that's not a future tense statement. Our citizenship will be in heaven. Our citizenship is in heaven right now. You and I have a place in the Kingdom of God right now, even though it has not been reestablished on the earth yet.

We have a citizenship in the Kingdom of God right now. And you are a citizen of the Kingdom of God. We went and did some Beyond Today programs in Germany and Belgium in the summer. It was a lot of fun. We did it on the cheap. We didn't have much of a budget. We thought we were going to stay in hostels. And then we found out that you could get motel rooms for 39 euros a night, which is…they're not fancy.

But we were able to go and we were able to do the programs. And, of course, every time I go to Europe, I really enjoy it. I enjoy the cultures. I enjoy the people. I love going there, but I am reminded of something. I have a passport. I am not a citizen of any of those countries. I have no legal rights there. And I have only the privileges they give foreigners. A citizen is a person who is legally a member of a country. They're actually a member of it.

They belong to it. It belongs to them. It's a legal status. And because someone is a citizen, they have privileges and rights that other people who come there don't have. I mean, when we were in Germany, the Germans have more rights than I do. I was a visitor. I don't have those rights. But as a citizen, you also have duties and responsibilities to that country. Duties and responsibilities to that country. That's what citizenship is. It's a legal status given to you that you are both owner and owned by that country.

You are part of that country. And you have rights and privileges. You also have duties that you must perform. As a citizen of the kingdom of God, you have been given a status by God. It's more than a legal status because to be part of His kingdom is to be part of His family. You'll hear a little bit about that as we continue through the feast. It is to be a member of His family.

You also have rights and privileges with that. And you have duties and responsibilities that have to do with our citizenship. Remember, our citizenship doesn't begin when Christ returns. Sometimes we have this idea, well, Christ comes back and re-establishes God's kingdom. And then, you know, I receive whatever my reward and I get to participate and help Christ change the world.

I get to be part of that. It's so exciting. And that is part of the vision of what this day is, that time when I get to be part of what He's going to do on this earth. And we get to stop wars and stop poverty. I mean, for most people, it's like, well, you live in a dream world. I believe that. I believe that since I was a child. We're going to do that.

But as you begin to grow into this understanding of God's expectations for you, you begin to understand, no, you're already a citizen. Every day, you're a citizen. Every day. And therefore, you personally represent in your lives the Kingdom of God. God has you as a citizen. You know, if you go to another country and you act very badly, what do they say? Boy Americans, right? Terrible Americans.

How do we represent the Kingdom of God? Every day. Are there people in your lives that say, oh man, if that's where Christianity is, I don't want any part of it. Because that's who we are. Now, what does that mean right now? There are certain changes. If you really understand that you're a citizen of the Kingdom of God, there's massive changes that have to take place in your life. And those massive changes include the Ten Commandments, keeping the Holy Days. It includes the doctoral understandings that we have.

It includes understanding that we don't have an immortal soul, that there's no everlasting burning hell. The understanding about clean and unclean meats. All this is part of it. But understand that's just the beginning part of it. If our Christianity stops at doctoral understanding, then we're only part way of being a citizen of the Kingdom of God.

It includes more than that. We're going to talk about some of the things that have to happen in our lives. If we're going to truly be a citizen of the Kingdom of God, and how that affects your life when you go back, why do you get out of bed in the morning when you go back home? Why do you continue to go to school? Why do you pursue a career? I mean, we have all these reasons we do things, but this has to be at the heart of everything we do.

I have been chosen by God to be His citizen, paid for with a great price to be a citizen in His Kingdom. And He expects me to do that. He expects me. He expects you and I so much. He's prepared a future for us. He expects it so much, He's prepared a future for you.

He already says, prepared and reward for you. You think about how much of our life is unhappy because we have high expectations. And usually we actually create failure in life by our expectations. I've seen marriages go bad, not because their problems are actually minors, because they had such high expectations.

Nobody can live up to those expectations. I've seen people just be so hard on their kids because they have expectations beyond reality. People sometimes will drive themselves to be sick because they have such expectations of what they're supposed to do. We have all these...how many people are victims?

