Has anybody had to get their tires aligned on their car lately? Hopefully, you are doing that occasionally because if you don’t do it you have to get new tires. You wear the tires wrong. Bad mileage. A lot of noises. Shaking steering wheel. Possibly even getting in an accident. Today, I am not really interested in talking about tire alignment. Today, I am talking about spiritual alignment. In other words, aligning your spirit with God and his kingdom. We have been going through this series on discipleship. We have defined discipleship as ordinary people learning to live everyday life like Jesus. We talked about the fact that if you are a disciple at Bellevue Christian Church there are three things you should be involved in or you should be doing. You should be gathering, training, and going. Hopefully, by the end of the series, you might actually memorize these three things and maybe the definition. When we talk about gathering, we mean gathering together on Sunday morning and throughout the week in small groups. When we talk about training it is learning about the various curriculums. And going is taking that information that we are learning in the small groups and taking it and applying it into the world. We are going to be addressing each one of those areas in the next few weeks.
But today, I want to continue to just talk about the theme of discipleship. In particular, I want to strengthen the link between the kingdom of God and discipleship. I would like to spend the first five minutes recapping where we have been. I think this idea of the kingdom is foundational to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You may recall that a couple weeks ago I made a strong statement that I think some of you may have struggled with. The idea that our salvation, our born-again experience, or becoming a Christian is not simply about getting us a ticket into heaven when we die. It is more than that. It is giving us an entry into the kingdom of heaven now that continues on until the point of death and beyond. I said that if we just have that limited view of salvation as getting to heaven when we die, then we begin to ask ourselves what is the point of being a disciple? What is the point of being a follower of Jesus Christ? What often happens is if we don’t see a point, then we just kind of hang around on this earth dealing with the trials and tribulations of life as best we can, but really we just don’t change at all. We don’t do anything differently. We just wait for the rapture to come and take us on home. Although there are people like that, I think most would say even though I might feel like that, I still feel like I need to do some things. Like I need to go to church and maybe serve on a committee or as an usher and throw a couple dollars in the offering tray occasionally. The attitude is that is fine but don’t mess with my life. I have schedules to keep. I have agendas. I have places I have to be. I have places I have to take the kids on Sunday. I have all these things. Don’t mess with my schedule. What happens is this thing called discipleship becomes a purely optional activity and, for the most part, people tend to opt out of it except when it is convenient for them. I also suggested that maybe when Jesus, in The Message translation, said these words “Time’s up. God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the message”, he wasn’t just offering a get-out-of-hell-free card or a ticket to heaven. He was offering an opportunity, an invitation into a new life. An abundant life. What he would refer to as the kingdom life that begins today and carries on through all eternity. I know that is a different way to think of things. But I think if you read the gospels, you will see that is what Jesus was trying to get at. When he talked about kingdom of God, he didn’t necessarily have a place in mind. I know sometimes when we think about the kingdom of God, we just think about heaven. Something that is going to happen way down there in some distant galaxy that only the Starship Enterprise can get to. We put it off in some corner of the universe. Instead, we have to think of the kingdom as really a realm of influence. A realm basically where what you want done gets done. I talked about the idea that everybody has a kingdom. Some people’s kingdoms are very small. Some people have just their house and a few people in their house. They pretty much run the house and what they want done gets done. Some people have larger areas of influence. Some people extend out into the community and local politics or regional politics. They have an area of influence where what they want done gets done. Then you have people in jobs. Some oversee a few employees. Some people oversee thousands of employees. What they want done gets done. I know some of you know the Pope has been in the U.S. All the people following him. You wouldn’t call it his kingdom, but in many senses he has his own realm of authority, realm of influence that pretty much encompasses the entire Catholic church and beyond. My point is that we all have kingdoms. God has a kingdom. God’s kingdom is where his will, his influence is done. That is why when we say the Lord’s Prayer we say “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, your kingdom come, your will be done”, kingdom and will are basically the same thing. Where your sphere of influence is happening. So when Jesus said “Time’s up. God’s kingdom is here”, what he is saying is there is something very unique happening in history right now. Last week I called it a kairos moment. A very unique thing that never quite happened. When Christ came and specifically when he died on that cross he was saying something is happening. There is a reversal going on. God’s kingdom is coming in in a mighty way and it is beginning to expand out and encompass all sorts of realms in the world.
