Discipleship - "Seeking" as a Way of Life

Jer 29:13 NLT - 13 If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.

Thank you music team. Well done this morning.

Well, good morning Church!

Introduction

Jesus wants us to live in the Kingdom NOW. In fact, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is NOT...

How do you get into heaven when you die.

The Gospel, the good news that Jesus ACTUALLY taught was...

How to get into heaven BEFORE you die!

And misunderstanding the Gospel of Jesus Christ can and often does lead us to reducing the message of Jesus to little more than a get outta hell free card. Where we say some magic words, often in a magic place and then do the best we can until we die and go to the cool place.

I don’t want that for you. I don’t want that for me.

Jesus preached the right now availability of the Kingdom of God and He has invited us to live there in the here and now AND for all eternity.

We are in the midst of a series we are simply calling “Disciple” where we are looking into just exactly what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and how to engage in the disciple making process. We have been discussing the Kingdom of God that Jesus talked so much about. It’s location and its accessibility. Jesus said the Kingdom of God is near, not far off. And the way we move into and traffic within the Kingdom is through apprenticeship and obedience to Jesus .

It is important for us to understand that God’s Kingdom is God in action. It is the reigning of God over the affairs of your life. But His reigning is not forced on you and me. That is not to say that His plans will not prevail. They will. But as I keep reminding you, He has issued and invitation to step into His kingdom. The next move is up to us. A response is required…or nothing happens.

And the kingdom that we seek is what is God doing right now where I am.

If I am in a relationship with another individual, the question should be, “What is God doing there?”

If I am engaged in some activity, the question should be, “What is God doing there?”

If I am involved in some ministry of the church, again, the question I should be seeking to answer is, “What is God doing there?”

We talked last week about inviting God into the moments of our days. Not just one blanket prayer in the morning , but a continual inviting Him into every activity of our day all through the day. Why do that? That has a way of keeping His presence in mind. It has a way of keeping us within His kingdom that is available to us. And it sets us up to be aware of what he wants us to do and then having the opportunity to obey Him, and every time we do…kingdom living occurs.

Can you see how we would not have or even see those opportunities by simply issuing an invitation first thing in the morning and then going about our business? What would we do? We would and often do get caught up in our day and never give Him another thought.

Have you discovered the kingdom of God? Have you tasted and felt what it is like to spend your time within the kingdom of God?

If not, I would ask, are you looking for it. Are you seeking it?

I gave you a few things to consider last week that could help you find it. Remember what they were?

Mindset: Embracing the truth that Becoming an Apprentice of Jesus Christ is not too difficult for YOU.

Intention: Intentionally Invite His Presence INTO the moments of your day.

Action: Be obedient to the teachings of Jesus.

That is not to be confused with simply KNOWING what He teaches but actually DOING what He teaches. Incorporating His ways into our ways, no....REPLACING our ways with His ways!

And as I have already said, this cannot be a part time, once-in-a-while, when it is convenient kind of thing. You must be a juggernaut when it comes to your commitment to the Christian lifestyle.

BUT! It is very important that you understand and come to grips with the fact that your spiritual transformation will not happen all at once. Again, that is not an excuse to back away or get lax in your pursuit of kingdom living and your commitment to your apprenticeship to Jesus.

You must keep pressing in.

This is a lifelong journey. Your salvation was instant. It happened in a moment. Not so with your sanctification or your transformation into Christlikeness.

The message title for this morning is, “Seeking” as a way of Life.

I want to spend the rest of our time considering the idea of seeking. What is the big deal in that? Well, it is in the seeking that we discover the Kingdom of God. Where do I get that idea? From Jesus of course.

There is this wonderful statement by Jesus we can read in the book of Matthew that tells us exactly what we need to do when it comes to seeking and what the result of that seeking will be IF we do it like Jesus Says.

Mat 6:33 NLT - 33 Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

Jesus spoke more about the kingdom of God than anything else. And here in this passage we see again, both a command and a promise that goes with it. As apprentices, this is very important for us to know and do.

Jesus instructs us to seek the Kingdom of God. And I want to draw your attention to HOW we are to do this...”Above all else”. Other translations tell us to “Seek FIRST”. It is the idea of “continually seeking”. To never cease seeking. To always be seeking. Seeking what? The Kingdom of God.

But what is that? Let me chase a little rabbit here.

We have talked briefly about this but I think at this juncture it would be good to get a clear understanding of exactly what Jesus was referring to here.

