The Kingdom Of God Series

This can best be seen as the known world at this time. Jerusalem of course being the home center for the church at this time, then the spread south towards Judea, east towards Samaria and onwards towards the known world. Part of being a witness is walking in the Holy Spirit’s power. It means coming to an end of self and letting Christ reign freely. It’s not being perfect just coming to the understanding that we are desperately needy and the solution is only to rely and trust in God’s abundant grace. Being a witness today in our world is hard, but it is still needed. Spurgeon said, “We might preach ‘til our tongue rotted, ‘til we exhaust our lungs and die-but never a soul be converted unless the Holy Spirit used the Word to convert that soul. So it is blessed to eat into the very heart of the Bible until, at last, you come to talk in scriptural language and your spirit is flavored with the words of the Lord, so that your blood is Bibline and the very essence of the Bible flows from you. (Party cited in Richard Ellsworth Day, The Shadow of the Broad Brim {Philadelphia: Judson, 1943},131).

Here we see that being a witness though is more than just outwards words, it is character, it is integrity. Being a witness is cultivated through the inner life, through the life of mediation on God’s Word through the understanding at the very heart level that what we desire most is for our soul to be fed supremely by God’s Word. Our soul longs as the Israelites ate of the manna, so our soul longs for the Living Bread, the Bread of Life, the Water that streams down from heaven’s gates. It is this water, it is this bread that people long for and it is this water and this bread that we can offer them. If we as believers would eat of the Bread and drink the water that God offers us in His Word and drew closely to the Well and closely to the food He provides us, we could not have enough groups online, we could have ministries or even churches because the people coming in would cause the growth to be massive. Yet this all starts within us, this change of attitude, this end of self and the beginning of Christ’s work within us. It is this present work within us this present reality, the Kingdom of God that is that Luke here is primarily interested in his audience understanding.

Andrew A. Bonar said, “Do not forget the culture of the inner man-I mean of the heart. How diligently the cavalry officer keeps his saber clean and sharp; every stain he rubs off with the greatest care. Remember you are God’s sword, His instrument-I trust a chosen vessel unto Him to bear His name. In great measure according to the purity and perfections of the instrument, will be the success. It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God. (Andrew A. Bonar, Memoirs of McCheyne {Chicago: Moody, 1978}, 95).

As we desire and dip our head into the streams of Water will naturally experience conflict within us. The old nature loves to die slowly and will not go down without a fight. It is this cultivation of the language of bibline though that we must cultivate through the understanding of who we are presently, that the Kingdom of God dwells within us so that we can verbalize it outwardly through our actions and our words. Some of the greatest preachers of all time were not educated in God’s Word, but they were an awful weapon in the hand of God because they were intimate deeply intimate with God. They knew God’s ways were not man’s ways, and God’s timing not our own,and they declared the Message of the Gospel faithfully. It is that responsibility that every minister has and those ministers who are most dangerous for the Kingdom of God, those believers that are most dangerous for the Kingdom of God are those who have the highest level of intimacy, the time and quality in prayer, the time and quality in study, the time and depth in the Word of God.