Kingdom Citizenship

      Under the Old Covenant, God chose the offspring of Abraham to be a people unto Himself. Still subject to the fallen nature, their sins could not be forgiven and washed away by the blood of Jesus. Instead the principle of exchange was set in motion until the appointed time. Through the laying on of the hands of the High Priest upon a goat, the sins of the nation would be conferred upon the sacrificial goat once a year as a symbolic act of the temporary removal of their sins for the year. The goat would then be led out of the camp and released into the wilderness to die. This is where the term scapegoat originated.
        The Chronos Lesson: Under the New Covenant, God has gone one step further, making us sons of God through faith in Jesus (Gal. 3:26). God not only forgives our sins through the blood of the sacrificial Lamb, Jesus Christ, God remembers them no more.
        This is the calling and amazing grace of being the Lord’s House. That is our destiny. For now, Paul explains our interim situation: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:3-6)
        We are no longer mere mortals because we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ! We may exist on this earth, but we are to live our daily lives according to the ways of the heavenly kingdom. “For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17).
       At the 3rd day wedding in Canaan, Jesus performed the first miracle of changing ordinary water into extraordinary wine. That same miracle is taking place in our lives today, as we dare to release the kingdom truths into this earth and live not as ordinary mortals but as extraordinary mortals by the power of the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God Almighty.
        One of the elementary truths of our faith listed in Hebrews 6:1-2 is the laying on of hands. In essence, this is the exchange principle of the Kingdom. We see it when church leaders lay their hands on missionaries and ministers to release the anointing. We see it when Jesus told us to go out and lay hands on the sick to release God’s healing power. We see it when we lay our hands on our children and speak a blessing over them.
       So now we have a choice: to be conformed to this world by spending our time and resources on things of this world, or to be transformed by spending our time and resources on the eternal things of Heaven by the truths of God’s Word and the leading of the Spirit. This is how we know what is the will of God.