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"God's
Kingdom
God's Will"
By Dr. Mickey Anders
South Elkhorn Christian
Church
Lexington, Kentucky
March 15, 2009
Text: Matthew 6:10 "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven"
Our text for today is the same as last week and the same as
it will be for the next several weeks.
As a part of our focus on prayer, I am preaching a series of
sermons on
the Lord's Prayer. The intent of these
sermons is to make of us a praying people.
Perhaps you will want to follow the example of the earliest
Christians who followed the Jewish pattern of praying three times a day
-
morning, afternoon and evening. Instead
of praying the Shema as was Jewish custom, the early Christians prayed
the
Lord's Prayer on those three occasions each day. We
could do worse.
Last week we focused on the beginning of the Lord's Prayer:
"Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed by thy name."
Today we take the next petition: "Thy
Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is heaven."
Matthew 6:9-13 from the New Revised Standard Version says:
"Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed
be your name. Your kingdom come. Your
will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily
bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do
not
bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one."
Every movement that has broken into history has had a
watch-cry. No cause or crusade can
succeed without a slogan. Men on Madison
Avenue lie awake at night thinking up clichés and catch words.
In the American Revolution it was "No taxation without
representation!"
In the French Revolution it was "Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity!"
In the Civil War it was "With liberty and justice for
all!"
In the First World War it was "Make the world safe for
democracy!" It was supposed to be
"The war to end all wars."
In Christianity, it is "The Kingdom of God."
We are not clear at all what Jesus was talking about when he
referred to the Kingdom of God. We have
a sneaking suspicion that he is talking about heaven, and we are not
quite
ready to go there.
What is your definition of the Kingdom of God? Most
of us don't have one, so I want us to
review what the Bible says about the Kingdom of God.
First, I must remind you that the terms "Kingdom of
God" and "Kingdom of Heaven" mean exactly the same thing.
We have often mentioned the sense of
reverence in Jewish circles which led them to avoid pronouncing the
sacred name
of God. So often we find the term
"heaven" substituted for "God," but the meaning is the
same.
When we review the various statements from the Bible about
the Kingdom of God, we find that the Hebrew prophets were enamored by
the dream
of the kingdom, a vision of the world where God’s justice and
peace would reign.
Isaiah referred to a place where swords would be beaten into
plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and we would learn war no
more. He saw equity for the poor, help for
the weak
and liberty to the captives.
Amos spoke of the kingdom as a place where justice would
roll down like waters and righteousness like an overflowing stream. Elsewhere we find an image where where the
earth would be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover
the sea.
Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God all the time.
He said, “The kingdom of God is not coming
with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here
it is!’ or
‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among
you.” (Luke 17:20-21)
Early in Matthew Jesus repeats these words on two
occasions: “Repent, for the kingdom
of
heaven/God has come near." (Matthew
3:2 and 4:17)
In Matthew 16:28, Jesus says, "Truly I tell you, there
are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son
of Man
coming in his kingdom.”
"Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Truly I tell you,
it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven/God.
Again I
tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
than for
someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.'” (Matthew
19:23-24)
So now, what is your definition of the Kingdom of God?
It's still not easy, is it? It
seems that Jesus avoided giving a clear
cut definition for us. But William
Barclay gives significant insight when he points to the parallelism in
our text
for today. He reminds us of the Hebrew
pattern of poetry in which the second line explains, amplifies, and
defines the
first line. We see this pattern all the
way through the Psalms.
Thus he suggests that the Lord's Prayer provides the perfect
definition of the Kingdom of God this way,
Thy kingdom come is defined by the phrase "thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven." The
Kingdom of God is a society upon earth where God's will is as perfectly
done as
it is in heaven. To be in the Kingdom
is to obey the will of God.
Jesus said as much in another passage found in Matthew 7:21
when he said, "“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord,
Lord,’ will enter the
kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in
heaven." (Matthew 7:21)
We pray every Sunday for God to bring in the Kingdom of
Heaven, but I wonder if we really want it.
Do we really want the Kingdom of God to come?
The Kingdom demands the submission of my will, my heart, my
life. It is only when each one of us makes
the personal decision and submission that the Kingdom comes.
Sometimes when we want something built or constructed, or
altered or repaired, we take it to the expert or the craftsman for
consultation. That is always my attitude
when I take my car to the mechanic. I
think auto mechanics is a mysterious art like Zen Buddhism. Not long ago, I took my car to the mechanic
because it was running roughly. He
pronounced his verdict, "It needs a new ERG valve."
I didn't even know it had an ERG valve, but I
knowingly replied, "Yes, I think you are right. Why
don’t' you just go ahead and replace the
ERG valve." He was the expert, and
I was willing to do whatever he suggested.
In the Kingdom of God, we submit our wills to the will of
God, and we often learn that God's ways are not our ways.
