The Kingdom |
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I’ve taken sort of a sabbatical from my other blog, but want to keep this one going on a weekly basis, if not more often. Sometimes I just have trouble finding topics that interest me, and sometimes there’s so much stuff in my head that I have trouble sorting it all out to make sense of it in a way I can put on paper.
That’s kind of the way it’s going today. I’m working on the Wednesday evening class where we’re talking about prayer, and specifically right now, we’re talking about the model prayer, or the Lord’s Prayer. The words in that prayer, as many of us memorized from Matthew, are simple, yet very profound and meaningful.
Today, I’m looking at “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Now, as you at first look at that, you might not think there is very much there. I would beg to differ with you, however, and ask that you study a little what Jesus meant when he talked about the coming of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is mentioned over 40 times in Luke and over 50 times in Matthew. It’s an important subject. It’s one that on the one hand isn’t rocket science; yet on the other is a very profound and incredible description of the presence and rule of God in His creation.
And it’s very distressing to me, anyway, to know that the only thing that keeps God’s will from being done “on earth as it is in heaven” is our free will to accept or reject the rule of God in our lives. Jesus is recorded in Luke as saying that the Kingdom was like leaven that was hidden in some flour, and in time infiltrated and permeated the whole thing. He also likened it to a mustard seed that, even though tiny, grew into a tree that branched out and became very large. We don’t often think about kingdoms. We don’t live in one, and have very little to do with those that still remain in the world today. To give absolute allegiance to any one person and allow that person total control over us is foreign to our way of thinking. Yet that’s what God is asking of us…to allow Him to “invade” us, so to speak, and surrender ourselves to His rule. In this way the Kingdom of God will indeed have come and God’s will indeed will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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