How many people see life as failure? How many people see life as, you know, anything never works out my way. Everybody's against me. Why? Because they have expectations that are unreasonable. It is unreasonable for everybody to treat you nice all the time. It is unreasonable to think certain ways, and yet that's the way we think. God has expectations for you. He thinks they're reasonable. That's why we're here. We're here to receive His expectations. The first thing that happens when we truly understand our citizenship in the Kingdom of God is there is a change in loyalty. A change in loyalty. Mr. Shaw talked about loyalty last night.

A change in loyalty. Loyalty is very important, right? I mean, you can't have a friend if there's not loyalty. It's hard to be in a situation where there's a...even at work, if there's no loyalty, then there's going to be all kinds of problems between workers and workers and management. You can't have loyalty in a marriage. You can't have loyalty in a family. Loyalty is absolutely required for functional relationships, because there's a lot of dysfunctional loyalty, too. We'll talk about that in a minute.

Loyalty. And there's times when you have to realize when once we become a citizen of the Kingdom of God, our loyalty is to God first and the Kingdom of God. It is to Him. He is the ruler. Jesus Christ is His King of Kings. And our loyalty is to them first. Anything else that comes between us and them is a challenge to our loyalty as a citizen, as a family member.

It has to be absolute. This is why faith and loyalty are connected. Faith and loyalty are connected. Let's go to Hebrews 11. We're only going to look at two passages of Scripture today. Hebrews 11 and the Sermon on the Mount. We're going to go back and forth between the two of them. Hebrews 11. Verse 1. The writer of Hebrews, I think it was Paul, says, Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

He said there's a substance to this. It's who you are. It's your life. If we simply do these things, if we come to the Feast of Tabernacles because it's just another great time, then we're missing the point. There's a substance to faith that says, No, I believe. I know. I know it's going to happen.

I believe it's going to happen. You know, at the Feast of Tabernacles, seven years ago, my father died. A week and a half ago, my mother died. I completely believe I will see them when these days are fulfilled. Completely. Absolutely, there's no doubt. I worry if I'm going to be there sometimes. I don't worry much if they're going to be there. This is the substance of faith. It's real. And we have hope then.

If we're hopeless in our lives, then we've lost something that God is trying to give to us. He goes on and talks about how there's all these people in the Bible that followed God, and yet their lives weren't always working out the way they thought. They had to exchange something. They had to exchange their expectations for God's. We have to exchange our expectations for God's.

Now, I don't like saying that. There are certain things I preach, and even as I preach it, it makes me uncomfortable because I like my expectations. I would like God to exchange His for me's mind sometimes. But that's not our relationship, and I understand. I've tried. I have tried God to meet my expectations. He has no obligation to do so. I do have an obligation to meet His.

So we have to give up sometimes our expectations for His. And He has high ones for you. He has a future for you that's beyond anything you can imagine. If we go down here to verse 8, there's whole chapters about people who were faced with living life like you and I are. They had the same dreams, hopes, desires, same problems we had, different culture, different world. But at the human level, it was all the same.

And in that, they had to follow God's expectations, and here's why they did it. By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out of the place which he would receive an inheritance.

And he went out not knowing where he was going. You and I don't always know where God's leading us. We go. We go. We're citizens of that kingdom. By faith, he dwelled in the land of promise. Now, think about this. As any foreign country, what was the promise made to Abraham? Well, one of the promises, there were many, was all this land, as far as you can see, is yours.

And in his entire lifetime, he never owned a piece of it. He had to barter with somebody to have a piece of his own land so he could bury his wife. You think you'd give up on God on that one, right? Your whole life, this is your land. When do I get it? When I tell you. And you're bartering for a piece of your own land so you can bury your wife. But here's why he could do that. By faith, he dwelled in the land of promise, as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob.

The heirs of him were the same promise. For he waited for the city which has foundation to buildings and maker is of God. He lived in a foreign country, even though it was his land. You and I live in a foreign country. We must never forget that. You and I have been privileged. We live in the greatest nation that ever created by man on the face of the earth.

And I stress, ever created by man, this is not the kingdom of God. The United States will go its own way into history just like every other nation, whether it's the Roman Empire or the Communist Empire. It doesn't matter. This one will go down too. This is not the kingdom of God. I love this country, but it is not my primary country. I fear sometimes in the church everybody gets so politically minded we forget.