When you think of the Kingdom of God, often time our thoughts go to heaven. That place somewhere above us that we hope to see one day. Not necessarily wrong because God DOES reign over heaven. But I submit to you that idea is very limiting when it comes to what Jesus was talking about. In fact, we misconstrue Jesus’ teaching if we think that his proclamation of the kingdom was telling us something about God’s rule up in spiritual space or in the afterlife.

Now part of our confusion comes from Mark 1:15 which reads “the kingdom of God has come near,” Matthew 3:2 has “the kingdom of heaven has come near” (literally in Greek, “the reign of the heavens,” But Matthew’s phraseology doesn’t mean that the kingdom is literally up in the heavens. He is just referring to heavens that God rules over. So, the kingdom of heaven is not the kingdom that exists in heaven, but the reign of God over both heaven and earth.

I closed last week with the Lord’s prayer. Jesus instructed us to pray is that God’s Kingdom would come and that God’s will would be done here on earth in just the way it is done in heaven.

Notice that we are to pray for the kingdom to come. It is not a place to which we go after death. Jesus is roughly equating the kingdom with the will of God. Currently, in heaven, God reigns and therefore his will is done. We are to pray for God’s kingdom to visit us, for his will to be done on earth.

Now, one place in scripture that seems to contradict this idea is in John 18:36. During His trial before Pilate, Jesus says

Jhn 18:36 NIV - 36 Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place."

One might read this and say Jesus meant that His Kingdom is not here on earth, but up in heaven.

But the Greek translated actually reads “My reign is not from this world.” And notice that last line there Jesus says,

But now my kingdom is from another place."

Jesus is not talking about the LOCATION of the Kingdom. He is talking about the SOURCE of His Royal authority.

Unlike Pilate, he does not get his authority from an earthly source (Caesar), but from God. Now it’s certainly true that Jesus was not seeking to use his divine authority to establish merely another political state on earth. Nevertheless, the kingdom he announces is, in a sense, heaven on earth, not heaven in heaven. Thus He says, with his arrival, the Kingdom of Heaven has been brought near.

So where IS the Kingdom of God? Is it in your heart? Again, no. I know we hear that all the time, the Kingdom of God is in human hearts of born again believers. And in fact we get this idea from Jesu own Words.

Luk 17:21 KJV - 21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

Now THAT translation is from the King James but you won’t find it translated that way in any other translation. In fact, the King James translation is not very good. Sorry King James folks.

The actual Greek translation reads Luk 17:21 ... the kingdom of God is in the midst of you."

or

Luk 17:21 NLT - 21 ...the Kingdom of God is already among you."

Of course it is true that when the Kingdom of God is encountered it touches human hearts. When we live under the rule of God, our inner beings are healed, transformed and renewed.

But in this particular passage, we have to be mindful of who jesus is speaking to here.

Jesus is speaking, not to his faithful disciples, but to a group of Pharisees. They expected the kingdom of God to come with great signs, most obviously the beginnings of a successful revolt against Rome. But Jesus says their expectations are misguided. In fact, He tells them, the kingdom of God is in your midst. Given what Jesus says about the hearts of the Pharisees in other places – that are “full of greed and self-indulgence” and “all kinds of filth” (Matt 23:25, 27) – it’s unlikely that Jesus is telling the Pharisees to look within their own hearts to find the kingdom. If the Pharisees want to find the kingdom, Jesus says, they should look, not into their own sinful hearts, but right in front of their eyes, at Jesus himself, at his words and His works.

So, it is true that God’s reign embraces and transforms human hearts, it is not limited to some sort of interior experience. The kingdom of God impacts our actions, thoughts, relationships, families, institutions, and governments. In the end, it will touch everything on earth, when God’s will is fully done on earth “as it is in heaven.” Yet this expansive kingdom has begun on earth in a most unexpected and unnoticed way – kinda like a mustard seed – in the ministry of Jesus. And it arrived here on earth with Him.

Can you see how inviting Him into everything we do makes sense. That is in fact how we experience the Kingdom of God in the here and now.

Now I don’t mean to dismiss all the times Jesus spoke of the Future kingdom coming. In fact...

If Jesus had only spoken of the reign of God in a future tense, our task would be simple. Unfortunately for those of us who like things neat and tidy, Jesus also spoke of the presence of the kingdom. Here are some examples:

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15).

