Appointed as Overseers by the Holy Spirit

“Keep watch over yourselves and over the whole flock of which the Holy Spirit has appointed you overseers, in which you tend the Church of God that he acquired with his own Blood,” Paul says to us in Acts 20: 28-38.  He adds: “I know that after my departure savage wolves will come among you, and they will not spare the flock.”  In the Gospel, John 17: 11b-19, Jesus says to His Father and ours: “When I was with them I protected them in your name…and I guarded them…But now I am coming to you. I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely. I gave them your word, and the world hated them, because they do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the Evil One…Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.”

Our first responsibility is to “keep watch over ourselves.”  The Evil One, “savage wolves” from within will attack the weakest part of our human nature, that part of ourselves where sin abides: pride, lust, narcissistic tendencies, sloth, selfishness, deceitfulness, wickedness.  The Holy Spirit has appointed each one of us an overseer of this side of ourselves that Jesus “acquired with his own Blood.”  The “world” within us hates the holiness within us that is there at the price of Jesus’ blood.  We live in this world of sin and darkness but do not belong to it by virtue of being adopted as sons and daughters of God. We are now, by virtue of dying and rising with Christ in our baptism, citizens of heaven. While here on earth, while living in this world, however, as Jesus does not ask the Father to take us out of the world, but to “keep us from the Evil One,” to “consecrate” us “in the truth,  we are also citizens of heaven to which the Risen Jesus has returned, sitting at the Father’s right interceding for us and waiting for all of His enemies, and ours, to be destroyed.

Am I aware that I have dual citizenship: that of this world, in my case, of the U.S.A, and that of heaven and that one will last forever and the other come to an end? For which am I building up treasures? This world or the world to come?