We are citizens of another place. If Abraham would have been citizens of Canaan, he would not be the father of the faithful. But he wasn't. Oh, we obey the laws. We pay our taxes. We're commanded to. We're supposed to be model citizens of this country, following God, doing what He says. But understand, we are not. Our citizenship here is not our primary citizenship, and it can't be. Remember that next time you're overwhelmed with all the politics going on. This nation was doomed to fail the moment they signed the Constitution because the Constitution is not the Constitution of the kingdom of God.

It is brilliant. I've read the Constitution, and it's absolutely brilliant. It's not the Constitution of the kingdom of God, though. And our citizenship is in heaven, and we must never forget that as our primary focus of life. First thing that happens to us is a change in loyalty. Matthew 6. We'll come right back here to Hebrews. Matthew 6, verse 19. Here Jesus says, "'Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroys, and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.'" In other words, in this kingdom that Jesus is going to re-establish on this earth, there are things in that kingdom as citizens.

There are rewards. There are privileges. There are rights that we won't receive until He comes back. But they're there. They're promised to us by God. He says, "'But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rusty destroys, and where thieves do not break in. For where your treasure is, your heart will also be.'" He goes on and He says, "'You know, you can't serve two masters.

You can't have two loyalties. Our loyalty is primarily to the kingdom of God and secondarily to the other obligations we have, like the country we live in. But it always must be in that order.' We ever reverse that order, and we're breaking down God's expectations for us.

Second change that happens to us is in Hebrews 11.13. So let's go back to Hebrews. And let's go to verse 13. We're talking about Sarah and Abraham and Noah and Edict and all these great people are the patriarchs, and before the patriarchs. He says, "'These have all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off or as short of them, and braced them.' They saw promises from God. They saw His expectations in their lives. They saw His promises, and those promises have expectations on us." Mr. Miller talked about that, didn't he? There's expectations on us because of these promises. He says, "'Gram hold of this promise and fulfill my expectations.' They embraced them.

They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. This is where these expectations change. And that's really the second thing that changes. Our loyalty changes. Our actual expectations of life change. We embrace. We embrace. And we look forward to and we understand. I am here, a sojourner. No amount of money I make puts me in the Kingdom of God. No, it's not wrong to be successful. There's lots of people in the Bible that were successful. But it's not our money.

It's not our status. Those things are interesting to God. That's what God's interested in, His expectations for us. His expectations for us are, are we going to be His expectations? Are we His children? Children, what little children want to meet the expectations of Mom and Dad, right? Do we want to meet the expectations of our Father and of our older brother Jesus Christ? He continues, He says, For those who say such things that they're pilgrims on this earth, we're soldiers. He says, For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland.

Don't get too comfortable here. This isn't the Kingdom of God. This is why you'll always be a little bit out of step. That's really hard, especially as a teenager. It's hard to be out of step. That's okay. There comes a time when everybody else is out of step. When Christ comes back, we will be in step with Him. God has great expectations for you. He wants to give you the Kingdom. What is the Kingdom? If you look through the Scripture, it's everything He has. All things. Now, I don't know what's left out of all things. Tell me what's not in all things. I would like to know. He says, I want to give you all things.

That's His expectations. To do that, we have to give up our expectations. We have to change what we think is important. And grasp hold of what He says. And truly, if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better that is a heavenly country. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them. He's prepared a place. The most amazing thing about that little passage is, God is not ashamed to be called their God.

I've thought about that in my life. Is God ashamed to be... Oh yeah, that's one of mine. Sorry. Yeah. He doesn't measure up that often. Not to my expectations, but He's one of mine. As God says here, He says, you know, these people, I'm not ashamed to say I'm their God. Now that doesn't mean He's glorifying them in terms of their...somehow they were made themselves good people.

What they did is they submitted through their faith so that God's expectations came through them. They gave themselves up to God. It wasn't because they were born better. Not one of us are here because we were better than anybody else. If we forget that, we're in trouble.

We're here because God called us. And He called us because we worked better than anybody else. That's why we were called. That's why we're here. Not so we can meet our great expectations, but His.

