THE PROMISED LAND (AKA—KINGDOM COME)
A vision that inspires and builds courage
For Israel in the wilderness it was the Promised Land
For Christians, it is the prayer: “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done on EARTH”
Both near and far
Mark 1:15 “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news.”
It’s clear that 2,000 years later, the Kingdom has not arrived but,
We can live in response to the Kingdom now and trust that God will complete the Divine purpose and history will be fulfilled according to God’s will.
If you were to describe in four or five sentences how a church and its members seek to embody God’s will in their behavior, what would it look like?
The vision of God’s Kingdom encompasses the whole diverse creation.
Genesis 1:31: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, I was very good.”
Everything from animate to inanimate features are seen as very good.
A Divine celebration of diversity.
Of course, as we know, the development of this diverse creation doesn’t always go smoothly, beginning with Cain killing Abel.
But God is not defeated and continues to work with humanity to achieve the Divine purpose.
“. . .in Christ God was reconciling the world to (Godself), not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”
Revelations celebrates the culmination of God’s purpose for our diverse humanity
That Divine purpose includes the diversity of humanity.
“After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the Lamb . . .” 7:9
But between then and now, people of faith have a task before them.
Think of your own church.
If your church chose to be shaped by the values of the kingdom because they trusted, like Jesus did, that with all the challenges before them it was still worthy to live into the kingdom, then what would it look like?
For a church to respond faithfully in a society that experiences tension and division, both the leaders and the members must live according to certain agreed upon disciplines. The Bible seeks to identify some basic behavior that a community needs to practice to demonstrate Christian community. Like among those early Christians, we don’t always live up to our own beliefs, but we have at least established a bar of truth against which we measure ourselves.
As an experiment, first, try to write five brief statements describing how the individual members would behave toward each other if they were behaving in response to Kingdom behavior.
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Second,write another five brief statements about how the pastor and elders would behave towards the membership in response to Kingdom behavior.
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Third, write five statements of what the witness of your church would be if the church chose to relate to each other and society as if the Kingdom had drawn near.
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You have the beginning of a vision. Share it with others.