📷Though one could argue that “has come near” isn’t exactly the same as “is here,” the sense of Greek is that the “coming near” of the kingdom has already begun to happen in some significant way. If I said to you, “The tornado has come near,” you wouldn’t wait around before getting into a storm cellar. You’d understand that it was very close by, almost here.

Here’s something else Jesus said about the present kingdom:

“But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you” (Matt 12:28).

In response to those who accused Jesus of casting out demons with satanic power, he pointed to the true source of his authority: the Spirit of God. The exorcisms of Jesus are not merely evidence of his compassion for demonized people, they are also evidence that the kingdom of God is already present. The Greek of Matthew 12:28 actually uses a past tense verb (aorist), emphasizing that the kingdom of God has already approached.

Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God as both future and present, and I reckon that is exactly what HE meant and that He knew what He was doing.

So what are we to do with this. It seems obvious to me. Leave the future to the future and pay attention to the present. If Jesus said the Kingdom of God is fully coming in the future then we can take that to the bank. It will happen and there is nothing for us to do.

That brings us back to the passage in Matthew chapter 6 and the main subject matter of today’s message.

Mat 6:33 NLT - 33 Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

Seek the kingdom of God Above all Else...

Why would Jesus instruct us to do such a thing in the present tense if the Kingdom of God was nowhere to be found on this earth. I submit to you this morning that the Kingdom of God is all around us and if we make seeking it a lifestyle choice then as promised we will find it. And not only that…if we live righteously, we do that by the suggestion I gave last week, be obedient to what Jesus says, including this, Seek the kingdom above all else and what? He will give you everything you need.

Just to back up this idea of seeking we see a similar statement in God’s word to the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament…familiar passage to many...

Jer 29:13 NLT - 13 If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.

So NT - Seek …above all else

OT - Look (seek) wholeheartedly

So it seems to me that God wants to be found by us and He wants us to experience Kingdom living as a regular thing in our earthly existence.

But how? Well i gave you one action to take last week, and that is to invite Him into every moment of your day. I hope some of you are getting into the habit of doing that. I hope you all are. It really makes a difference.

Let me suggest a couple more things with regard to seeking the Kingdom WHOLEHEARTEDLY.

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a book called “Life Together” And in the first chapter there is a discussion of how the Christians never meet one on one, but they always meet under the presence of Christ. And keeping that in mind is the way and that's the way we we escape this bad habit we have of sizing each other up.

Do you know what I mean? We all do it. it is not a very helpful thing and more often than not it leads us to a bad conclusion about what someone is like. And only the love of Christ and the presence of the Kingdom can bring us Beyond it.

It usually goes like this. We meet a person maybe it's someone we've known about for a long time, maybe it's in church maybe it's not, maybe it's out on the street and the first thing that happens is we have a kind of pre-conceived program running in our heads about this person that covers their their appearance, and their demeanor and what they must be like because of this that and the other thing.

And the problem is it breaks the possibility of meeting them under Christ as Bonhoffer suggests.

If I am seeking the Kingdom of God when i meet someone, when I'm in a face to face with another person and it doesn't matter if this other person is my enemy, God, gives me the ability to love and to bring blessing to that person no matter who it may be. And listen to me. This also applies to the most important people in our lives. The ones closest to us.

This is one way we can know the kingdom in a way that we cannot know it anywhere else. in our personal relationships to other people.

It is just one of those areas we may overlook the Kingdom. We should be seeking the kingdom of God where we are now, in the present, not just looking for it in the future.

Somebody said you seek Joy and cannot find it because you look for it in the future instead of the present.

Seeking the Kingdom of God wholeheartedly means you look for it in everything you do. Folks, I am convinced that seeking the kingdom in every aspect of our daily living is what causes us to be pulled out of who we can be in the freedom of Christ.

And one of the places we can seek the Kingdom is in our relationships to other people.

Folks, here is what I know to be true. People do n ot change quickly. Seeking is designed to pull us as quickly as we can stand it with God’s grace and cooperation into a different kind of person than we were. And the funny thing is, when we change the people around us change. But God knows we have to pace ourselves because if we sprang the new creation we are in Christ on each other all at once we wouldn’t be able to stand it!

So. Living in the kingdom of God is a matter of living with God’s action in our lives. That’s what it is. When seek the Kingdom of God, we are seeking more and more to allow God to be present in everything that we are, and everything that we do, and to allow him to act and overrule and guide and help us become what he intended us to be.