We're the proof of what God can do. We're never going to be the proof of what we can do. We're the proof of what people submitting to God, what God can do. And that's why we have to give up our expectations for Him. Matthew 6. Matthew 6. I won't read this whole passage, but if you start in verse 25 and go through verse 34, Jesus says, don't worry.

Don't be filled with anxiety about your clothes or all the things we expect. I expect the promotion. I expect this. I expect that. I want this. I want that. He says, stop all this anxiety. Stop all this worry. God will take care of you. We have to have the loyalty to God to believe He will do that. He'll take care of us. Now, that doesn't mean He promises that all of us are going to be millionaires. But His expectations go beyond this life.

We expect everything to happen in about 50 years. His expectations are for eternity. So His expectations for us are so much greater than anything we can come up with. Anything. And He tells them here in Matthew 6, He goes on in verse 25, don't worry. Don't be filled with anxiety. Don't be just overwhelmed with all the other stuff that surrounds all of us. And we get down to that famous verse in verse 33.

But seek first the Kingdom of God. You are now citizens of the Kingdom of God. Because God never left His throne. His Kingdom has always been there. And according to the Apostle Paul, you are citizens of that heavenly Kingdom. Seek that Kingdom first. And His righteousness, His way of doing things, His expectations, and all these things shall be added to you. Whatever we give up now, God says, I'll give you back what you can't even imagine. And I can imagine a lot. But there's a number of verses that talk about, no, no, you can't even imagine.

Now that's a promise. The only way we lose God's promises are carried out. It's just who they're carried out in. We don't have to take the promise. We can run away. Or we can grab hold of that. You grab hold of that, it becomes the substance of your life. And God says, I will get you there. Because we say, well, I can't do that. I can't overcome this sin, or I can't do that. I can't do this, not me. I'm too weak. I'm too small. And we give all these reasons to God, and we forget, wait a minute.

God may be a little bigger than my problem. God may be a little bigger than my sin. God may be able to do something in me that I can't do. In fact, everything God does in us, you and I can't do. He doesn't, because we follow. It becomes the substance of what we live, how we live, what we believe. And so we change our loyalties and our expectations. The third thing we change is we change our values. Now, values has become a very cliché word. A value is something, it's simple.

It's something that you feel is so important to you that you'll pay a price for it. You know, if you value your car and someone scrapes your car, you're really upset.

Now, if you have a 25-year-old car that you're sort of hoping someone wrecks into because maybe you'll get $100 insurance on, you don't value that car that much. It's simply what a value is. Well, what are our spiritual values? What do we say that are so important, so important, that we will hold on to those even if other people don't? We will hold on to those even if the society around us doesn't, because I guarantee you.

I guarantee you. You hold on to the values of the Kingdom of God, and you will always be out of step with the rest of the world. You will always be a sojourner. Always. That's what it is to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God under Satan's kingdom. You don't fit in. But the more you expect what God's expecting, the more you don't care that you don't fit in, because you see something so much greater.

There is something greater than the Republicans and the Democrats. I hate to tell you that, but there is. I did a story a couple of months ago now, and there was a black lady behind a counter, and I said, you look tired. She says, I've worked all day. She says, now I've got to go home and turn on the news and listen to the mess of the news. And I don't know why he said this.

I said, you know what? Just remember, Jesus is going to come back and fix it all. She says, you know, I've been telling my friends that. Nobody will listen to me. Pretty soon, everybody in the store was gathering around while she and I talked about Jesus coming back. She says, where were you? You always go so long. And I was, yeah, me and this lady, I don't know who she was, but she was great. We preached to everybody in that store. Because that is the only answer. And our values has to be His values. Look at Hebrews 11 again. Hebrews 11, verse 24, By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months by his parents, because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were commanded.

We're not afraid of the king's command. By faith Moses, when he became of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt, and he looked to the reward. So by faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king.

For he adored us, seeing him who was invisible. He adored because he could see what nobody else could see. You won't stay with this if you can't see what others can't see. I've known many people. It's my 54th...61, I was seven when I kept my first one. So yeah, this is my 54th feast in Tabernacles. Or is that 55? Anyways, it's some number. When you get to be 61, you can't remember things.

