The Kingdom is at Hand

The central message of Jesus was the arrival of the kingdom of God. The Gospel that Jesus embodied, proclaimed, and demonstrated, was the Gospel of the Kingdom. His arrival was a declaration that a new King was in town. As followers of the King of kings, it makes sense that we would be rooted in a kingdom dynamic. It also is important for us as his church to see how the kingdom God was meant to be the natural cultural and overflow of our lives.

The word “kingdom” occurs 120 times in the gospels (53 in Matthew and 45 in Luke). We are going to walk with Jesus into a rich and practical theology of the kingdom for the next 7 weeks.

Transcript

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Thank you for listening to an audio resource from Stanwich Church, located in Greenwich in Stanford, Connecticut. The vision of Stanwich Church is to know Christ and make him known.

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The gospel lesson for today is from Mark chapter 1, verses 14 to 15. This can be found on page 995 of your Pew Bible. Jesus begins his ministry on earth by announcing the arrival of God's kingdom and calling people to repentance and faith. A reading from Mark chapter 1, beginning with the 14th verse. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. The New Testament lesson for today is from Acts chapter 1, verses 1 to 8. This can be found on page 1080 of your Pew Bible. Despite Jesus' teachings about the kingdom of God, the disciples are still awaiting the political restoration of Israel. Instead, Jesus tells them to wait for the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, who will direct their ministry on earth. A reading from Acts chapter 1, beginning with the first verse. In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. And while staying with them, he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, You heard from me, for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit, not many days from now. So when they'd come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. May God add his blessing to the reading of his holy word.

