Category Archives: The Kingdom

Discipleship, The Kingdom

How to seek God’s kingdom

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One young friend, a bright young university student, just asked me an honest and searching question: “What kind of things constitute seeking the Kingdom?” I’m no authority with these types of questions.  I still feel like a kingdom rookie searching the field for some seasoned player who can show me the ropes.  But I love the process, and so I asked the Holy Spirit for insight to respond.

I think it all begins with loving God and loving others (Luke 10:27).  But even before a journey can begin it needs a firm starting place, and the only place solid enough to begin the kingdom journey is a deep revelation of the profound and unwavering love God has for me.  Until my eyes are opened and my heart is bathed in the reality of God’s staggering love and affection towards me I’ll never be able to truly love others as I ought.   Sadly, many of us are clueless about God’s affection and we spend our lives trying to get into a room we’re already in rather than striking out on the adventure.  (If we really understood the love of God it would show up clearly in our attitudes towards liberals, gays, church visitors, homeless people and minorities!)

So we begin by drinking deeply of the love of God.  You’ll need to stop squirming.  Stop tracking your performance.  Stop trying to earn God’s love (there’s no need), or to prove how much you deserve God’s love, (you don’t), and just accept the fact that Father God is crazy with love for you beyond all reason or understanding.  There’s absolutely nothing you can do including “seeking the Kingdom,” that will make him love you any more or any less than he already does.  The truth is, God COULDN’T love you any more, and he REFUSES to love you any less than he does at this moment.   When a person’s soul is baptized in the love of the King his born-again eyes will be opened for the first time to the splendor of the kingdom.

And from there it will be quite natural to burn with love for God and others.  You’ll discover an inner motivation to pray for the kingdom, (Matt. 6:10); to preach the kingdom, (Luke 10:9; and to enlarge the kingdom through acts of mercy, helping the poor, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, and bringing justice and light into the darkness around us.  (Matt. 25:31-40).

But we must never lose sight of the fact that the LOVE of God is forever the engine of all activity.  God’s kingdom is never advanced by drudgery nor the compulsion of dry religious obligation.  The kingdom comes with delight.   When we realize the love of the King we will gladly give ourselves to the enlargement of his kingdom.

PS:  I’m in Constanza, Romania with a class of twelve students from Moldova, Azerbaijan, Canada, Romania and the US.  We’re having some amazing moments together.  Next week I’ll be in a youth camp in the middle of the country with no internet access.  (It’s in a tiny village with one dirt road,  horse-carts, and cows who come wandering home to their respective yards at dusk).  Thanks as always for your prayers and support.

The Kingdom, The Love of God

Success in shiny eyes

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Ben Zander, who conducts the Boston Philharmonic, authors books, and inspires countless people, says he measures success by how many shiny eyes he has around him.  If he could have seen my eyes yesterday afternoon after watching one of his lectures he would have felt very successful indeed.  I like Ben’s measure of success because it cuts to the quick of what’s important and reveals God’s fingerprint on human nature.

Shiny eyes happen when the beauty of the invisible God and his Kingdom breaks through into the natural world.   Whether it’s the harmony and passion of a Beethoven Symphony, the tender touch of a friend, or the wonder of a good story, those things are all – at the heart – mere visible reflections of the passion, tenderness and wonder of the invisible God.

Abba wired us for shiny eyes and for all the things that cause them to shine.  It’s one of His ways of courting us and inviting us into his Kingdom.   When a man discovers a treasure in a field or a pearl of great price, his eyes will shine like diamonds in the sun – so much so that the Son told us, “YOU are the light of the world, a city on a hill cannot be hid.” (Matt. 5:14)

I’m living this month in a city, (Sarajevo), where masses of people live in a dim, colorless world.  Lets pray that the eyes of many will fall again upon the Pearl of Great Price, and will begin to shine with the wonder of the Kingdom.