I've seen a lot of people along the way give this up for some riches. Give this up for some money, for some status, or a house, or a boat. Or for some friends, or to be able to do things on the Sabbath that they felt were wrong, but they know I've got to do this. I've seen people give it up for all kinds of stuff. And if we really understand and say, how could we give it up for that little... How could you sell the personally engraved invitation from God to His greatest events?

You get to be ringside at the greatest events of God, and you say, nah, I tell you what. Partying with my friends is more important than that. Being able to go to the right college is more important than that. No, this advancement in my career is more important than that.

What is it we trained this for? That we value more than this? The Kingdom of God and His righteousness, our relationship with God and with Christ, has to be the most valuable things in our lives. We won't give up anything for that. We forget sometimes. Our value system. That's why we talk about the law of God so much.

We know that the law of God doesn't save us. That's ridiculous. We're saved by the blood of Jesus Christ. Because you know what? If you really know what the law of God is, you have a problem. You keep finding out you're a sinner. And the more you understand the real spirit of the law of God, the more you realize, no, I'm a sinner.

So we're brought into, I can't be saved by it, it tells me what my value should be. That's what the law of God is. It explains our values. Those are the values of God. That's what He wants in His Kingdom. The values of God. He says, well, let me explain to them simple, okay? Do not steal.

Okay? That's a value. He doesn't want anybody to steal from anybody. In fact, He doesn't want us to even want what somebody else has. In fact, He wants us to be the opposite. He wants us to be generous. Here, take mine. That's what He wants. That's His value. His value is, you know, in Matthew 5, in the Sermon on the Mount, He says, His value is, okay, I tell you not to kill, but look, I want something more than that.

I want you not to hate anybody. I want to do away with all this hatred and meanness and prejudice. I want to get rid of all of that. He says, I don't want any of that. There won't be any of that in my Kingdom. That's what He says. It's a totally different value system.

And we can come along and learn the doctrines and not know the value system. You say, how could that be? You can keep the Feast of Domenichals and never get out of it what He wants you to get out of it.

Because you don't know His expectations. His value system. Let's go there to Matthew 5 just real quickly. Matthew 5, verse 21 through 30 here, He talks about, well, you've heard this. I'm telling you, the values of God are much greater than that. But it's verse 29. I want to zero in on here. Verse 29.

If your right hand causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you. For it's more profitable that you, for you, that one of your members perish and your whole body, then your whole body will be cast into hell fire or the gahanna. This is a very important way of saying something. He didn't mean we should go plucking our eyes out. He's saying, you should value this so much you will pay the price of the value. You will pay the price of losing the job because you won't lie. You'll pay the price because that value is too important. The job is secondary to the value of not lying. Honesty is that important. Now, we all struggle with the real spirit of God's law. I do, you don't do. We all sin. That's why we know we have to have this savior for us all the time. But it doesn't change the fact just because we fail sometimes. We don't get up. Well, Mr. Shaw said again last night, we get up and we keep going because that failure doesn't stop us from wanting to do the values. It's what we want. It's what we desire. And as long as we want it and desire it, God will continue to forgive us and God will continue to work through us. God's never going to leave us. We have to leave Him. God is never going to leave you. Why would He have such great expectations for you if He planned on leaving you? He's bigger than us. He's bigger than that. He's bigger than us, our problems and our sins. We have to give up on Him, which I've seen many people do. The fourth point is it causes a change in motivations. Now this is an area that we can ignore. We think we're keeping the letter of God's law, but we ignore why do we do what we do? Because if we ignore our motivations, we will always find a way to get around God's way. We will always find a way to take a value and devalue it. We will always find a way to compromise with what God wants us to do. Back to Hebrews. Hebrews 11. This is a great little section here. This is exciting. This can put us on a high. This is what God will do in our lives.

Yes, that's the life I want. That must be God's expectation for every one of us. Tomorrow I'm going to get up and go slay some enemies. No, God's enemies. Not mine. God's. The problem is you read the stories of those people. It wasn't always easy. And at times they failed. All their failures have been in the Bible too.

When it came down to they were motivated to seek God. David committed horrendous sins. But he was so motivated to seek God. God could use him. Isn't that amazing? He was so motivated. His motivations always came up. When you read the Psalms, his motivations are, forgive me for I am nothing. I seek you. You show me from my heart what I should be.

