+I. Enjoying special privileges.+--1. _A saintly citizenship._ "No more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints" (ver. 19). The apostle has spoken of the separation and enmity existing between Jew and Gentile. The Jew, trained to believe in the one invisible and only true God, who could not be imagined by any material form, learned to look with hatred and contempt on the outcast, lawless Gentile, with his idol deities in every valley and on every hill; and the intellectual Gentile looked with philosophic pride on the stern land of the Hebrew and in philosophic scorn on his strange, exclusive loneliness. They were not only at enmity with each other, but both were at enmity with God. Now the writer is showing that by the provisions of the Gospel both Greek and Jew are united as citizens of one Divine kingdom. They enjoy the same privileges and are in actual fellowship with prophets and apostles and all holy souls in all ages and are sanctified subjects of a kingdom that can never be moved. 2. _A family life._--"And of the household of God" (ver. 19). The Church is a family having one Father in God, one Brother in Christ, one life in the Spirit, and one home in Heaven. As in earthly families, there are diversities of character, tastes, gifts, tendencies, and manifestations, but all the members of the heavenly household are bound together by the one common bond of love to God and to each other. +II. Resting on a sure foundation+ (ver. 20).--The materials composing the foundation of the Church are _living_ stones--teachers and confessors of the truth, "apostles and prophets"; but Christ, as the one foundation, is the "chief corner-stone." The foundation of the Church is not so much in the witnesses of the truth as in the truth itself, and in propagating which truth the first teachers and confessors sacrificed their all. The truth which produced and sustained the martyrs is itself immovable. The apostles and prophets--teachers in the apostolic times--laid the first course in the foundation of the Church and were careful to recognise and build only one foundation, united and held together by the one corner-stone--Christ Jesus. They fixed the pattern and standard of Christian doctrine and practice. The Christian Church is sure because the foundation is deep and broad and can never be removed and replaced by any human structure.