The Kingdom of God and the spiritual dot-com
I promise I’ll eventually get back to the website. We’re still working on numbers for prospective webhosts, and in the meantime I’m surfing the net, looking around, taking in inspiration where I can get it, and waiting for the “Aha!” that will come in due time. I’ll go ahead and plug James Webb Young’s book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, one of the best books I’ve seen on the subject, and one that I keep nearby at all times.
All that said…
God is really working on me about having a Kingdom of God perspective in my life and especially in “my” ministry. Last week, Jeff Christopherson, pastor of The Sanctuary, a church planting church in Toronto, really started pushing that point home when talking about what God laid on his heart as he began seeking the Lord in this work.
Today, Gerry Taillon, the national ministry leader for the Canadian Convention of Southern Baptists, brought the point home in a more intelligible way, using the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6.
He was asking the question, “Do I really understand what it means when it says, ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven?’”
I don’t think I’d ever really thought about what it meant until today. What I think it means, though, is that God is sincerely interested in bringing His kingdom to this earth — NOW — and wants to have His will accomplished on earth — again, NOW — as it presently is accomplished in heaven. So, if I understand that correctly then I have to ask, “If God wants to do that NOW, what is stopping that from happening?”
To answer that, I have to look as Israel. When Israel was looking to accomplish what God had already promised them would happen, namely that the land of Israel would belong to them if they would take the step of faith required to make it theirs, they balked and floundered unnecessarily. That step of faith, of course, required them to take the land from its present owners, which required a lot of boldness, but God consistently told them, “It’s YOURS! Go get it! I am giving it to you.”
That statement really confronts my view of God. “It’s mine? Who is giving it to me?
If I believe God will just bless my efforts, I’ll probably be satisfied with moderate success. If I believe that God simply moves in practical ways (i.e. through the FAITH program, through a mass marketing program, etc.) then I’ll probably expect a certain return percentage on what I put in, but I’ll never expect something God-sized. I’ll be just another spiritual dot-com on the church growth bandwagon who gets church-hoppers to hop, but never sees a neighborhood or a city transformed for Christ.
Israel was in that predicament. The people who came back from spying out the land said, “Man, those people are waaaaay too big; and we’ll never defeat them. We just need to find a way to live peacefully with them — somehow assimilate their culture into ours — and just live there, if that’s even possible.”
Caleb (our son’s namesake), however, said, “Let’s go get what God said He’s going to give us. Let’s go take it! He’s told us what to do…let’s not wait on committee…let’s not wait to see if it fits in the budget…let’s not wait to see if it fits into a good church growth strategy…LET’S GO GET IT! IT’S OURS!!” I added some quotes for emphasis there, you understand…
God is going to give me a dream. I know He’ll take my passions and my personality and my gifts and He’ll put me in the place He wants me to be. When I get there, I’m commanded to go and take the land — to see God’s kingdom come to my assignment, to see His will done in that place as it is in HEAVEN!
That assignment doesn’t first lead me to a church growth manual. That assignment leads me to pray as Jesus did, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done here as it is in heaven.” And then I’m charged to wait for the Lord, hear His direction, and go in it.
I’ll have to admit…my m.o. has usually been way too practical to think in those terms. “Get in there, assess the situation, use your noggin and get it done.” That’s usually been more of my working theology in ministry.
What kills me is that I’m realizing God could do way more than that if I believed rightly about Him. That way, when He tells me to simply wait on Him and submit myself to Him in prayer — don’t do anything just yet — I get restless and start making my own plans.
Do you ever wonder what would happen if we simply let God bring His kingdom through us? Jesus said that we are to “seek first His kingdom” and that we’re not to worry about budgets and what we’ll wear and what we’ll eat and how we’ll make ends meet. We’re not professionals. We’re seeking God’s kingdom on earth…and He wants nothing more than to bring it!
I can’t understand why I’ve gotten in the way for so long…
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