The Kingdom Of God Is Near Series

If you want to follow along today, we are going to be looking at two verses. It is out of the gospel of Mark 1:14-15. We have been going through this series on the theme of discipleship. If you were here last week, you know that we have defined discipleship as ordinary people learning to live everyday life like Jesus. We talked about how here at Bellevue Christian Church we have come up with three primary ways that will help facilitate discipleship here at the church. Those three primary ways are that we gather, we train, and we go. Last week, we talked about the idea of gathering. How we gather on Sunday morning. We gather the first Wednesday of each month. We gather in small groups. We gather one on one. Disciples were known to gather around Jesus. Also, we train. We submit ourselves to the teaching of others and to the curriculum of others to learn and grow in our faith. And also we go. We take the things we are learning in the church and things we are learning in the small groups and begin to apply them, particularly in the area of service, in the church, in the community, and ultimately the world. I also mentioned how just because we know that some of the stuff may be overwhelming to us, we are testing out this concept called discipleship coaches. Discipleship coaches are just people that are willing to come alongside somebody and help them along in their spiritual journey. We also showed a video last week that summarized what I just said in a nice little four-minute video. If you haven’t seen the video yet, I encourage you to go to the Facebook page or the website and watch the video. As I mentioned last week, we are going to take this theme of discipleship and we are going to take it into the fall and we are going to take it into next year. We are starting this theme with a 12-week series on discipleship. Last week, if you were here, I introduced the concept of discipleship by talking about a hard concept. I talked about it as the problem of just being saved. The problem relates to the fact that many people see the gospel of Jesus Christ or they see becoming a Christian simply as me getting my sins forgiven and getting my free ticket into heaven. That is part of the gospel, but it is an incomplete part of the gospel. It really does affect discipleship. What happens is discipleship becomes this optional activity. In other words, if you are going to heaven, what is the point of doing anything with your life now? What is the point of working on your character issues in this world? You begin to see discipleship as an optional activity. What we mentioned last week when we looked at 1 Peter was it presented the Christian life as the opportunity to experience a brand new way of living. He called it a brand new life.

Today, Jesus is going to introduce that life as the kingdom life. What I want to do is expand on this concept of kingdom and especially how discipleship connects to the concept of kingdom. When you begin to understand that, you will be able to understand how discipleship fits within everything. I wanted to start off by asking a question. How many of you were at least a teenager or older in the 80s? How many of you remember the 80s? I am surprised more people remember. In the 80s, I was a student at Portland State University working on my Bachelor of Science Business Administration and reading all sorts of fun books like accounting and marketing. When I wasn’t getting bored with my books, I was out on what they would call the quadrangle or commons area of the campus. It would seem like every week we would get somebody who would come along that we would refer to as a Jesus freak or a street preacher. They are kind of obnoxious and they just come in and start yelling. I wasn’t a Christian at the time. I found these types of guys very annoying. Maybe somewhat entertaining but in no way inviting. They would use scare tactics to scare me into heaven. I realized over time that these guys didn’t really care whether I got into heaven or hell. They just had a message to preach and all they did was preach the message and yell at the people who were mocking them. That is all it was. Unfortunately, we still find people in the world today who take that turn or burn approach to try to get people into the kingdom of God. Although it might work for a few people, I think for the most part it is a turn off for many because it gives Christianity a very bad name. You begin to think of Christianity as all about avoiding hell rather than embracing heaven. What if we were to rethink the gospel? What if we were to rethink it as an invitation into something grand and glorious that no one on this earth has ever experienced rather than avoiding something like hell?