The Kingdom
28 Then the Jews led Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor. By now it was early morning, and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness the Jews did not enter the palace; they wanted to be able to eat the Passover. 29 So Pilate came out to them and asked, “What charges are you bringing against this man?”
30 “If he were not a criminal,” they replied, “we would not have handed him over to you.”
31 Pilate said, “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.”
“But we have no right to execute anyone,” the Jews objected. 32 This happened so that the words Jesus had spoken indicating the kind of death he was going to die would be fulfilled.
33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
34 “Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”
35 “Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?”
36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate.
Jesus answered, “You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
38 “What is truth?” Pilate asked. With this he went out again to the Jews and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him. 39 But it is your custom for me to release to you one prisoner at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release ‘the king of the Jews’?”
40 They shouted back, “No, not him! Give us Barabbas!” Now Barabbas had taken part in a rebellion. John 18:28-40 (NIV) [1]
As we read the scripture lesson this morning, I find myself inwardly disturbed and puzzled. I am mystified when I think of the ways that Jesus Christ was misinterpreted while He walked on this earth. As a matter of fact, I am mystified today when I try to understand why people hold Him away from their hearts. I see nothing but good that Christ would bring to our lives. But we fight so hard against His tender advances.
1. Why is it that we stand apart from Christ and in conflict with Him?
· We want God to explain himself to us but it’s not really knowledge or understanding that we are looking for. It is simply some inner fear that if we let God have His way in our lives He will do something to us that we don’t want done or He’ll take something away from us that we are not ready to release. So to disguise our fears we pose our questions.
· Or our pride refuses to allow for the possibility that perhaps we need help. Perhaps there’s not enough gas in the tank to go the distance. There are people everyday who run out of gas. They break down by the roadside and life rages on in some frantic pace that ignores the soul. There have been many travelers who felt that they had everything that they needed to make the trip. Do you know what pride is? It is really self-deception based on a lie. The lie is that you were meant to make the journey by yourself. The lie says that this is the ultimate proof of worth – to be able to stand alone. And it’s difficult enough to surrender to God and to admit our need. There are people who come to Christ and admit that they need Him but never admit that they need a faith family as well. And you do you know. You do need a faith family. Cut from the herd you are just bait.
5 Young men, in the same way be submissive to those who are older. All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because,
“God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.”a
6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. 7 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. 8 Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. 9 Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings. 1 Peter 5:5-9 (NIV) [2]
More than the fact that you are vulnerable on your own, you are a target for the devil. The sort of prey that he is looking for. On your own you stand no chance of spiritual survival. My opinion is there is no such thing as a solitary saint. They come in packs.
Another reason perhaps that we hold him away is that we are simply in rebellion.
1 Samuel 15:22-23 (NKJV)
22 So Samuel said:
x“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,
As in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, yto obey is better than sacrifice,
And to heed than the fat of rams.
23 For rebellion is as the sin of 4witchcraft,
And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of the Lord,
zHe also has rejected you from being king.”[3]
This scripture is spoken by Samuel the prophet to Saul the 1st King of Israel. He failed to follow God’s direction regarding the conquest of the Amalekites and he
“amended” his orders to suit the moment.
In rebellion we do the same thing. We modify God’s direction for our lives in order to suit our own desires.
And today, the scripture lesson shows Christ in full blown conflict with people whose own will stood in conflict with the will of God. It is a lesson of Kingdoms in Conflict. As we look at it today, let me ask you if you are in “conflict” with God today or are you “cooperating” with His will for your life. Actually the idea of compliance or cooperation is not nearly enough. Let me ask you if you are able to joyfully accept the kingdom of God for your life today?
There comes a crisis, a moment when every human soul which enters the kingdom of God has to make its choice of that kingdom in preference to everything else that it holds and owns.
n Catherine Booth. "William and Catherine Booth," Christian History, no. 26.
Have you made that choice of preference today? Do you long for the Kingdom of Christ in your life? I believe that you should make it today. I believe that each day that a person puts it off, they increase the odds that they may never make that decision.
2. Christ had no earthly, material agenda.
There was nothing that the chief priests or Pilate had to fear from Christ. There is nothing that you have to fear today. He is not interested in the petty things that we hold so dear. The Kingdom of God is not about the things that you possess. It is about the things that possess you though. It is about the things that hold your heart ransom.