An old episode of The Jerry Seinfeld show
features the hapless character, George Costanza. George
is a classic loser. There is no
politically correct way to
describe him otherwise. In the
storyline, George attests to his own inadequacies and ineptness.
Bemoaning the
fact that all of his decisions in life have turned out wrong, George
vows to spend
his day choosing the opposite of what he would normally select. His reasoning is sound: if his instincts are
always wrong, he must try the opposite. The
episode was hilarious as George went through is day always doing the
opposite
of he would normally do.
In Romans 7, Paul says much the same thing:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I
want, but I do the very thing I hate... For I know that nothing good
dwells
within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot
do it.
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I
do.
(Romans 7:15-19)
We may have to learn that we too will have to do the
opposite of our instincts if we really want the Kingdom of God to come.
Ours is a world where we normally think only of ourselves,
our success, our safety, our security, our investments, our comfort,
our
luxury. God's kingdom might challenge
such instincts.
We have witnessed the tragic outcome of an economy built on
greed. When everyone takes as much as
they can take, when excess becomes the norm, when executives take
millions in
bonuses while driving their companies into the ground, when individuals
commit
to loans they can't possibly repay, when fraud and theft occur on a
massive
scale, sooner or later that house of cards has to come crashing down. And it has.
I saw on television this week a woman who had lost $2 1/2 million
in the Madoff scandal. Can you
imagine? Another attorney said she had
her whole retirement savings invested with him and lost it all. She
said,
"Now I will be working until I am 95."
It has been a vivid reminder that life is far more insecure
than we like to think. Fortunes can be
lost. Security can evaporate. There has
to be more to the meaning of life than that.
At our elders meeting this week, I asked the elders to
respond to the question, "What are the spiritual needs of our
congregation?" The first answer was
that we needed to spend more time in hands on missions.
It is one thing to talk about missions; it is
a good thing to give our money for missions projects, but the kingdom
of God
calls us to get our hands involved in missions.
Jesus said, "Inasmuch as you have done it unto the
least of these you have done it unto me."
That's what the Kingdom of God is all about.
But we are a very comfortable people. We
like our life as it is. Most of us have
families and friends whom we
enjoy, jobs that keep us busy and happy, and a religious faith that
sustains us
in the rougher moments. While we pray every Sunday for the Kingdom of
God to
come, we probably would add, "but not yet." "Thy
kingdom come, O Lord, but maybe not just
now."
We have achieved in the United States a way of living that
is just about as close to heaven on earth as we are likely to get. We no longer have to worry about the basic
necessities of life. We no longer worry
about getting enough to eat. On the
contrary, we worry about getting too fat.
We even worry about our dogs and cats getting to fat, so we put
them on
diets too. Who wants to leave all that
for some unknown realm called the Kingdom of God?
The Kingdom idea reminds us that God is the expert in life,
and God's guidance can never lead anyone astray. Our
task is to submit our will to the will of
the one who created all life.
The Kingdom of God is life transformed to accord with the
will and purpose of a loving God. The
Lord's Prayer does not say, "Thy kingdom come in heaven."
It says, "Thy kingdom come on earth,
even as it is in heaven."
When we understand the Kingdom this way, we discover that
this is a dangerous prayer: "Your kingdom come, your will be done on
earth, in me, as in heaven." It
lets God loose in us and in the world.
The person who utters such a far-reaching request assumes an
obligation
to work for its fulfillment in convincing people to accept God's
control.
We hear the ultimate goal of the Lord's Prayer in the
wonderful passage from Revelation 11:15, "The kingdom of this world
will
become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ." (Revelation 11:15)
In the Seinfeld episode, George Costanza realized his
instincts were all wrong. The
culmination of this thinking comes when he sees a lovely young lady in
a
restaurant. Whereas the "old"
George would try to impress her with tall tales of success and
prosperity, the
"new" George strolls up to her and says, "Hi, my name is George. I am single, unemployed, and I live with my
parents." To his amazement, the
opposite response won the heart of the young lady.
Seinfeld is a comedy; the Kingdom of God is a radical new
way of life. If we really understood
this part of the Lord's Prayer, we would find that our lives and our
values
would be turned upside down.
Somewhere the story has been told of a well-to-do
businessman traveling abroad who, out of curiosity, visited a Roman
Catholic
leper colony. He peered into one of the shacks there and saw a nun down
on her
hands and knees scrubbing the floor. A
leprous person had died there only hours before. Looking
at her incredulously, the man said,
"I wouldn't do that for a million dollars." Glancing
up at him from her work, the nun
replied, "Neither would I." (Ministers Manual for 1985, p. 98) She was living in the Kingdom of God.
Jesus taught that the kingdom is like a pearl of great
price, or like a treasure uncovered in a field, that was so valuable
and so
desirable that men were willing to sell everything they had in order to
obtain
it.. We too need to be willing to make
that sacrifice.
Meanwhile, we are playing with dynamite every Sunday when we
say:
"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy
kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth
as it is in heaven."