“Your eye is a lamp, lighting up your whole body.  If you live wide-eyed in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light.” – Matt. 5:14

The Kingdom

The gloom and the glory

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David Wilkerson’s “prophetic word” regarding the coming catastrophe in New York City has been getting some serious attention in the news this week.   People are confused and panicky, wondering how we ought to respond.  Should we stockpile food like David suggests?  Should we withdraw our money from the banks?   How  do kingdom people respond to such a terrifying word?

Dr Wilkerson writes:

“An earth-shattering calamity is about to happen…  It is going to be so frightening, we are all going to tremble – even the godliest among us.”

“For ten years I have been warning about a thousand fires coming to New York City. It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires—such as we saw in Watts, Los Angeles, years ago… There will be riots and fires in cities worldwide.  There will be looting…

We are under God’s wrath.  In Psalm 11 it is written,  “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (v. 3)…  God is judging the raging sins of America and the nations. He is destroying the secular foundations.”

First I want to say that I love David Wilkerson and have the highest respect for him.  His life and his fifty-plus years of ministry speaks for itself.  Yet I’m deeply troubled by this message.  Has not God placed the church in the world as a prophetic arrow of hope pointing to the Kingdom?  Jesus said “I did not come to condemn the world, but to save it.” (John 12:47)

We invite panic and despair when we miss the kingdom.   When the church understands the Kingdom to be heaven, (as many do), then it’s easy to embrace a message of judgment:  “The sooner the world burns up, the sooner we can get on with heaven.” But when we see that God’s intention in Christ is to restore all things,  (Col. 1:20), and to bring His kingdom into the earth,  (“…Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven,”), we’re reminded that the Gospel message is in fact GOOD news:  “For God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and not counting their sins against them.” (2 Cor. 5:19)

Today is a golden hour for the church as people all over grope for  answers.  “Is there any hope?” “Can there be any justice?”  “Is it possible to live together in harmony?” “Can we make a dent in poverty?”  “Can the environment be restored?” We’ve been entrusted with the good news of a resounding “YES!”  Ours is the privilege of preaching a kind King and a glorious  kingdom to a world on the brink of collapse.

Whether David Wilkerson’s word will be fulfilled is something only time will tell.  It doesn’t take a prophet to understand that when a nation rejects God it rejects the glue that holds it together.  Chaos and anarchy are inevitable.  Of course we’ll destroy and loot and set fires and turn on each other.   We’ve cursed our own way, and God doesn’t need to send judgment on us any more than he would need to curse the harvest of a farmer who fertilized his crops with salt.

Yet we are to go on preaching the kingdom, seeking the kingdom, living the kingdom, and demonstrating the kingdom in the power of His Spirit and in selfless acts of love.   There is something beautiful and glorious on the heart of God, and He has invited us into it.   Perhaps if we return to preaching the glad news of the kingdom we can yet escape the doom.

The Kingdom

Makeover TV and the kingdom

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old-house-2-bwI hardly ever watch TV, but the other day I happened to be in the gym and got sucked into a makeover show about – of all thing – restaurants.  As the hour unfolded I was astonished at how my heart was so moved by this tired old restaurant being brought back to life.   So I listened:  “What’s up Father?  Why am I feeling emotional about this?” (I’m being very real here, at the risk of sounding like a mush).  The answer came quickly: “It’s a kingdom thing.  Makeover is just another word for redemption.  And I’ve wired the human heart to respond to redemption.”

Do you know there are as many as fifteen TV shows out there about makeovers?  I just did a quick search and found makeover shows about cars, people, pets, houses, restaurants, weight loss, wardrobes, rooms, and garages.  Network TV has tapped into our heart’s longing to see all things made new.   It seems that once our hearts recognize the kingdom, there’s no going back.  It crops up everywhere, even in makeover TV.

“And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered,
O Lord, you know.” – Ezekiel 37:3

The Kingdom

Repenting of political salvation

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There are mental breakdowns, and then there are political breakdowns.  I’m still in the midst of a serious political breakdown.  It’s become a clear crisis of faith in the American system that grows deeper by the day.  Or maybe it’s simply God leading me into repentance and a rethinking of my closeted and idolatrous hope of political salvation.