He said that His kingdom was not of this world.
I’m trying to represent the truth today and hoping that I do it accurately. My goal is not to try to convince you that it is not going to require anything of you to come to Christ and to live for Him. The call to discipleship is the call to Christ.
23 Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. 25 What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? Luke 9:23-25 (NIV)[4]
He didn’t come as Pilate and the Romans had come, to rule and dominate and subjugate. While the Bible tells us that we are “more than conquerors” we have not been conquered. It’s is not God’s aim to coerce you to faith or to wrestle things from your grasp.
We are so much like children. We take hold of things that are worth so little. We play with the broken pieces of our toys, our lives as though they were worth so very much. I am being re-educated in the process of raising a young child. This time I get to watch my children do it. It has brought me great faith in God’s sense of fairness to watch Erin wrestle with a strong willed child. She will grab hold of a book that she has torn pages from and sucked the corners off and she holds it as a rare treasure. I don’t want the book. To be honest it is in disgusting shape. It has been mangled and mistreated. There have been times when I want to take that away and give her a new story but try to take the old story away and replace it with something new. She wails and screaches and bawls. By now, what she has is garbage compared with what I could give her but she won’t have any of it. She doesn’t understand what she could have. She’d rather have some ratty version of an incomplete story that she has created by her own destructive tendencies.
We understand that when we raise tiny children. But when we are our mid lives or our senior years and we are still hanging onto the mess we have created when God longs to give us something far greater, . . . then it defies understanding.
Do you have a nice house? God is not interested in it. You can have it – you’ll have to leave it to someone else when you die or just vacate when God calls an end to time.
Do you have a nice car? Don’t worry, you can have that too. Help yourself.
Have you invested your talents and your energies to achieve notable things in the here and now. That’s great. People are impressed. Good. Remember though, your name won’t be written in the book of life with the letters that currently follow your name. There will be no titles written there. Just your name.
God doesn’t want anything that you can squeeze from this life.
But if your hands and your heart are fixed in a death grip on the things that we hold so dear then somehow God has to free you from them. Somehow He has to help you to let them go in favor of something else far better. Not just in the life to come but in the here and now.
3. God’s kingdom is a kingdom of the heart.
20 Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, 21 nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is withina you.” Luke 17:20-21 (NIV)[5]
Why do we fear the possibility that Christ should gain access to our hearts?
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,a Isaiah 61:1 (NIV)[6]
This is His kingdom. This is the place that God desires to rule and reign. This is the invitation that he waits for – to be granted unlimited access to the human heart. Because it is from this place that God can redeem the world, He can change the world from the undivided hearts of men and women given wholly to Himself.
Give me a hundred men who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I will shake the world. I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; and such alone will overthrow the kingdom of Satan and build up the kingdom of God on earth.
--James S. Hewett, Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc, 1988) p. 128.
But . . . the fighting is fiercest in the heart land.
Because there we are most vulnerable. The hurts that He would heal must first be addressed and acknowledged. Many people shove those things so far down and so far out of sight that they are all but forgotten but they impact us on a daily basis. Some good comes out of these things as well. They can make us better, more resolved to avoid repeating the past failures.
John Eldredge in “Waking The Dead writes the following:
“He brings His comfort and mercy to those times and places where we suffered the shattering blow, and the heart in that place often feels the same age as it was at the time of the event.”
I read this just before a Wild Bunch meeting and wrote the following as I experienced another touch from God to my own brokenness.
I remember a ball of food in my mouth and choking back tears, trying to keep my face from twisting in anguish. I was trying to hide, to conceal my emotion from my father. I wasn't 5 years old anymore but I felt like it. I was too old to cry now. I was sure that he saw this as weakness or worse, he really didn't care about the effect of his temper on my heart. I just lowered my eyes and fastened on the plate of food below me, hoping that I could make it through the mealtime, the place where we most often fought. I couldn't taste the food, just the saltiness of swallowed tears. It hurt like hell to hear my parents fight. I loved them both and I hated the fact that they couldn't seem to love one another. Their relationship just didn't work.
