The Kingdom Of God

Jesus, in this verse is looking ahead to his death on a Cross – a death that was necessary to herald in the coming of the Kingdom of God (see Jn 3:3) and so the establishment of the Church.

There is a cost to the coming of the Kingdom of God. Jesus summed it up well by using an agrarian anaology:

24I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

Just as a grain has to die before a plant can grow, so Jesus has to die on the Cross before the Church could be birthed.

Jesus mission was to proclaim the Kingdom of God on earth – and we – the Church are the result of it

Kingdom of God can fully come to fruition but only by the death of the seed - Jesus.

Which leads me to my final point

3. The Coming of Kingdom of God is costly

God’s Kingdom coming – and Jesus asks us the question: Are we willing to pay it?

The Early Church was mercilessly persecuted by the Roman State in the first two centuries of the first Millenium.

Indeed if they had not paid the price, we would not known about the Jesus of the Bible.

And we still have “Jews” and “Greeks” around us today. Those who think they will be fit for God’s Kingdom by their ritual observances and those who seek to find God simply through theuir intellect.

But the Kingdom of God is found through

1. repentance – that is turning from our own

selfish ways to follow the way of Christ

2. new birth - a gift of God and

3. a response to the call of Jesus to

discipleship

Jesus said this in Jn 12:

25The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

26Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honour the one who serves me.

May I leave you with a parting thought from Jim Eliot –a missionary killed by the Ecuadorian Indians in the 1950’s who said:

“He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”