I feel like I’m awakening to the fact that American is NOT “the last best hope on earth.” (Barak Obama, 2007)  Nor is the American ideal “the hope of all mankind” (George Bush, 2002)  Nor is she “a shining city on a hill” (Ronald Reagan, 1989, quoting founding father John Winthrop.)  Those would decribe the Kingdom of God, and the sooner we clarify that, the better off we will all be.  Then perhaps we’ll be able to cast off the idolatry, look realistically at the United States government, and begin to pick up the pieces.

But even more importantly, we’ll be in a position to identify the True Kingdom that really IS the world’s best hope.  It’s time. No, it’s past time we become serious students of the Kingdom of God, the only kingdom that can truly deliver good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the captives, and the year of jubilee.

It’s all so new to me, this transfer of loyalty from a teetering human government to a kingdom that cannot be shaken. (Hebrews 12:27)

Tomorrow I leave for Budapest to teach in the Discipleship Training School.  Don’t know yet how this will translate into the classroom, but it must.  It’s time to raise a new flag over our hearts.

The Kingdom, Worldview & Truth

To love the Truth

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I don’t know which gripped my heart first: a love for the Kingdom, or a love for Truth. There’s no difference, really, because the Kingdom is the totality of Truth, and Truth is the Kingdom. In fact, the King himself declared “I am the… Truth.”

One of the greatest grievances I carry in my soul is the abandonment of truth I see in today’s culture, (both Bosnian and American, I’m sad to say). Living here in Sarajevo has worked in me an utter detestation of lies: They kill. They destroy. They create wars, poverty, bondage, prejudice, broken relationships and emotional illness. I suppose its simpler to recognize it here because it’s always easier to see someone else’s lies than your own.

Several years back my friend Bill Burtness gave me a little formula for knowing truth:

  • We’ve gotta be honest. A dishonest person can never grasp truth because his very being rejects it.
  • We must know why we believe what we believe.
  • We must know why we don’t believe what we don’t believe.
  • We must be willing to change.

It’s all such hard work, really: thinking and honesty, and being willing to change. I have to say it’s a daily challenge for me to to sift through information and news and even the perceptions of my heart. But for all the annoyance, it’s worth it to occasionally find a little nugget of the Kingdom hidden under the rocks of illusion. It’s like discovering treasure in a field.

“The pursuit of truth shall set you free – even if you never catch up with it.”
– Clarence Darrow

News & Stories, The Kingdom

Compatability issues

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I arrived in Romania Sunday afternoon, and have a class of young people from seven different nations. Several are former students from past schools, so it’s a joy to reconnect and to hear the stories they’re living.

The forty hour trip from Albania was taxing to say the least: a non-air conditioned bus, upright, non-reclining seats, and passengers lighting up along the way! But even worse was the toll of Communism that unfolded in the passing scenery. For the first ninety minutes I counted military bunkers built by the Albania’s former dictator, Envir Hoxha.  Stopping at one hundred fifteen, (out of a purported seventy thousand!), I turned to writing in my journal:

“Run down properties, soupy, polluted streams and a littered roadside reel past my bus window. The cities are crowded with decaying Communist apartment blocks, discarded scrap, and half-finished projects. One ten mile stretch of oily, abandoned factories with their overgrown parking lots weighed especially heavy on my spirit.

‘You were never meant to live in such a place,’ the Spirit whispered. ‘This is the work of the enemy, whose purpose it is to destroy the bright, the beautiful, and the glorious. You were meant to live in a world of glory and gardens, beauty and brightness, purity and order. In the same way that glory feeds the human spirit, destruction and disarray burdens the soul and depresses the heart.’ ” Communism is incompatible with human life.