When there is a kingdom expanding, there is another one shrinking. The one that is shrinking is the kingdom of Satan. As evidence of that, we talked last week when we referenced a passage where Jesus had just driven out a demon in a mute and what did he say when somebody accused him of being a demon himself? He said that is crazy. I am going to tell you what, if I drive out demons by the power of God, in other words if I am doing this miracle, then that means “the kingdom of God has come to you.” What he is saying is something is happening. Pay attention people. One kingdom is coming on strong and another kingdom is shrinking. So when he says “repent” or as The Message says “change your life”, he is saying choose. Choose which kingdom you want to belong to. There are two options. The kingdom of Satan or the kingdom of God. We know that the good news is when you accept Jesus Christ as Lord, as Paul implies, there is immediately this transfer because you have accepted this invitation from Christ to enter into his kingdom. You may not have thought about that at your baptism or conversion, but that is what is going on. In fact, Paul equates it with a rescue operation. In Colossians 1:13 Paul says “For he has rescued us from the dominion (or kingdom) of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” If you need a visual to think about it, it is basically like this. You have the cross. You have God’s kingdom going on expanding so the area around there, the dominion of darkness, is beginning to shrink. That is what is going on there. When you accept Christ, it is a rescue. It is taking you out of a hostile territory and putting you into someplace very good and very nice. A good, positive place.
I know some of you have probably seen on the news all the refugees that are leaving Syria and looking for a host country. Statistics are as high as 4 million people have left Syria and gone looking for a host country and not really knowing whether they are going to hit something positive or negative. That is what is going on in the spiritual realm. When you accept Christ, there is something going on where you are immediately transported out of the dominion of darkness and you are put into the kingdom of the Son. Unlike those Syrian refugees who have no idea what they are going to meet, a mean president, a welcoming president, a wired fence, are they going to be welcome? We know when we are transported into this new kingdom, we know what is going to happen. We know that we are going to receive a big welcome. It is going to be a positive experience. It is going to be a great experience. There is an author, Eugene Peterson, who says it like this “Jesus brings us into a world without fear. In his world, astonishingly, there is nothing evil we must do in order to thrive. He lived and he invites us to live in an undying world where it is safe to do and be good.” It is a good place, but as this passage implies, it is a strange place. Down is up and up is down. The rules are a little bit different. We are not quite used to it. That new kingdom is quite different from the old kingdom, the dominion of darkness. In the dominion of darkness we see things like hatred, anxiety, jealousy, pride, fear, anger, lust, impatience, meanness, insecurity, a whole host of things. We could go on and on. In the kingdom of the Son, we see what some would call the fruit of the spirit and plus things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, humility, safety, compassion. The kingdom of God is a safe place to be. But because it is an unfamiliar place, we have never navigated it. We are used to living in the dominion of darkness. That is our world. We are surrounded by that. We need some sort of a guide. Somebody who knows what they are doing. Somebody who knows the ropes. And who but Jesus. Jesus knows the ropes. He is our guide. He will help us navigate this new and unfamiliar territory. He will keep us in alignment with the kingdom of God. We are talking spiritual realities. That is why it is so hard to grasp. Even though at our salvation or our born-again experience, we are being transferred behind the scenes from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of the Son. It is a spiritual reality. The reality is that we often find ourselves pulled back into that old dominion of darkness. Not totally in a spiritual sense but in a mental sense, in an emotional sense, a bodily or physical sense. It is like a gravitational pull. That you are being pulled back constantly into the dominion of darkness. That is what happens. We know that inherently we want to believe that verse, but we find ourselves being pulled back. That is why we have to continually realign ourselves with God and his will.
