I’d rather be broken, that I may be fixed, I’d rather be
foolish, that I may experience God’s awesome power, I’d rather…
God desires a broken and repentant heart, not a mind filled
with strategies, or a knowledge of righteousness! I don’t want to become as
stubborn, hard-hearted and far away from God as His own people have been. We
strive for Kingdoms in the physical, but where I ask, is the spirit of LIFE AND
WHOLENESS? Do we know what it means when we say ‘Your Kingdom Come’? ‘Your Will
Be Done’? I have a suspicion that we really don’t. The meaning of Kingdom is
what I design to explore here, and I postulate that perhaps if we change our
view of the Kingdom and how it is to come, in each one of us, we might actually
be able to live our lives growing in the complete fullness of Christ! And I believe
one of the key pieces lies in Isaiah 58:7-8, which gives us clear instructions
on how to serve and build Gods kingdom, how to do His will, in the physical,
and how that has true eternal, spiritual impact. It is an outworking of the Kingdom
that looks very little like what I’ve seen everywhere else. But let me not get
ahead of myself.
Christ walked on earth, calling his disciples to him,
healing, and praying. Luke describes how He would heal men, as a way to prove
that the Son of Man can indeed bring the forgiveness of sins. Is not what is
restored in the physical simply a sign of that which can ultimately be restored
in the spirit? Is not God’s ultimate desire to save all souls and restore man
unto Himself? We long for Kingdom, as did the Jews of Jesus’ time, that
manifests itself and is established in the Spiritual. But Jesus said, the
Kingdom of God is within you. We think if we repent, become righteous, get
ourselves ‘right’ before God, we can gain the ultimate Kingdom of God: perfect
lives and blessing in the natural. But how self-righteous will we become if that
becomes our focus? We often live for a kingdom not of God, but one of our
making. And in so doing, we are much like the Israelites, who walked through the
wilderness with the very presence of God as they were on their way to the
promised land, but had no faith or heart for what was God’s heart. Instead,
they wanted their own version of things, and ended bowing down to a calf and
asking to be sent back to Egypt, the land of their enslavement!
Isn’t it interesting as well, that Christ chose only to use
natural blessing as a sign of His power to bring the ultimate blessing,
the redemption of souls. Very few got that. They would get caught up on the
first part, the fact that he could heal, and many missed the entire purpose of
his coming. Many of those He healed, would walk away without even praising Him
or realizing that He was the true giver of LIFE.
In the book of Luke, Jesus says as he spends time with tax
collectors, that he “has come not to call those who think they are righteous,
but those who know they are sinners and need to repent.” If we only focus on
leading righteous lives, and having others do so as well in order that we may
have God’s blessing, we’ve missed the entire purpose of the Gospel, and are
indeed, in danger of missing His call on our lives. We become dead to the
redemptive power of Christ within us! That is the true Kingdom of God within us.
If we understood the beauty, power and ultimate purpose of that, perhaps we
would walk in all the authority so many talk about and want. But authority used
to bring about our own perfection or our own kingdom, is not an authority that will
stand or bear fruit. How much more would we see, and how many more souls saved,
if we long for an authority that brought the Kingdom within each person!
A Kingdom meant for eternity, not just some sham we can think up now. Is not
the soul of a person saved more important than them gaining riches, physical
blessings or the like, without ever knowing true LIFE in Christ?? To what end to we want to use the authority
given us by Christ, and will it stand for eternity? Paul says “Already you are
filled, already you are rich; You are reigning as king without us. I wish it
were so, that we would reign with you.” (I Cor. 4:8). And in Galatians 2, he
emphasizes, “I have been crucified with Christ [in Him I have
shared His crucifixion]; it is no longer I who live, but Christ (the Messiah)
lives in me; and the life I now live in the body I live by faith in (by
adherence to and reliance on and complete trust in) the Son of God, Who loved
me and gave Himself up for me.
21 [Therefore,
I do not treat God’s gracious gift as something of minor importance and defeat
its very purpose]; I do not set aside and invalidate and
frustrate and nullify the grace (unmerited favor) of God. For if
justification (righteousness, acquittal from guilt) comes through [observing
the ritual of] the Law, then Christ (the Messiah) died groundlessly and
to no purpose and in vain. [His death was then wholly superfluous.]"
So why do I say all this? Because what I’ve seen of the
Western church, is that to the extent that it knows the truth and principles of
God, knows what right and wrong is, it also has forgotten the redemptive work
of Cross, and what that work indeed calls us to. Paul says, “I have determined
to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified”. To know, each every day, that He
died for our sins, to know His sacrifice. That we would walk in humility and
thankfulness for His grace and mercy and loving-kindness for doing so, to learn
how to live our own lives of sacrifice. Paul also encourages the Church to
“boast only in the Lord”, for it is by His grace that we do any and all things.
(Some ‘Christian’ nations were established with a thought to
go create a righteous, holy place in this world, with perfect governing laws. However a lovely and utopian thought it was, it not only didn’t work,
but I wonder if perhaps the thought was not even founded in a proper knowledge of the call of the true
follower of Christ, what he meant by Kingdom and how he desired to establish
it? Perhaps in this very thought there lay a bit of self-righteousness that is still visible today?)
I might be going out on limb here, but GOD HASN’T COME FOR
THOSE THAT KNOW THAT ABORTION IS WRONG, OR THAT HOMOSEXUALITY IS IMMORAL, OR THAT
HONESTY IS GOOD! He’s come for those that don’t. Do we still have heart for
them? Or are we so focused on being righteous, on justifying, that we’ve
completely forgotten why God called us in the first place and how to reach
those that need the same call? (On a side-note, at times I wonder how much
the justice-movement is also a part of this striving for self-made morality and
righteousness, and if perhaps we are not very balanced in our approach). The
sad thing is, we’ve become self-righteous in certain areas, and just like the
Pharisees, have only picked out the parts of the law we want to listen to (and
even added some of our own laws). If we were honest, we’d acknowledge that we
are failing miserably at being righteous! Why does no one talk about the
problem of divorce in the church, or greed, or the myriad of other sins? We’ve
put a bandaid on our problems, thinking that by pointing out all the wrong in
society, we can cover our own wrong. A proper work of healing and wholeness
requires something much deeper, and unfortunately something much more
long-lasting. Eternal in fact. Instead, we have become short-termers with no
eye for the goal. Have we so quickly forgotten that it is not this life that is
our prize?
Something is missing, we’ve obviously missed the formula,
because we are becoming a stagnant body, growing so engorged on ourselves that
we can’t even move out of our buildings, our homes, and be relevant to others.
We don’t even know how to LOVE AS JESUS DID! So my question, how can we learn to
live and love wholly in Jesus, from the heart?
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