Your Kingdom Come

YOUR KINGDOM COME

Romans 14: 16. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

The Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven is the realm of God’s authority and power and order which expresses the love and unity and agreement that exists between the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. 
In this Scripture the word righteousness speaks of our alignment in heart and mind with the Kingdom of God in Heaven. People living this Kingdom life in the earth experience and display the love and peace and joy that reflects the nature of the Kingdom of God in Heaven. 

Paul wrote to the Church in Rome which had a great diversity of national and cultural and religious persuasions to encourage them to flow in the love and unity that reflected the nature of the Kingdom of God in Heaven. He warned them to not judge one another because of their cultural and circumstantial differences but to accept and honour the intentions of each other’s hearts to live for God and not to live just for themselves. 

Romans 14:1 Welcome with open arms fellow believers who don't have the same opinion as you about serving God. And don't jump all over them every time they do or say something you don't agree with— One person has faith to eat anything, while the weak in faith eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him, even when it seems that he is strong on opinions but weak in the faith department. Remember, they have their own history to deal with. Treat them gently.

He explained to them that God could handle these differences that came from the variety of religious persuasion and upbringing of each one because he sees what is in the heart toward himself and that is what he measures and accepts.
God does not endorse our personal opinions, but he validates our obedience and sincere intention to please and honour him in our conscience. Our conscience is continually being purified by faith as we desire to walk closer with him in all we think and do. As we
live with a heart of love for the truth of who God is and who we are we receive clearer revelation of the knowledge of God and his Word.
 
Paul told them that if a brother or sister is committed to following a certain religious exercise of practising something or abstaining from something that they were taught to observe and we cause them distress by flaunting our faith and telling them they should have the freedom to do what we do, we are not acting in love. And more than that – we are not reflecting God’s Kingdom of Heaven in the Earth.

Romans 14: 16. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Whoever serves Christ this way is pleasing God and not causing offence to their brothers and sisters. So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding.

Our humanity seems to be hardwired from an early stage in life to detect unfamiliar differences in people other than what we grew up with, and to be threatened by anything that falls too far away from under our kindred tree, and that is not unusual. 

That has been the cause of divisions and conflicts in this world throughout history, but the Church has been given the very Spirit of wisdom and grace to model the answer to this conflict and division everywhere, and that answer is our oneness in Christ. 
Paul encouraged the Church to grow in maturity and love and an openness of heart and mind to learn to accept and appreciate the blending of our circumstantial differences such as race and gender and status and culture because in God’s eyes. we are really all the same
1Corinthians 12:12 The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So it is with the body of Christ. Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But we have all been baptized into one body by one Spirit, and we all share the same Spirit.

We see the differences and contend with each other and judge one another, even for the slightest degrees of difference of opinion or practice. 
God sees and appreciates those differences in us, which he himself planned for us to have and to be expressed through his Spirit. 
Jesus lived through this human experience of being treated as an outsider and even an outcast and lived this judgement upon himself by others every day of his life till the day he died - on the cross– for us. 

Jesus knows each one of us intimately, Spirit to spirit, human to human. He understands
the unique potential and aspirations we each have, and the misunderstandings and the hurts we have all suffered because of our differences, and he understands completely. Jesus loves us through all of this and he told us that we are each loved by Father God as much as he was, as he said in the following prayer; 
 John 17:22  that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

This needs to be reinforced and sustained by the revelation of the truth that each one of us is accepted fully as we are, along with our differences and limited understanding, and half formed opinions, and the imperfect formation of our thinking by sincere but imperfect teaching of Biblical doctrines and practice. 

Otherwise, we are left with the fact that while God sees us as One in Christ, we see one another as outsiders, the way the apostle Peter saw the Gentiles as outsiders through his Jewish lens. Peter was reluctant to even enter the house of the Gentile Centurion Cornelius, let alone present the Gospel to him, but when he did enter and present the Gospel the Holy Spirit did the rest in very quick time, and Cornelius and his whole household entered the Kingdom (Acts 10:44).

So as we have just seen, learning the ‘one in Christ’ reality was a very difficult journey for the early Church, as it is for us today, but escaping that journey is not an option for God’s Kingdom to come ‘on earth as it is in Heaven’ (Matthew 6:10). 

This revelation of oneness together in God’s love has to start somewhere.
It can start simply by being willing to put other things aside in order to spend time seeking God’s grace to believe in the fulness of his love for us. 
I believe it must be the grace of God for if I try in my own strength to reason with myself about how much I deserve or don’t deserve that love I just go around in circles in my mind, but when I get the grace of God to believe it there also comes a peace which is above all understanding and reasoning.
I then stand against letting the devil rob me of the confidence I have of being loved by God and loving him back. We can then have confidence that his love and goodwill will flow out to others.
That is the beginning of love and oneness, the first fruits of God’s Kingdom on earth.

It may seem passive to be waiting on God in stillness, but submitting to God’s working in us this way is really an active response to God in faith.
In this stillness our intellect gets starved of its hungry appetite for more knowledge and it complains bitterly just as our body does when it is starved of food, but just as a bodily fast can bring wholesome results, a soul fast of our intellectual busyness yields unparalleled spiritual health and wholeness.
Our will yearns for decision making and action so that it can be in control of our circumstances and it feels starved also when the soul is put on this kind of fast. When we do this we yield control to God in surrendering to his loving reordering of our circumstances for his purposes for our lives. 

Jesus taught us to pray ‘Your Kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’. 
We can enter into the heart of Jesus in this prayer for the Kingdom and hope to be a part of the answer to it in these days in which we live. We can allow his Kingdom power to be expressed in the reordering of our minds and the intentions of our hearts to accept his love and to love one another. This journey begins on earth but continues in eternity. Love never ends.

I have seen some grand moves of the Holy Spirit in my time, and my notion of the next move is that Holy Spirit would rain down and soften our hearts by his love and give us ears to hear one another and eyes to see one another and hearts that feel for one another as one in Christ, and so reflect the love and unity and agreement of his Kingdom in Heaven.
This flood of grace from Heaven could melt our hearts and bestow upon us a humble innocence that heals our souls. And then we might just get to take that healing power into a broken world. May your Kingdom come Lord and may that healing rain fall.