And then when I couldn't take it anymore, I would throw my fork on the table and run toward the screen door. I never remember being able to see my way up the field and into the woods. I just wanted to run away forever and never come back. I think I prayed but I don't remember what I prayed about. It was more waiting for the emotion to pass and then back to the house. Perhaps Dad would be gone, the way that he usually followed a good fight. He'd punch something, or slam a door or curse. Then he'd fall asleep on the couch or climb in the old truck and take a ride. It was usually late when he came home and he'd be just drunk enough to claim that we wasn't really drunk. But he was different when he came home. He looked like my Dad but he wasn't. I resented the impostor who commandeered my father's body. Probably why I hate alcohol to this day. That's probably why I detest the way that people who call themselves Christians, play with this stuff.
I don't ever remember my Dad following up on one of these occurrences. Perhaps he did but I don't remember it. He never knew it but in my mind he was taking a long knife and plunging it deep into my very soul. He was beating me inwardly, dashing my brains against some stony surface. I could never tell him that. I never did. But I was a mess inside, just a broken mess. So it was a relief when my parents divorced. I can't believe to this day that God would have people to stay together in a marriage when they are destroying each other. What could possibly be honoring about a marriage that doesn't work the way that God wants it to work? I think it's actually dishonoring.
It hurt when they separated, the finality of it, but at least I found peace. It still hurts though. That has never gone away. I still want to run away when people I love can't get along together. I tense up inside, I want to create a diversion, get them focussed on something else. And I still cry. But I try to do it when no one else can see me. The day I leave the ministry, this will be one of the things that I will look forward to. I will no longer have the responsibility of trying to get people to love each other. It's a disgrace when Christian people don't work at loving one another. The way that I understand the scriptures, it is one of the greatest testimonies that we have.
This is one of the areas of my own "broken-heartedness" that still affects me. I deal with it and perhaps I have experienced healing to a degree but I think that I have a long way to go. I guess in many ways, I am a wounded healer.
Eldredge says:
“The work of Christ in healing the soul is a deep mystery, more amazing than open heart surgery. A friend described his expereince as having Christ ‘holding the broken parts of my heart in his hands, and bringing them all together, holding them tenderly until His life brought a wholeness or a oneness to what was many pieces.’ Yes --- that’s it! The idea of binding up our brokenness involves bringing all the shattered pieces back together into one whole heart.”
He tells us that His kingdom is a kingdom of truth. Jesus was being tried and executed for what he said, not what he did. It seemed that this was of utmost importance in the whole trial process. If he were being tried for what he did then he was clearly innocent.
The church today is on trial as well for what we say. It makes little difference what we do but it makes all the difference what we say.
The truth of God cuts beyond our pretenses like a hot knife through butter and leaves us bare before Him.
Browsing in a London bookstore last summer, I ran across a little volume by Mrs. Leslie Stevens, called Notes from Sickrooms. It was a volume of instructions for domestic nurses. My eye fell upon this passage as I looked through it:
"When an illness has gone on for some time, the sick person becomes very weary of the things that surround her. She has looked at all the pictures which hang on the walls and at the patterns which ornament or disfigure the paper till she can bear them no longer. The nurse cannot, of course, alter all these things, but she can give them a certain change in the aspect of the room. A looking glass, so placed that it can reflect the sky and the trees--or if the sufferer is in London, some portion of the street--will be a refreshment to the eyes which have for so long not pierced beyond the narrow boundary of the sickroom."
The older pastor will recognize in these words something central to the business of ministry. We cannot remake the world in which our people live, despite all our youthful ambitions. In fact, one of the persistent ingredients of despair over the years will have been a sense of inadequacy to affect any change at all.
But one learns in the course of living how to work with the looking glass, to make things more bearable for those who suffer, to reveal to them new vistas--perspectives they've never seen, ways of looking at the world so they can see the world for the first time since they were children. And who knows but that in the course of making the world look new, it actually becomes new and moves closer to the kingdom of God.
-- John R. Killinger, JR. "The Season of Youth," Preaching Today, Tape No. 60.
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[1] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
a Prov. 3:34
[2] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
x Ps. 50:8, 9; 51:16, 17; [Prov. 21:3; Is. 1:11–17; Jer. 7:22, 23; Mic. 6:6–8; Heb. 10:4–10]
y [Eccl. 5:1; Hos. 6:6; Matt. 5:24; 9:13; 12:7; Mark 12:33]
4 divination
z 1 Sam. 13:14; 16:1
[3] The New King James Version. 1996, c1982. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
[4] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
a Or among
[5] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
a Hebrew; Septuagint the blind
[6] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.