Seeking is fundamental. But we must never forget. The Key here is Christ. The Kingdom and our access to it began with His arrival and His ministry on earth. And it is only through him and the leadings of the Holy Spirit in our lives, that we have tangible access to the kingdom. Our actions do not bring the Kingdom, the Kingdom is all around us. Our actions allow us to move into and experience the kingdom.

So to close let me say this. If you were in my study on Romans, or if you have spent much time in the book of Romans then you will know that there was a lot of talk about the Law and it’s place and its purpose. And the bottom line is that the Law is designed to line you up with the kingdom of God. It is a great great gift.

It isn't for us to make little hoops to jump through. It's to point us to the kingdom of God and and if you just set out to keep half the Ten Commandments you will be thrown on the mercy of God immediately because you'll be crosswise of everyone else. But Jesus is the one who enables us to penetrate to the heart of the matter and sets us free from the obligations that have been imposed upon us by ourselves most likely because we impose stuff on ourselves as a way of getting along with others.

So we say I'm going to be like this I'm going to be like that and that's a terrible trap for those of us who are spokes-people for Christ. Because we're constantly under pressure to please other people and it's a deadly trap and it will crush your soul unless we learn how to step beyond the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisee and not be governed by what other people expect us to do and to say. Be loving. Be kind. Be present. Accept them for who they are live with them there. But don't do what they say and you remember that's what Jesus said about the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees.

Do what they say but don't do what they do because they say and do not. And this is the horrible human Condition and the only escape from it is in the kingdom of God.

And so I just want to conclude with a verse that is not on the slide but one that you know very well, one that we looked at last week in fact, but we would do well to dwell on it. It’s John 8:31. He was dealing with a bunch of people who were drawn to him but they were really not committed and he said to them,

If you abide in my word, now that word “abide” is the same one that is used to talk about abiding in the vine.

Abide in my word means to put my word into practice where you are and that is the pathway to knowledge. And he says If you abide in my word then you are my students indeed.

Okay now you're making the connection to the whole discipleship thing I hope. It's becoming a student you're become a student in response to the message of the kingdom and you start to grow and you learn about the easy yoke by experience. And You observe the work of God with you as you go through your life. And you stop carrying the burdens. See, that's why the yoke is easy and the burden is light. If the burden is huge and the temptation is to try to carry it because it's in the Yoke with Jesus and drawing from the life of the kingdom in which you live with him that the yoke is easy and the burden is light. And so you can be the most cheerful person in Lebanon as a spokesperson for Christ.

It is said that Mother Teresa of Calcutta trained her people that worked with her to smile. And she would not retain someone who did not smile. They had to smile and now here again hehe, you could make that life crushing legalism if you want to. A frozen smile you know. That well known paINTED ON SMILE THAT SO MANY OF US EMPLOY. But bless her heart, she of course did not mean that. She meant a genuine smile that comes from a realization of the goodness of God where we are, even if you've been just dragged In off the street and you're dying. You're Dying In The Arms Of Love. See, beloved, that's the kingdom of God.

Now if you put your life in his word in that way, then you really are his student and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. It will set you free because it will be the realization of how things really are. Beloved, there's a lot to smile about. Joy is the final word. My joy I give you Jesus said.

Along with his peace and his love came joy and that is based on the reality that things are really better than you could ever imagine as you live in the kingdom of God. And you learn that and you have joy. Joy is a pervasive sense of well-being and that springs up in the cheer. Jesus says in the old translations “be of good cheer” You know that's where we live in the kingdom of God.

I want to close again this morning with what has become my favorite take on the Lord’s prayer. Would you pray with me please?

Dear Father, Always near us.

May your name be treasured and loved.

May your rule be completed in us.

May your will be done here on earth in just the way it is done in heaven.

Give us today the things we need today and forgive us our sins and impositions on you, as we are forgiving all who in any way offend us.

Please don’t put us through trials but deliver us from everything bad because You are the one in charge.

You have all the power, and the glory too is all yours forever. Which is just the way we want it.

And Father, once again I ask that you will bless these words and use the ones that are good to bless where a need is present. Give us a compelling sense of the reality of your life in us.

And Father, if there are any in the room today who have not yet decided to follow Jesus, then may this be the day as the power of your spirit leads. And we ask this in the very strong name of Jesus Christ, Amen.