August 5, 2012: Kingdom Come – Michael Hidalgo

Jesus’ sermons almost always involved the kingdom of heaven. So just what is this Kingdom that he speaks so much about?

In his 2008 book titled, The Great Awakening Jim Wallis writes, “In all my growing-up years in our evangelical church, I never heard a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount …But after leaving the church and reading all the revolutionaries, I encountered the Sermon on the Mount afresh, as more revolutionary than anything I had found in Karl Marx, Che Guevara, or Ho Chi Minh” (Page 63). 

This perspective of Wallis is nothing new, ten years before in his book titled, The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard quotes several evangelical leaders, from the previous twenty years, who point to the fact that the presence of Jesus’ central message about his Kingdom was absent. He quotes Peter Wagner, a leading figure in the “church growth movement” who said, “… I honestly cannot remember any pastor whose ministry I have been under actually preaching a sermon on the Kingdom of God.”

It is surprising, perhaps even disheartening, to hear evangelical leaders speak about how teaching on the Sermon on the Mount and the Kingdom of God have been absent from the church. However, surprising this may be, the necessity of recapturing the words of Jesus cannot be understated. 

To date, much of what has been written, specifically in regard to the Sermon on the Mount, has been removed from the cultural, historical, and revolutionary context of the First Century in which Jesus taught. Writers and commentators continually spiritualize and privatize the most radical of Jesus’ teachings boiling them down to clever, spiritual maxims that end up bring printed on a book mark or a refrigerator magnet.