Jesus alludes to this when he talks about this in John 5:24 where he says “Anyone here who believes what I am saying right now and aligns himself with the Father, who has in fact put me in charge, has at this very moment the real, lasting life and is no longer condemned to be an outsider. This person has taken a giant step from the world of the dead to the world of the living.” There is a lot of stuff here. If you pay attention, you see that this passage is very similar to what Paul wrote in Colossians except Paul wrote the “dominion of darkness” and Jesus says “the world of the dead”. Paul wrote “the kingdom of the Son” and yet Jesus writes “the world of the living”. Jesus would use the phrase insiders and outsiders. We may not like that idea but that is what he uses. As a side note, when we are talking about the world of the dead, we are not talking about the ghosts and goblins. In the world of the dead he is talking about dead souls. Souls that for all intents and purposes are dead because they are dead to God. They have never experienced that new life in Christ. We see that everywhere. We are surrounded by the world of the dead. We see it on TV. We see it in schools and colleges. We see it in the workplace. We see it in the political arena. We see it in the business world. We see a bunch of dead souls. Dead because they have no hope in Christ. They disconnected from that life source. They have no connection so they have no hope of salvation. For all intents and purposes, they are considered the walking dead. People that have no life at all with God. The walking dead. In contrast to the world of the living. God’s ever expanding and unfolding kingdom where all is good, where all are welcome, where all are safe. You are always safe as long as you remain in God’s kingdom. He uses the term insiders and outsiders. Some people probably feel at times like an outsider. Maybe you just feel like you are never connected to those around you. You feel isolated. You feel alone. The good news is if you are in the kingdom of God, you are never alone. You are an insider. You are an insider. You have to remember that. Now and for all of eternity you are an insider.
As I mentioned earlier, we have to be sensitive to the fact that we have this gravitational pull that always wants us to pull back into the dominion of darkness and into the world of the dead. We have to constantly trust ourselves in every situation that Jesus knows what he is doing. We can trust that we can listen to his voice and respond appropriately. Another passage that deals with this comes out of John 6:40. This is Jesus speaking, “This is what my Father wants: that anyone who sees the Son and trusts who he is and what he does and then aligns with him will enter real life, eternal life.” Trust is like belief. It is like faith. Remember what I mentioned last week? Belief is not something that is just an intellectual thing. Like if I read all these books or memorize all these passages. If I get enough information, I am believing. No. Belief is an action word. It is believing into the depths of your soul and then responding to that belief. You cannot really respond unless you trust this person. That he is going to do what is best for you. So we have this idea of trust and response and aligning ourselves up with the will of God. When we do that what happens is we not only gain access to that kingdom of the Son. We gain access to all sorts of stuff including our spiritual nourishment. Another passage deals with the idea of alignment. Jesus says “I am the bread of life. The person who aligns with me hungers no more and thirsts no more.” He is saying everything you need. Not material. Spiritual. What you need spiritually is there and it is there in abundance, but you have to go after it. You have to want it. You have to desire that spiritual food.
Anyway, I hope you are getting the sense that this place we call the kingdom of God has some benefits. It is a good place to be. It is a safe place to be. What we have to determine before we can even begin to access that is figure out which kingdom are we living in most of the time. Where are we living? Which place are we living in? Are we living in the dominion of darkness or the kingdom of the Son? It is really quite easy for everybody to figure out. In fact, I would say everybody has inside of them something that tells them which kingdom they are living in. I know it is true. You know if you are experiencing hatred, anxiety, jealousy, pride, fear, anger, lust, impatience, meanness, and insecurity, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, it doesn’t a spiritual scholar to say this doesn’t line up with God too much. Does that make sense? On the other hand, if all of a sudden you are feeling these things like love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, humility, safety, and compassion, you can pretty much get the sense that you are operating like that. This is an easy thing to do. We have that in our soul. We have that in our mind. We have the ability to discern what kingdom we want to live in. That is only the first step. That is an awareness of where you are living. Over time, it just becomes habit. You say, oh gosh, I know I am in the wrong spot today, I need to get back there. The next thing you have to do, and this is the biggest problem for most, is you have to intend to go over into the other kingdom. I would suggest that most of you don’t intend to do that. I would suggest that some of you enjoy living in the dominion of darkness. You have no intention of changing over. You may think you would like to change over. You may be tired of your circumstances. You may complain about your circumstances, but you really don’t intend to do anything about it.