And this has to be more. This has to be more than a mind understanding of God's way. It has to be the heart. It has to be our motivation. We have to desire it because here's the rest of the story. Here's what some people lived through.

The second part of verse 35. Others were tortured. Wait a minute. That might be part of the deal. I thought I was going to bring down kingdoms. Raised the dead. Why doesn't God do this more like He in the past? He healed everybody. God never healed everybody. Have you met the apostle Paul? Have you met Mary, the mother of Jesus? God never healed everybody. He gives us healing. Healing is a great gift. I'm not saying God doesn't heal. I've seen it.

I've seen it a lot of times. But He doesn't promise that we're going to bring down kingdoms. Everybody's going to be raised from the dead physically. He doesn't promise that all these things are going to happen. He says others are going to be tortured. Why? Well, their loyalty is different. Their expectations are different. Their values are different. He says they are not accepting deliverance. They might be tortured is one thing. But you could stop it? Yes. Not accepting deliverance. That they might obtain a better resurrection.

God's expectation isn't just now. It's when Christ returns, and what's the first thing that happens? One of the first things that happens when Christ returns. The resurrection of the saints. He says, oh, you can't even imagine what that's like.

I'm going to give you a spirit body. I have no idea what that is. I want one, but I have no idea what it is. What's the spirit body? He says, I've got this expectation for you when Christ returns. And sometimes we keep waiting for that. Because not everything is going to happen in this life.

He says, still others had trials of mockings and scourgings, yes, of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were salted too, they were tempted. They were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, they were being destitute, afflicted and tormented. Wait a minute. I don't want that in my life. That's not my expectations. But then we start to live by a different set of loyalties as God does with us when He sees fit.

These people paid a price to be a citizen of heaven. We sell it for practically nothing. We sell it for nothing. He goes on, He says, For of whom the world was not worthy, They wandered in deserts and mountains and dens and caves of the earth. And yet these two types of people are in the same chapter as the exact same type of people. People who wandered in a foreign land because their citizenship was in heaven. If you go to Matthew 5, we won't go there, but Matthew 5 verses 3 through 10, you have what is called the Beatitudes.

Oh, we read through those and they're so nice. It's a nice thing to do to read through them and say these are what God wants for us. So understand, the Beatitudes are the attitudes of the citizens of the kingdom. We're down into motivations. Why do I do what I do? I've seen people come into the church because they like the idea that they were better than other people. And this secret knowledge of being in the church made them better than others.

That's not a citizen of the kingdom. That's not a citizen of the kingdom. Oh, God gave me this secret knowledge. I'm better. So I can go around just sort of hating everybody else and condemning them because I'm better. We're in the world. You know, God doesn't give me the right to condemn anybody, but I've got to get up sometimes and say to people, you're condemned by God. That's two different things.

You're condemned by God. Repent. And then I get hate mail. The problem is the good news, and we'll talk about this Friday night. At the Bible study Friday night, the other sermon I give at the end of the piece, these are all themes. There are three messages that tie together. The good news has no importance without the bad news first. That's the problem with the gospel. Everybody wants the good news. Feel good, get lots of money, be healthy and happy by accepting Jesus.

And that's not the gospel. It starts with bad news. We'll talk about that Friday night. The last point. I didn't know when I started here, Mr. Shaw. When am I supposed to be done? I know I have an hour. I got two minutes? Oh, two o'clock.

Oh, why? I'm not going to speak to that long. I got two minutes. I'm going to talk real fast. Our last point is we become a citizen of God's kingdom, and it changes the change in the purpose for our lives. Oh, reason we live changes. It's amazing when you understand your purpose. You're going to do a whole lot of things in life that part of you is saying, I don't want to do that. Part of you is going to be saying, no, let's do something else.

And yet you're going to do actions and do things that go against your nature. And that's what they do, because you have two different natures. Once you receive God's Spirit, you have two different natures. You're corrupt human nature and it's in the Spirit of God. The nature of God is in you. The nature of Christ is in you. As we said last night, Christ comes in the flesh to be in us. And so here He is in us.

