Jesus’s Stories: Understanding the Kingdom | “An Enemy Has Done This!”

Jesus, like his followers today, seemed to field a pressing question from people on a regular basis: “How can the kingdom of God be present when there’s still so much wrong with the world?” Jesus was preaching that kingdom had come, God had done an amazing work, we should have joy—yet so much still seems to be wrong. Evil and injustice and the general crumminess of life on earth didn’t go anywhere. What gives?

In this message, Pastor Joel walks through a story Jesus tells to respond to this question, how it opens us up to a more complex world than the one we think we’re often living in, and how it invites us to patience, trust, and to Jesus’s most definitive statement about evil at all: the cross. Included is an extended time of question and response at the end.