I tell a story that I told last week at this VIP conference that I did. I might have told it here before. To me it just illustrates so much this idea of intention. When I was in the Navy way back when, I was on an aircraft carrier. When you are on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Mediterranean there is not a whole lot to do besides read and play cards. I didn’t read much in the day, so I played a lot of cards. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at cards. I played a lot of blackjack. Pretty soon, each pay day I found my paycheck dwindling very quickly. Half my paycheck would be gone to the other men. I was tired of losing my paycheck. So I heard there was a chaplain on board. On an aircraft carrier with 5,000 sailors, you have to have a chaplain somewhere. So I searched him out and ended up going to the very front of the ship and found the chaplain’s office, knocked on the door, went in and sat down. He said sailor what do you want? I said I have this problem. I do a little blackjack here and there and I am tired of losing so can you help me out. Can you fix my problem? He looked at me and said sailor, you have no intention of quitting. You like gambling. You love gambling. What you don’t like is losing your paycheck. So it is not me fixing you. You just have to become a better gambler. That is really the issue. Go find somebody who is going to teach you how to gamble. I left there feeling kind of upset. Who does he think he is? Telling me what my heart is. But many years later, I said he is right. I didn’t want to quit. I just wanted somebody to keep me from losing my paycheck. I hate to say it, but a lot of you are there. You like you squalor. I might say squalor but I am not talking about major sins. You like the thought in your head of holding on to bitterness towards somebody. Am I preaching? You like holding on to what I would call your pet sin. You see yourself as a pretty good person, but you just can’t let go of that anger that is inside of you. It is pretty easy to tell which domain you are in. Every day you want to praise Jesus but you live in constant fear and depression and anxiety. There is something about that. That is your normal. I don’t know how to operate differently, so I kind of enjoy that. I like to complain about it, but I really don’t want to do anything to fix it. You are blowing your paycheck every month. You can’t pay your rent. I am going to complain about it, but God forbid you do anything about it. It is called a job application. Am I preaching now? I really had a short sermon today, so I decided to ad lib a little bit. I warn you, if you come to the second service, it is always going to be longer, so that is one more reason to come to the 9 o’clock.
Intentionality. You don’t intend to change. The only way that you are going to change is if you intend to be a disciple. The entryway from the dominion of darkness back into the kingdom of the Son is one word: discipleship. That is the connection there. Discipleship is learning to live your everyday life like Jesus and I could add like Jesus lives in the kingdom. That is all it is. Just attaching yourself to Jesus. Being his apprentice. I know that some of you are apprentices in skilled jobs. It is no different in the spiritual realm except you are attaching yourself to a really skilled person named Jesus through the power of the spirit. You are becoming his apprentice. His disciple. You have to stay by that apprentice. Like any other good apprenticeship. You need to stay close by your teacher. You need to listen to your teacher so when the teacher says, hey Chuck, you seemed to have a little bit of attitude towards this person you talked to on the phone today. I say, oh, you are probably right. You seem to have an attitude towards someone in the church or someone in the community or about a relative or whatever. You say, yeah, you are right. You seem to be operating out of fear and anxiety and depression. Yeah, I think you are right. It is more than just agreeing with Jesus. It is doing something about it. The first thing you have to do is repent. I used that word last week and I know we have this idea that repentance is this thing we do the first time we are saved. We are sorry and we get down on our knees and say I am sorry Lord Jesus. Please forgive me. Accept me. Let me accept you. That is part of it. But I would say repentance for the Christian is a lifestyle. In other words, repentance is about not just turning direction. It is changing your thinking. Rethink your thinking. Rethink your situation. Rethink the stuff that is in your brain that doesn’t line up with the kingdom. Think about it in light of this glorious kingdom that God says you have available right now, but you say no. I just don’t want to go there. I don’t want to try that. I don’t trust you Jesus. If you trust him, you are going to think about. You are going to repent and say, yes, this doesn’t make sense. I want to be in the kingdom, so I want to try to do better. That is where the problem is. It is not about trying. Trying you are going to mess up. If you have an anger problem with someone out on the street and every time somebody cuts you