Thy Kingdom Come

We are in week three of our series on the Lord’s Prayer, and I hope you’re finding it helpful to spend time taking this most important of prayers line-by-line and examining what each petition of the prayer might mean for us.

It’s important to know what it is we’re praying for when we offer this prayer each week.

And I want to start this morning by saying this: what we’re praying for with the third line of the prayer might be, at the same time, the most difficult for us to understand…and the most important for us to understand.

Our Father in heaven…hallowed be your name…

Thy kingdom come.

Your kingdom come.

You know, if we stop and think about it, praying for God’s kingdom to come is an immense and awesome thing to try to wrap your head around.

What we’re praying for is nothing less than the kingdom of God to be manifest in our world.

That is huge. That is powerful. That is…intense.

Annie Dillard, in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, talks about the immensity and awesomeness of this kind of prayer when she writes:

“Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”

She’s a little extreme in her description, but I get where she’s coming from.

Do we understand what we are saying when we pray "Your Kingdom Come?"

Do we have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we're invoking?

What you and I are saying when we pray these words is earth-shattering: it's revolutionary, it's radical…some might even say it's dangerous.

Maybe we should approach it with crash helmets and life preservers, because if we truly grasped what it is we're asking for here, our lives...and our world...would never be the same.

Your kingdom come.

What are we asking for when we say those words?

If you were to ask the average Christian what it means to pray, “Your kingdom come,” you would probably get a response that has something to do with the second coming…the belief that Christ will return to establish his everlasting kingdom.

Especially these days of earthquakes and wars and floods and political uprisings.

A lot of people, myself included, have watched the news in recent months and wondered…just how much time does our world have left?

But even before this latest round of world upheaval, Christians have always been keenly interested in the coming kingdom of God.

It’s become a huge topic in books, on TV…even in movie theaters.

And so it’s no wonder that the prayer, “Your kingdom come” conjures images of Christ’s return in glory…as well it should.

Part of what it means to embrace God's kingdom is to embrace hope that there is a future free of heartache and conflict and pain.

And it’s completely valid and very meaningful to pray in anticipation of that glorious event…after all, the very last prayer found in the Bible is “Come Lord Jesus!”

But I think in our escapist culture…where we put such a high value on “getting away from it all,” there’s a danger that our Kingdom thinking becomes too narrow.

We can become so enamored with what Christ will do when he returns, that we lose sight of what he's doing right now.

As author John Fischer puts it, there’s more to this petition than just “Twinkle, twinkle coming Christ…take us all to paradise.”

Steve Chalke, a pastor from England, writes these very telling, and true, words:

“So much of the gospel we peddle,” he says, “is all about the future tense, not the present reality. We live with the idea that the gospel’s chief aim is to make us fit for heaven, when in reality Jesus’ message is focused on making us citizens and recipients of the Kingdom of God today…If we think of the gospel only as a means by which people get to heaven, then we are misrepresenting and missing the major thrust of the message of Jesus.”

Let me repeat that last line: “If we think of the gospel only as a means by which people get to heaven, then we are misrepresenting and missing the major thrust of the message of Jesus.”

The message of Jesus.

As we talked about earlier, it can be hard to sum up in a single sentence.

Just what was the message of Jesus?

There are a lot of people who claim to have an answer to that question.

But the only person I trust to answer that question accurately is Jesus himself, and we heard him do just that in our reading from Luke chapter 4.

Here we have Jesus right at the beginning of his ministry. He’s just been through the temptation in the wilderness, then he was off to Nazareth to preach at the synagogue, and then he went to Capernaum where he healed a man possessed by a demon…

And word starts spreading about this amazing man from Galilee.

And some people think he should set up shop.

"Jesus...the word's getting out! Why don't you stay here, and the people will come to you?"

But Jesus says no, then he says this in Luke 4:43:

“I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.”

He's says it right there: Jesus himself sums up his teaching in just seven words.

“I must proclaim the GOOD NEWS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD."

The kingdom of God is the heart of the gospel.

It's the message Jesus himself preaches in his first sermon:

Mark 1:14—"...Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 'The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!'

The kingdom of God is the heart of Christ's message, and notice what Jesus says: he says it has come near.

Some translations put it: "The kingdom of God is at hand."

In other words, it's not something we have to wait to experience.

It is both a future hope...and a present reality.

As a pastor friend of mine likes to say: "The kingdom of God is here but it is not yet fully here."

One day it will be realized in all of its joy and peace and wonder and fulfillment.

But even still, until that day, because of Jesus Christ, the kingdom is something we can taste and experience in this life.

How does that happen?

What does it mean to experience the kingdom of God in the here and now?

To answer that we need to know what the kingdom is.

