Our blessings are found, not in the realm of the things you can touch and hold and feel, but in the realm of the Spirit, and they are, in fact, more real there, and they are received and experienced by faith.
Let us work this out just a little bit. Let us take one of the blessings that Paul mentions here, the blessing of adoption. Believers in Christ are adopted as children of God. He writes of that in verse 5—how spiritually in the heavenly realms we are blessed with the blessing of adoption as God’s children—and yet that is not generally manifested, at least not in an obvious way, in the material realm. You are not wearing a uniform of the royal household of heaven. There are no royal robes falling from your shoulders. There is no visible insignia that you wear. Angels minister to your needs, and yet no eye beholds them, not even our own eyes. There are no crowds watching as you walk down the streets, though you are chosen in Christ for an eternal inheritance and glory. The newspapers are talking about things like basketball scores and wars in the Middle East and dreadful things like an airplane that has crashed. Those things matter, but from the perspective of the angels, they think that it is bizarre that the newspapers are not chronicling the day-to-day march of the children of God to glory. The world could not care less about you. In fact, to the extent that the world notices us, it generally looks down on the children of God. But how different in the heavenly realms.
The same is true when it comes to our redemption from sin. It often seems like Christ has not redeemed us as much as we would hope that he would. We wearily battle temptation. We painfully toil under the effects of sin, disease and affliction, and Christians suffer them too. Ultimately, death will place its bony hands on us just like everyone else. Our spiritual blessings will not keep us from the grave. And yet, we are the redeemed ones in Christ, and in the heavenly realms we have treasures of riches and wholeness and life everlasting. We have been liberated in Christ with spiritual blessings. They are real, and they strengthen us in the trials of life.1
Dr. Richard D. Phillips
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,