off, you flip them off, which some people in this town do, you aren’t going to say I am going to go out and try to do better. You are going to fail. Because you don’t have it within you. If I decide I am going to be a professional baseball player tomorrow and I am going to join the Pirates because I want to be in the playoffs, I am going to show up there this afternoon and I am going to hit a 90 mph fastball as it comes at me. How well do you think I would do? I would stink. It is the same thing with the spiritual realm. We have to apply those basic ideas to the spiritual realm. It is not about trying. It is about training. When you have something you need to work on over and over and you begin to practice the disciplines that will get you there and make you less likely to respond in your old ways, pretty soon you find something happening. You find transformation. You don’t just get more information that we get at 90% of our Bible studies. You get transformation. A year from now, I just don’t seem as angry. I am not flipping that guy off every time. I might be saying something, but I am not flipping him off. I am getting better. I am making progress. That is a good thing. You find yourself over time getting better and responding differently. There are techniques for this. This is really called the practice of spiritual disciplines. Some people get so worried when they hear the word discipline or practices. Think of it again when you are going to be on a baseball team. You are going to do drills and all these things that are going to make you better. That is what you do in the spiritual practices.
There are two groups, and I am not promoting the groups because I think they are both full except for the men’s group, but some of the women are doing this book called Sacred Rhythms. It is spiritual practices. Bible study. Silence. Solitude. Fasting. The men are doing one called God in My Everything, which is basically the same book except presented in a different format. I call them training manuals. They allow you to show how you can use biblical practices that Jesus used, which I can demonstrate throughout the gospels that he used these practices (and if he used them, they are good enough for us), that are training you to leave the dominion of darkness and to enter back into the kingdom of the Son. To leave the world of the dead and come back to the world of the living. This is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week thing. Even right now some of you are on the wrong side. I guarantee sometime today you are going to be going mentally into the dominion of darkness. So what are you going to do? You don’t have a lot of options besides trying and maybe you will get lucky and you will get a little better. But again, like trying to go down to the baseball field and hit a 90 mph fastball, you are probably going to fail miserably. All I am saying is spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible study are great, but those are the beginning. You have to decide what is it that you need to help you get past your issue, your pet sin, and everybody in this room, including me, has a pet sin that they fall to. In the mind. In the body. In the spirit.
That is all I have for today, but I am just going to give you a quick summary of some of the key points. Salvation is not just a ticket to heaven when you die. I hope you get that. It doesn’t minimize the forgiveness of sins on the cross. All I am saying is that message by itself is incomplete. If you read the gospels, I don’t think you could point out in Jesus’ words where he said I want to die on the cross so people here can get to heaven when they die. It is not in there. But he did say the kingdom of God is now. Change your life. Come on into that kingdom. Shift from the dominion of darkness to the kingdom of the Son. The good news is that if you have accepted Christ as Lord, you have already been transferred in. You are already there. You just have to live out your citizenship in that kingdom. Because we have this gravitational pull, call it Self, call it Satan, call it whatever you want, but the bottom line is it is whipping you around like crazy. You guys aren’t living like you are citizens of the heaven. You are living lives that people say why would I want to be a Christian. I don’t see the power of the kingdom in your life. The only way around that is this idea of discipleship. Attaching yourself to Jesus Christ. Becoming his apprentice. Letting him be your master. Listening to him. So when he points out that you are operating in the wrong sense either by body, emotion, or thinking, you respond. You repent. I am sorry. If it is an ongoing habit, you figure out ways to practice training things, whatever it is, and there are all sorts of things you can do, that begin to align you up with God’s kingdom. And begins to help you to experience that abundant meal. What Jesus called the bread of life. The water that will never run dry. He will give you that. He will give you what you need to get through this world and the world beyond. In closing, “Jesus said, ‘I am the Bread of Life. The person who aligns with me hungers no more and thirsts no more, ever.’” Amen.
