This week we celebrate the birth of our country, grateful for the amazing rights and freedoms in America that people don’t enjoy elsewhere in the world. It gets me thinking about the rights we have as Christians, as citizens in the Kingdom of God. Here are 15 I thought of. I’m sure you can think of more.

#1: In the Kingdom, we have the right to remain silent (Isaiah 53:7, Luke 23:9). FaceBook, Twitter, and social media would be much friendly places if we learned when to exercise this right. Here’s the best definition of spiritual maturity I’ve ever heard: In an argument where the other person’s is being ugly, to have the perfect comeback to just crush their soul, and not say it. That’s spiritual maturity.

#2 & 3: We also have the right to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15). We have the right to build people up. Not puff them with empty flattery so we can manipulate something out of them, but truly build them up. Telling them the truth, calling out how God sees them, how they may not even see themselves.

This isn’t all rainbows and unicorns and singing kum-ba-yah. Sometimes, ok often, it means confrontation. But we don’t confront the way the world does, with anger and judgement. We confront with mercy, uncompromising truth, and most of all, with God’s heart and with God’s strategy, which is the perfect segue into our next right.

#4: We have the right to intercede. We have the right to ask God for his heart for a certain person or situation, and pray it back to him. We don’t want to pray our agenda. We want to get God’s strategy, God’s heart, and pray his heart back to him. But getting God’s heart for a situation means we have to be willing to drop our own agenda, which leads into our next Kingdom right.

#5 & 6: We have the right to deny ourselves (Luke 9:23). Essentially, this is the right to give up our rights. It’s so not fair. God has stacked the deck in our favor. When we give up our rights in this world, God gives so much more in return.

This is different from the world. People in the world without Jesus can’t help but pursue their addictions and vain pleasures (Philippians 3:19). But we have been given a spirit of self-control (2 Timothy 1:7), and we have the right to use it. Pursuing God’s Kingdom, rather than our own, is much more satisfying anyway. It’s an oxymoron, but the thing in our greatest self-interest is not pursuing our own self-interest.

#7: We have the right to believe in people, even when they don’t believe in themselves. God believed in Moses, Gideon, Elijah, and so many others when they didn’t believe in themselves.

#8: We have the right to change the atmosphere everywhere we go: at work, at school, at the store, at the gas station, everywhere. There’s a story of a missionary in South America going into an unreached village. The witch doctor came up to him and told him his spirits wanted to know how long he was going to stay in their village. He began to explain he was there to tell them good news about Jesus, but witch doctor interrupted him.

“Yes, I know. You serve the God who sits in front of the crystal sea with the emerald rainbow around his throne, and his servants fly around him singing his praise day and night.” The illiterate witch doctor described Revelation 4 perfectly. “I have seen it in my visions, but my spirits tell me he is an enemy and they are not allowed to go there. When you stepped into our village, my spirits had to leave, so they want to know how long you’ll be staying, so they know when they can come back.”

Our presence, and the Holy Spirit we carry within us, changes the atmosphere everywhere we go. How much more if we realize it! I have often prayed for the Lord to send an “angelic sweep” through the building I’m in, removing any spiritual forces not of God. You can too. It makes a difference.

#9 & 10: We have the right to kick down the gates of the enemy (Matthew 16:18), especially within our sphere of influence. We have the right to cancel the enemy’s legal rights over our lives and the lives of our families. We do that by repenting of inner vows and judgements we’ve made, and by choosing to believe God’s truth instead.

#11, 12, 13, 14, 15: Finally, We have the right to serve, to the right to forgive, the right to love, the right to sacrifice. In short, we have the right to be like Jesus,

Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. (Philippians 2:6-7)

So what about you? What has God restored when you surrendered your rights? How has exercising your Kingdom rights changed your sphere of influence? Have you experienced changes in atmosphere? Tell us your story in the comments, and please share if this would bless someone else.