“YOUR KINGDOM COME": Jesus is inaugurating a kingdom.
- Matthew 6:10.
- So there is an important and underused word here in this part of the Lord’s Prayer: kingdom.
- Let’s set the stage as we have in previous sermons. This is the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus is teaching us how to pray. He is sharing with us important things that should be a part of our ongoing prayer life. He is doing this because we are fairly ignorant on what a healthy, vibrant prayer life looks like. Further, our prayer lives often lean toward being self-centered rather than seeking larger, bigger goals. Jesus is inviting us into a more expansive prayer life.
- Here we have another statement: “your Kingdom come.”
- For some people the only understanding they have of that phrase goes back to their childhood. Remember when your Dad threatened to knock you all the way into Kingdom Come? This is where he was planning on your landing.
- This isn’t a joke, though. This is something that is something real and important.
- This morning I want to unpack this phrase and some key questions surrounding it.
- Before we move on, let me talk about the word “kingdom” for a moment.
- One way to define it is it’s everywhere that Jesus is ruling.
- A good initial point to make in terms of expansiveness is that we often think today in terms of our individual churches. We are hopeful that our church will grow and expand. But we don’t think often enough about the Kingdom in the sense of what He is doing through all churches and in all His believers. We get kind of self-centered in our own church family.
- This can also manifest in terms of denomination. Guess what? There are no denominations in eternity! Just followers of Christ.
- While we should be church people in the sense of attending and supporting our local family of believers, we should keep a larger vision of what God is doing everywhere. We should be Kingdom people.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR JESUS' KINGDOM TO ARRIVE?
1. RIGHT NOW: Jesus is in charge of lives.
- Today we share the Good News. You can be saved. Jesus has died on the cross and been resurrected from the dead so that we can have new life in God. We can become new creations in Christ. We want Jesus to come into our lives and be our King.
- Jesus can be in charge of lives today. He is willing to come into the hearts of all who will receive Him.
We celebrate this, of course, when someone comes forward at the end of a service or when we have a baptism. It’s a joyous thing for all of us who claim Christ to see that the Kingdom is still expanding. We want to see more come to know Him, even as we have. We want more to know His peace and joy, even as we have.
- I think it’s worth dwelling for a moment on the words “in charge of” in the answer in your sermon outline. This is for two reasons: it is a crucial part of salvation and it is important for connecting this point to the second point that I want to make in a moment.
- Many people have misconceptions about what it means to become a Christian. They think it means stating some vague and undefined “belief in Jesus” and then going on with your life. Sure, you should probably show up to church a couple times a month, but there isn’t really a lot of changes that happen to your life when you claim belief.
- In fact, the Bible teaches repeatedly that belief in Jesus entails choosing to follow the teachings of Christ. This is a defining characteristic of genuine belief. We don't just believe in the sense of checking a box that says I believe in Jesus the same way that I believe the sun will come up tomorrow. We believe in the sense of believing that Jesus was who He said He was and that He deserves our allegiance and obedience. And that obedience to His teachings is a gift to us, leading us in the direction of the most meaningful life possible.
- To say it another way, Jesus is our Savior but He’s also our Lord. Lord is another word for “someone in charge.” Jesus is our King. He is King of our hearts. And King means that He is calling the shots and we say, “Yes, Lord.”
- I’ll pause for a moment and make a challenging statement: if that's not what you want from Jesus, you might want to stop and ask if you’re a Christian. “Jim, that's offensive. I’ve been a church member for 30 years.” I get that, but I’m not asking if you’re a church member, I’m asking if you are a follower of Christ and if Jesus is the ruler of your heart.
2. UPCOMING: Jesus is in charge of the world.
- There is a lot of misunderstanding around what it means for Jesus to return someday - what we refer to as the Second Coming of Christ. Most people have heard of this enough to understand a joke or a reference to Jesus coming back someday.
- But many understand as Jesus returning to get His believers and then taking them all the heaven to “live happily ever after.” So - and this is important - the return of Christ has nothing to do with the way things happen on earth.
That is not what the Bible teaches.
- We believe that there will come a point where Jesus returns to earth, not just to whisk away His believers but to set up His rule.
- I don't want to get deeply in-depth with this but the overview looks like this. There is a Millennial rule of Christ, where Jesus is in charge for 1,000 years ruling over sinful people like we have on earth today. Jesus is, literally, the King of Kings in this moment. He is ruling over all the kings, presidents, prime ministers, and countries of the world. At the end of the 1,000 years, Satan leads a rebellion against Jesus and is cast forever into the Lake of Fire, never to return.
- After this, we have Final Judgment. That is followed by the advent of the new heaven, new earth, and New Jerusalem. Here we have Jesus again ruling the earth, this time from the New Jerusalem. We will rule with Him. This is all the stuff that the final two chapters of the Bible talk about.
- I have just handled very briefly something that I could easily do a 20-part sermon series on. There is so much interesting detail when you get into the specifics on all this. And we did get into many of those details earlier this year when I did the sermon series about misconceptions about eternity.
- But for our purposes this morning here is the big fact: Jesus will rule on the earth someday. There will literally be a Kingdom of God on the earth, ruled by Him.
- For the Christian, this should be enormously exciting, comforting, and hopeful. A Kingdom is coming! Jesus will rule. We get to be part of it. This is our future. This is where we are going.
- Another way to think of this is that Jesus came to earth the first time 2,000 years ago to open a door to the Kingdom coming into our hearts.
- Jesus will someday return a second time to open a door to the Kingdom coming into the world in a full way.
- Let’s go back for a moment to the first point that I made a moment ago about the Kingdom in the world today.
- We don't see a physical Jesus. The Kingdom in many ways is hidden. It’s happening in hearts. It’s happening in quiet and obscure places around the world. All of that is important, but it would be easy to miss if you were focused on the things of this world.