And then we wonder why we're conflicted. Sometimes, it's like a person told me one time, I thought I was crazy. And then I really read the Bible and realized, I'm not crazy, I'm a Christian. And she was right. She was talking about the conflict within herself. Yeah, that's right. We have a different purpose. And if we can grab hold of that purpose, that's why we're here. It's for that purpose.

Matthew 7. Matthew 7. Verse 24. He's given this to us. And He paid at a horrible price. He said, why would God ask me to pay a price to be part of His kingdom? That's the price we have to pay for having a corrupt human nature. It doesn't get changed. All these changes take God in us. And every little change He makes, we automatically resist. And we have to give into it. And we give into it. And we give into it. As He makes these changes in us.

And we struggle through this. So yes, there's a price. But every time you think this price is too much, I want you to remember the price Christ paid for you to be a citizen. See, we can have a lot of patriotism for the United States. This isn't wrong, patriotism for the United States, but I tell you what. The Apostle Paul said that when he looked at what he was in Judaism, you couldn't be anything more important than him.

He kept God's laws perfectly in the letter, and you know what he did. Then he found out he wasn't keeping it in the Spirit. It was a shock to him. But in the letter of the law, he says, I did it perfectly. He says, I kept all the Jewish customs perfectly. I was a leader in Judaism. He says, I was a famous person. I was important. The Sanhedrin knew me. Everybody knew Saul, the persecutor of the Christians.

And he said, when I came in contact with Christ, he says, it's all done. Now, he didn't mean all that stuff was bad. But he said, a relationship? We have to be patriots. Where's our patriotism for the Kingdom of God? Because everything else is done. It is. It's done because we are patriots of this Kingdom. Or why are we here? What makes us any different than Christmas and Easter?

If it's just another sort of holiday we keep. Jesus said, therefore, and this is how he ends the Sermon on the Mount, therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine and does them, I will liken him to a man who built his house on a rock. He's the rock. And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house.

And it did not fall for it was founded on the rock. You know, you're going to have troubles in life whether you're following God or not following God. We tend to think, well, I've got so many troubles because I follow God. You have troubles if you don't follow God. This life is pretty much a mess.

I like it myself, but there's times when I don't like it, right? It's pretty much a mess. With God there's purpose, there's meaning. And He says, when you build it on this rock, your life will stand. Your life will stand. But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.

And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house and it fell. And great was its fall. That's an interesting way to end this message. In fact, the Sermon on the Mount has actually been called at times the Constitution of the Kingdom of God. This is what it is to be a citizen. This is what it is to be a patron of the Kingdom of God.

He's only explained it to you. And at the end He says, so when you do this, even when life gets hard, you'll stand. And if you don't, you'll fall. Our purpose has to be this. It has to be this. This country is not going to get any better. It's only going to get morally worse.

Is it going to get any better? This is where every democracy ends up, by the way. Just study it in history. The world isn't going to get any better. It's only going to get worse. He's like, oh, he's being so negative. No! Actually, I don't find it all that negative. I find it sad. Because I know it doesn't destroy itself. Before it can do that, price comes back. And it gets fixed. God didn't create us to let us get to the point that Satan destroys us.

That's not why He made you. That's not why He made everybody out. It doesn't want the atheists to be destroyed by Satan. He made us to be His children. Remember, His kingdom never went away. His power never went away. Satan rules as God of this world only because God lets Him. And God's letting us learn the difference between good and evil. It's a hard way to do it, but I really don't know any other way to learn the difference between good and evil.

It's just the hard way. I don't know how else we'd learn it. Because you could tell Adam and Eve that fruit's bad for you, but they wouldn't believe it until they ate it. And you know what? Neither would you or I. We all would have eaten that fruit because that's the problem with free will. Let's go back now and end up once again in Hebrews. The end of Hebrews 11 is a statement about all these people who died.

I want you to think about David, Abraham, Sarah, Mary, Dorkis, all the apostles, James, Peter, John, all the men and women that lived in a foreign country because they saw the Kingdom. They wanted that Kingdom. I want you to think about all those people for a minute.

Wow, I could never be like them. Wow, that's okay. They're so amazing. All those people. Verse 39, And all of these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise. I can think of a lot of very righteous people I've known in my lifetime that have died.