But when the church neglects the message of the kingdom, Marxist ideology surfaces as one of the few human ideas that actually talks about justice, equality, and a future. That’s why I’m here, to point to the real thing: the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom

From cabbages to kings

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Driving rain has marooned me at La Hacienda with no chance of leaving. So it’s a great chance to shoot off a little update if I can draw some inspiration from the Holy Spirit, my own heart, and this vegetable Quesadilla in front of me.

“Nathaniel”, (who laughed and told me to use his real name – “Amer”), did a terriffic job telling his story to a packed house last night. He’s a gifted storyteller, so the audience sat in rapt attention to his tale of encountering Jesus in dreams and Coffee bar conversations.

I’ve been thinking about the church lately. I reckon for a missionary I don’t talk a much about the church. I love the church, believe in the church, support the church, and of course “attend” church. But it’s the Kingdom that captures my imagination. After all Jesus told us that we should seek first the Kingdom, and He would build the church. But somehow it feels like we’ve gotten it all backwards with disasterous results. (He mentioned the word “church” twice in the four gospels, and the kingdom over one hundred seventeen times!

Lots of Jews in Jesus’ day missed the kingdom because they confused it with the Jewish nation. “Lord, are you going to free Israel now and restore our kingdom?” (Acts 1:6) You gotta understand this question came after the resurrection, and after three and a half years of preaching the “gospel of the kingdom.” Can you imagine that maybe the Lord might have felt like banging his head on the nearest brick wall?

As long as we equate the Kingdom with the church, or with heaven, we’ll never understand the Gospel as Jesus preached it. The Kingdom is the fullness of Christ filling ALL of creation, from “animals to atoms” and “cabbages to Kings.” (Eph. 9-10) I look forward to the day when the church awakens to the call of being God’s arrow pointing the way not to heaven, and not to itself, but to the Kingdom. That will be a fresh, new day in the history of the Church.

The Kingdom

A King and a Kingdom

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Yesterday I had a stunning opportunity to lay out the Gospel to a dear Bosnian friend. He just sat down and started asking questions; The sincere questions of a seeker, and not the type of questions we often hear from those who just want to debate the differences between Islam and Christianity. It would be sketchy of me to use his real name without permission. So I’ll just call him “Nathaniel” because he reminds me of Jesus’ disciple: “an honest man – a true son of Israel.” (John 1:47)

In the end I was struck by how lucid and straightforward the gospel of the Kingdom is when it’s presented as it was intended: Forget the Four Spiritual Laws. The Apostle Paul “told them about the KINGDOM of GOD and taught them about JESUS from the scriptures.” (Acts 28:23) Phillip did the same in Acts 8:12: “But now the people believed Phillip’s message concerning the KINGDOM of GOD and the NAME OF JESUS CHRIST.” Even at the end of Acts we find Paul under house arrest in Rome “welcoming all who visited him, proclaiming the KINGDOM of GOD and teaching them about the LORD JESUS CHRIST.”

Even a child can understand a King and a Kingdom: a servant king who sacrificed his life for the Kingdom. The two go together like peas and carrots. It’s just taken me awhile to discover it.

Poetry and Prayers, The Kingdom

Truth and passion

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There’s no internet access at Nazim’s place, where I’m staying. And that means I have to dash off these quick updates at La Hacienda, a smoky Mexican restaurant in the old quarter of Sarajevo. With distractions coming and going like television commercials, it’s not exactly the sort of place you’d choose to do some creative writing.

I was thinking the other day how truth gives birth to passion. Any non-musician will quickly tire of plunking around on an untuned piano. But tune the instrument and teach him a few laws of harmony and the passion of music will thrill him for a lifetime.

It’s the same with the Kingdom. For years my heart was dull and two-dimensional. The uninspiring fragments of life left me cold and listless until the curtains of the kingdom parted and Truth began to take root in my soul. From that moment on, nothing has been the same.

Pray that I’ll be able to point these dear people to the truth of the Kingdom. I’m convinced it is the only sure thing that can resurrect God-given passion and hope in the Balkan people.