- Jesus compared the Kingdom as it exists now to yeast hidden in a batch of dough. It has an impact in raising the dough, but it’s a “behind-the-scenes” type of impact.
- This second manifestation of the Kingdom is not hidden. It is obvious and clear to all. In fact, it’s undeniable. In the Millennium, there will certainly be people who chafe against the rule of Christ, but there will be no one who denies that He is ruling.
- This is our Kingdom. This is why the Bible says that we are strangers and pilgrims now. This is why the Bible says that this world is not my home. I have already (point 1) invited Jesus into my heart. My hope is that someday Jesus will (point 2) be ruler over the world.
- Everything we have around us now is just part of us passing through. We should have a hope and expectation that there is something better coming.
- We should not get too comfortable here.
- We should long for things to be set right.
- Worth pondering: do we want Jesus’ Kingdom to arrive?
- On the first point above, the question isn’t really whether we like seeing people saved. Presumably anyone who is a Christian would approve of seeing someone come forward at the end of a church service to receive Christ or have a conversation elsewhere that ends in them following Jesus.
- No, I think the more informative question is whether we are personally doing anything in our lives to make this happen in the lives of others. This would include most obviously witnessing to people, but could also include praying faithfully for an unsaved friend or loved one as well as inviting people to church.
- Is this something that, in some concrete way, we are personally working toward?
- Is this something that creates any excitement within us?
- Someone might have a conflict come up and have to say, “Oh man, I had tickets to that concert and now I can’t go.” Most of us are more excited about that concert than we are about the full manifestation of Jesus’ Kingdom on earth.
- Can you imagine someone meeting the love of their life but then being bummed because staying and talking to them will mean that they will miss out on going to a movie with friends that night? Of course not - this is far more important.
- I think that for many of us this is just isn’t even on our radar.
- The second point above is also important.
- Is the eventual reality of the kingdom of Jesus on the earth something that we are looking forward to? Does it capture our heart and our imagination? Or does it seem completely irrelevant to us?
- I want to talk more in my next sermon point about why in most cases I don't think it grabs us the way it should.
WHY DON'T I WANT THIS SECOND MANIFESTATION OF JESUS' KINGDOM MORE?
1. AMERICAN ARE MORE MATERIALLY COMFORTABLE THAN MOST PEOPLE.
- Every Thanksgiving Sunday service there is someone (or, more likely, multiple people) who will give testimonies about how grateful we should be for the material blessings that God has bestowed on America for so long.
- And they are right in a couple senses. First, we should be thankful for food to eat, clothes to wear, homes to sleep in. It is good and right to be grateful for “daily bread.” Second, we do have more than most people. Indeed, we have more than almost anyone in history.
- So there is something to all that.
- But there is something askew there as well.
- Too often we don't think about the negative that comes with our material prosperity.
- Just to cite one, we don’t have to rely on God in a daily way to provide enough to make it in the same way that a Christian in the Third World would have to. That, materially, is a blessing. But spiritually we don’t have to create that level of trust and dependence that the other person would have to that would have the side effect of making them closer to Christ.
- As for our point this morning, there is another consequence of our prosperity: contentment with where we are right now and a subsequent failure to long for something else.
- When a Christian is dealing with persecution or economic struggles or other similar issues, there is a greater part of him that will think of the day when the world will be set right by Christ and his heart will cry out, “Come quickly to right the world, Lord Jesus!”
- Conversely, when a Christian has plenty in the bank and is enjoying a country with religious freedom, it’s easy to be content with this world. “Things are going pretty good right now, Lord Jesus!”
- Now, it’s not a situation where we all need to go out and start living in cardboard boxes. But it is a situation where we as American Christians need to start paying a lot more attention to the negative spiritual side effects of our positive financial blessings.
- If we hold the two things rightly, we can become people who use our financial blessings to further the Kingdom. We seed money into things that are going to see more people saved (the first manifestation of the Kingdom that we talked about earlier). We don’t see it as giving money away - we see it as investing in the Kingdom. And we do it with joy.
2. WE TEND TO THINK ABOUT OUR RELIGIOUS HOPE IN INDIVIDUALISTIC TERMS.
- Too much of our faith is basically “me and Jesus.”
- We think of our religion in individualistic terms: I have a personal faith that will get me personally to heaven someday.
- This leads an alarming number of people today to feel like church is optional to the Christian walk. Now, we aren’t saved by our works, I understand that, but church is the way that God is working to get His message out to the world. It’s part of His plan. We can’t reject church within our lives without rejecting God’s will for our lives.
- Beyond that, though, is the larger manifestation of the Kingdom of God that we’ve been talking about today. That doesn’t just shift from individualistic to corporate (the whole church); it shifts from corporate to global.
- What Jesus did isn’t just about transforming individual lives, though it is about that. It is not just about raising up a global family to rescue the lost, though it is about that. It is also about a global Kingdom with Jesus as the leader.
A GOOD QUESTION TO PONDER: How do I think the story of human history ends?
- Where do you think this is all leading?
a. Some think that humanity is a random and accidental manifestation of mindless evolution.
- In that case, the end of human history is the collapse of the universe and that nothing we did, said, or thought is ultimately of any importance whatsoever.
b. Some think of a personal heaven.
- As I just shared, I get to go to heaven.
c. But some think that a Kingdom is on its way.
- Jesus will rule and the world will be restored to the way it should be.
- What we think the end of the story is will impact our lives profoundly.
- Where is human history going?
- Jesus here is inviting us to hold onto a vision of where we are going.
- “Father, bring the Kingdom.”
- “Father, I am longing for the Kingdom.”
- “Father, I am praying toward the Kingdom.”
- “Father, I am working toward the Kingdom.”