And they have a promise. It's going to happen, but they haven't received it yet. They were died citizens of the Kingdom and have not yet received the Kingdom. They died expecting the Kingdom and have not yet received it. They receive it when Jesus Christ returns.

And they're changed. Then they receive it all, everything. But notice the last part. God having provided something better for us. Wait a minute. How can what we receive is better than them? The point here is we don't receive a better reward. The point is we've got to understand what God's doing. God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.

There's a certain amount of citizens that are supposed to be with Jesus Christ when He returns. And until that number is filled, and I have no idea what that number is, until that number is filled, nobody gets resurrected. They don't get resurrected until we're finished. And if there's more time, if Christ doesn't come back for 40 years, I will go to sleep and wait my promise. And I will be resurrected. You will be resurrected until God finishes the next group. Why didn't they go right to heaven? They didn't, did they? We teach them. They didn't go right to heaven. Why didn't they? Because they're all resurrected at the family of God, the firstfruits, coming up at one time together. And He says none of them received that promise. They died knowing they didn't receive the promise until Christ returned. And we all do it together. If you ever wonder about your purpose in life, think about Abraham still asleep, waiting for God to fulfill His purpose in you. If you ever wonder about your purpose in life, think about Mary, the mother of Jesus, who's still waiting in her grave, asleep for God to fulfill His purpose for you. We don't think He has great expectations for us. How cheaply we sell it. This Feast of Tabernacles, I encourage you to do a couple of things. Read Hebrews 11 and read the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7. Well, yeah, 5, 6, and 7. And then prayerfully ask God to renew your loyalty to Him. Ask God to change your expectations, to His expectations. Commit yourself to seeking the values of the Kingdom of God and rejecting the wrong values of the world you live in, because this world is going to die someday. Everything we know is going to change. Everything we know is going to be erased. And He's going to start all over again. Explore your own motivations by reading the Sermon on the Mount. And ask God to give you His purpose. His reason for living, or are living, you have a purpose. God says, I made you for a purpose. You have a reason to get out of bed every morning. I don't care if you are 61 and you're hurt. That's me. Yeah, I didn't know you would hurt so much when you get older. People told me that, and I thought they were lying to me or something. But you do! There's still a purpose. There's still a reason. It's worth getting out of bed. Years ago, Kim and I took a trip to Cape Cod.

We went out to the Highland Lighthouse. It's out on the Atlantic Ocean. I remember it was a beautiful lighthouse. My wife loves lighthouses. There's something about the structure. And we were out there looking at it, and we read the plaque. And this lighthouse had weathered all kinds of storms. It had weathered hurricanes. It had weathered snow, ice. Everything you could imagine. But it was in grave danger. Because you couldn't see it. But the waves that were hitting the – it was up on a cliff – were undermining the cliff. Back in the 1980s, they had to move the lighthouse. Because the lighthouse was in good condition. The ground it was on wasn't solved. You and I could go through this Christianity doing the right things. We could go through this Christianity, you know, going to church every week and criticizing the Catholics for worshipping idols. We could refuse the pork when it served to us in the restaurant. And yet, the core of these things we talked about today are being undermined by the lies we live in this world. This is not the kingdom of God. And it undermines us, and undermines us, and undermines us. I've always thought that lighthouse was a good example of what we need to think about as Christians. If we're not built on that rock that we just read Jesus talk about, it gets undermined. And eventually, no matter how good we look, it collapses. It doesn't matter how good we look to everybody else, it collapses. A relationship with God, seeking first His kingdom and His righteousness, that's what this is all about. Remember this Feast of Tabernacles. It is God's expectation. It is His anticipation to give you the kingdom. It's what He wants for you. And that is everything, all things, being in His family as His child forever and ever. That's His expectation for you. That's what He wants for you every day of your life. How cheaply do we sell it? You have a personally engraved invitation from Jesus Christ to be there when He returns, to re-establish that kingdom on His earth, and to serve Him in fixing this. And it will be there because you have the same loyalties He has, you have the same expectations He has, and you have the same motivations He has, the same values He has, and the same purpose He has. And He'll say, yeah, you're ready. And we'll come up together with those others who are waiting for us to reach our completion. And remember, every day when you get out of bed, it's not just the future. Because you are now, right now, in the mind of God, a citizen of the kingdom of God.