See we tend to think of kingdoms as nations...geographic and political entities, with defined boundaries and maybe a certain ethnicity associated with it.

That's not what Jesus is talking about when he says "kingdom of God."

For the Hebrew mind, the "kingdom of God" means, "God acting as king."

It's not a place or a people...it's a dynamic experience of God's loving kingship and rule.

And it results in a changed world.

In our Old Testament reading we heard an echo of this in the way the Queen of Sheba describes Solomon’s role as Israel’s king.

She hears Solomon’s wisdom, she sees the kingdom of Israel, for the time being at least, thriving as it aligns itself with God’s law and God’s priorities.

And she says to him, “Praise be to the Lord your God, who has delighted in you and placed you on his throne as king to rule for the Lord your God. Because of the love of your God for Israel and his desire to uphold them forever, he has made you king over them, to maintain justice and righteousness.”

That’s what a kingdom aligned with God’s purposes is all about: God’s love, God’s justice, and God’s righteousness.

Solomon eventually failed as an earthly king, being a mere mortal.

But when Jesus came to earth, those kingdom priorities were reflected perfectly in his life.

(Jesus…God’s righteousness revealed)

Jesus demonstrated the kingdom in what he did. He showed what happens when God's rule and kingship are experienced here on earth.

And just what happens when God’s rule and kingship are experienced here on earth? What happens when God answers our prayer, “Thy kingdom come?”

Lost people are found.

Broken people are healed.

Oppressed people are set free.

Hungry people are fed.

The hurting find comfort.

The despairing find hope.

The wronged find justice.

That's the kingdom!

That's what it looks like.

(PAUSE)

During World War II in France some soldiers brought the body of a dead comrade to a cemetery to have him buried. The priest gently asked whether their friend had been a baptized Catholic. The soldiers did not know. The priest sadly informed them that in that case, he could not permit burial in the church yard.

So with heavy hearts the soldiers dug a grave just outside the cemetery fence. And they laid their comrade to rest. The next day the soldiers came back to add some flowers - only to discover that the grave was nowhere to be found. Bewildered, they were about to leave when the priest came up to speak to them.

“I’m so glad you returned,” he said, “After you left I was troubled by my decision. I saw the dignity with which you buried your friend and realized the anguish my decision had caused you. I couldn’t sleep, so early this morning I rose and moved the boundary fence so that your colleague’s grave is now within the graveyard itself. I hope you can forgive me.”

Friends…that's a picture of the Kingdom of God: it redraws boundaries…it moves the fence in a way that is revolutionary and counter-cultural.

It embraces people others turn away, it refuses to stand idly by as long as a single person knows hunger, loneliness, or need…it incorporates contentment, health, liberation, fulfillment, freedom, and hope.

I love how one preacher put it: he called it the "in-breaking Shalom of God."

Shalom is a great word.

We typically translate it as “peace,” but it’s so much more than that.

Shalom is a picture of life lived in line with God's agenda.

When shalom breaks in…God’s priorities come to life around us.

That’s what we’re praying for with this petition…thy kingdom come.

That the transforming, peace-bringing, life-changing shalom of God would descend on the world today.

And it's available...through Jesus.

The kingdom of God...is at hand.

In his book on the Lord's Prayer, Darrell Johnson writes this:

He says, "It is in light of this 'at-handness' that [Jesus] teaches us to pray 'Your kingdom come.'

Let me say this again.

"It is in light of this 'at-handness' that [Jesus] teaches us to pray 'Your kingdom come.'

In other words...we are invited to pray these words of Jesus that the reality of God's kingdom would be known in our world today.

Think about that for a moment. Let that sink in.

You are invited...I am invited, to pray for this "in-breaking shalom of God" to be known here and now.

That is huge.

That is revolutionary.

Don't settle for less.

Like the great preacher Charles Spurgeon once said:

“A little faith will take you to heaven, but I pray for the kind of faith that will bring heaven to earth.”

Did you catch that?

“A little faith will take you to heaven, but I pray for the kind of faith that will bring heaven to earth.”

Thy kingdom come.

Friends…if we say that prayer...and really mean it, it has huge implications for how we live our lives.

Frank Laubach, an American missionary in the early 20th century, once said:

“The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer most used and least understood. People think they are asking God for something. They are not—they are offering God something. The Lord’s Prayer is not intercession [as much as it is] enlistment.”

The Lord's Prayer is not intercession as much as it is enlistment.

When we say, "Your kingdom come," and we really mean it, we find ourselves invited to demonstrate the kingdom in the same way Jesus did.

By laying down our lives.

By offering them to God, asking that through us the truth of his reign…his loving, benevolent, transforming reign…would be known in the world.

(TRANSITION TO PRAYER)