Where is your citizenship?

"Any Christian man has a double citizenship. He is a citizen of the country of the world in which he happens to live. To that country he owes me anything. He owes the safety against lawless men which only settled government can give; he owes all public services to the state. To take a simple example, few men are wealthy enough to have a lighting system or cleansing system or a water system of their own. These are public services. In a welfare state the citizen owes still more to the state-education, medical services, provision for unemployment and old age. This places him under an obligatory debt. Because the Christian is a man of honor, he must be a responsible citizen; and failure in good citizenship is also failure in Christian duty. Untold troubles can descend upon a country or an industry when Christians refuse to take their part in the administration of the country, and leave that administration to selfish, self-seeking, partisan, and unchristian men. The Christian has a duty to Cesar in return for the privileges which the rule of Caesar brings to him.

"But the Christian is also a citizen of heaven. There are matters of conscience and of religion and of principle in which the responsibility of the Christian is to God. It may well be that the two citizenships will never clash; they do not need to. But when the Christian is convinced that it is God's will that something should be done, it must be done; or, if he is convinced that something is against the will of God, it must be resisted, and he can take no part in it. Where the boundaries between the two duties lie Jesus does not say. That is for a man's own conscience to test. But a real Christian-and this is the permanent truth which Jesus here lays down-is at one in the same time a good citizen of this country, and a good citizen of the kingdom of heaven. He will fail in his duty neither to God nor to men. He will as Peter said, 'Fear God, and honor the king' (1 Peter 2:17)." (William Barclay in the Gospel of Matthew, vol. 2, pp. 302-303).