The Kingdom is Truth, total Truth permeating every facet of God’s creation from relationships and government to economics and environment.  When the King identifies himself as “Truth” (John 14:6), you can be sure His Kingdom will reflect the flawless reality of His original intention in all of our living, loving, working, playing, and laughing.

Lucifer, the World-Hater, has only one real weapon in his arsenal of destruction, and that is the simple, yet effective strategy of deception.  Daily He disseminates lies like dandelion seeds, which in turn poison everything they touch:  Lies about neighbors contaminate communities.  Lies about government sabotage our freedoms.  Lies about morality breed slavery and destruction.   Lies about health metastasize into cancer and disease.

Recently God has been teaching me to pray for the Spirit of Truth to expose lies and to stir up an appetite for Truth in the church and in the nations.  Picture how effectively wars can be turned when the enemy’s plans have been laid bare.  It’s a non-partisan prayer, really.  Whether the lies are liberal or conservative, yours or mine, church lies, media lies, or Hollywood lies, they all must be rooted out before the Kingdom will emerge with great glory.

An additional bonus to this kind of prayer is the transformation of the way I read the headlines.  Instead of daily discouragement, I take heart when one more instance of corruption, infidelity and greed has been exposed to the naked light of Truth.  Imagine with me what God might do if His people banded together in asking that – come what may – the Enemy’s hidden agenda would be exposed like cockroaches to daylight for all to see.

Back when I was religious, I had my life all sorted into neat piles of “things that matter” and “things that don’t”.  Church, Bible study, prayer, and Christian music had value because those things were “sacred” and eternal.   But other things, “secular” things, were essentially meaningless:  Hollywood and hobbies, politics and parties, the way I dressed and the way I kept my yard.  It was easy in those days to prioritize: I merely had to sort the sacred from the secular and turn my focus full onto the sacred.  Now that I see the Kingdom I’ve come to realize that my twisted thinking was just one more remnant of hyper-religious, super spiritual yada yada.   The truth is, Everything Matters!

From the majesty of a sunset to the stripes of a caterpillar, ours is a world designed for glory and destined for redemption.  Every little piece of it.  Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian captured it perfectly when He said,  “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!'”  There is no division between sacred and secular because there is no secular.  It all belongs to a holy King, from the tidiness of my car, to the trimming of my shrubs, to the brightness of my smile.  In fact, everything I do carries the seeds of significance.

I’m reminded of “The Broken Window” theory that became a crime-fighting strategy of former Mayor of New York City, Rudi Guilanni.  The theory says that there is a direct correlation between broken windows and crime rates.  When people go into a neighborhood and simply replace the broken windows of the vacant buildings, crime rates will drop measurably.  Glory begets community health as surely as neglect and broken windows beget crime.

So while our postmodern neighbors suffocate under the lie that says “nothing really matters”, we believers have inherited a message of hope, the glad news of a Kingdom where everything matters!