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Friends that have known me for a while refer to this term of being senior pastor as Chuck 2.0. Chuck 1.0 didn't start out that great. You're new and fresh, and so people like some of those things, but they're trying to get to know you to find out do they really trust you and can you lead? Actually, had a couple of people on the original search committee come to me over that time and say, We're not sure we made the right decision. Now, and they did it in a Connecticut way, they didn't quite use those words, but they got around. And so, with that kind of opposition, I had a young man come up to me about a year in and he said, I know what you're doing. I was like, Okay, what am I doing? He said, You're turning us into kingdom theologians. And I thought, aha. You see, it wasn't on my job description. It wasn't something that they specifically hired me to do, but I'm a kingdom theologian. And if I'm going to apprentice people in the way of Jesus, I need to apprentice them with a kingdom theology. See, you can teach what you know, but you can only reproduce what you are. You can teach what you know, but you can only reproduce what you are. And people would say, well, why are you a kingdom theologian? Because Jesus was a kingdom theologian. It was at the center of everything that he talked about. And so this is important to us because our way of seeing Jesus has to match up with his way of being and what he talked about. And our way of walking out, being Christ followers, is to understand that he has passed a kingdom onto us. And our way of being church should be very much founded on the kingdom of God. If you're paying attention, we live in a time when the church is living with a confused identity. It's because we've lost the kingdom of God. Other theologies have snuck in that have taken preeminence, and we need to come back to this understanding. And so you had the prologue of Acts read for you this morning. It's a great passage. When I was a young pastor, I would read over this quickly to get to the meat. But I could preach on this eight verses, these eight verses, for about two hours now. What Luke does, he sets up what we call the Christ event. All the aspects of who Jesus is and what he does. He comes in incarnation. Luke says it this way: all that Jesus began to do and teach, which is an interesting phrase. We would have expected him to say, all that Jesus did and taught. But what he began to do and teach, he's seeing it going on through the church. He goes on to talk about his suffering, his crucifixion, his resurrection, which moves him from being a martyr to being victor, and then his ascension. It was about 10 years ago I was reading this, and even though I'm a kingdom theologian, I think I jumped over this one phrase because it says this he presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God. Any of you have been with someone who's dying and they were special to you, you'll never forget their last words. Right? They remember Jesus' upper room words, but they know that he's moving on now, or at least maybe have a hint of it. Not sure that Jesus let them know that he was moving on. But they're listening to these things, and Luke summarizes it, it was about the kingdom of God. Now, if you were to boil Jesus' minage down to a few key points, you might be tempted to go with the Great Commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Or you might choose the Great Commission, as you're going, make disciples of all nations. Or you could even choose the uh what do we call it? The um golden rule. Thank you. You were in the first service and you remembered what it was. You can help me all along. I'm starting to get tired. I can see that. But the golden rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But if we want to be true to Jesus, we should talk about what he talked about the most. And it was the kingdom of God. You heard the gospel lesson that was read for us, uh, the beginning of Mark. Mark's gospel is fast moving. Uh, he begins with John the Baptist, has Jesus baptism, Jesus tempted, and then he summarizes what Jesus does in his ministry in two verses. Now, after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. The kingdom of God is at hand. It's near, it's in your midst. There's something new happening here. And there's something else in the text that's very instructional. This word gospel, we tend to think about salvation, but it's the word uh in Greek. It's what someone brought from the battlefield to say, your army has been victorious, your king is on the throne. So you've heard the phrase, how beautiful are the feet that bring good news? Now, all of you know feet are not very beautiful, so there must be something very deeply metaphorical in that. But it's the saying that though the world has been a mess, there's still a king on the throne. And Jesus says things are changing right now. The kingdom is at hand because I have come as your king. Matthew, over 50 times, is going to have the word kingdom given to us. His favorite designation is kingdom of heaven, and there's a reason for that. He's writing primarily to a Jewish audience. And the kingdom of heaven was the dwelling place of God. There is a new dwelling of God in our midst with Jesus coming on the scene. The exact representation so that we can begin to understand God's ways. And so spending time with Jesus is significant in being shaped by him. Luke has the inauguration passage when Jesus is back at his synagogue in Nazareth. He opens the scroll to that passage in Isaiah 61, where the anointed one was coming, and these were going to be the signs of his coming. Brokenness would be turned over in this world. God's kingdom would come and bring healing in the midst of sickness, that God's presence would send the demons away. And this is Jesus' constant message. He's there to announce the kingdom, to heal the sick, and to cast out demons. In fact, Luke chapter 8 gives one of these travel narratives where Jesus is moving along, and it says he's going from village and city with his entourage with him, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom. So, what is this kingdom? It's not a word that we use very often. I was at a conference with pastors, and this young pastor came up to me and he said, Chuck, you're always talking about the kingdom. Can you give me a couple books to read? And then we'll meet in about a month, and you can tell me more about the kingdom. I said, Sure. So I gave him a couple uh titles. He read them. Next time we were together, we sat down and he said, You don't need to tell me anything. He goes, I get it. Kingdom is not about a place, it's about the rule and reign of God. And when I say, Lord, your kingdom come in my prayer all the time, I'm saying, I want your rule in my life so that it affects everything that I do and everything that I am. He had this kind of discovery. We tend to think of a kingdom as a place, but kingdom is really a state of being. Interestingly, the word kingdom, that word dumb at the end, is from the Latin. It points to a condition that you're living in, a situation. So think about it. Uh, boredom. It's a state of being bored, it's not a place. Freedom. It's the state of being free. Uh, someone texted me one after the first service. Oh, I can't find it. I said, Does random work? And she said, No. Stardom. It's a place of being famous and being known. So kingdom is about being in the condition of God ruling everything. And when God rules, brokenness is corrected and purpose is released. Flourishing is given to us in our life. Now, this kingdom message was not original to Jesus. It occurs on the very first page of the Bible. If you remember, God created Adam and Eve in his own image, male and female. He created them and he gave them dominion to rule and to subdue everything on earth. This is God's plan. It's been his plan since the beginning. That's why authority and hierarchy are good. People will say to me, I don't like authority. I don't like bad authority. I don't like evil authority. I don't like power that postures as authority, but I like kingdom authority because that's the way God designed it. And that's the way Jesus came to put it back in its right way. John the Baptist even used this phrase. He says, the kingdom is at hand, even before Jesus. Did you ever realize that Jesus plagiarized? That was better than a little chuckle than that. But the whole process, Jesus is saying there's a new day, there's an invasion, he's now an enemy-occupied territory. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it. He comes to his own, and his own do not receive him. He's about bringing the royal way the way it was originally designed. He's overturning the kingdoms of this world by putting God's kingdom over top of it so that we would experience all of the design that God has for us. In fact, 1 John, John says this Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. So what's he destroying? He's destroying brokenness, he's destroying sickness, he's destroying death, he's destroying everything that mars the glory of God. In fact, when Jesus actually sends demons away, the religious leaders say to him, uh, you're doing this in the power of Beelzebub. Do you remember what Jesus' words were? If I cast out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God is upon you. So Jesus establishes a new way that we get to walk in. So what's the so what this morning? We first need to acknowledge that what was important to Jesus should be important to us. Can I get an amen on that? If Jesus talked about the kingdom quite a bit, we should spend some time diving into the kingdom. That's why we're doing this for the next six weeks. And part of it is to get our allegiance in the right place. Now, let's be honest, most of us don't have kingdom or king in our social imagination. Apart from the reality that we every once in a while watch a royal wedding from England. We don't know much about kingdom. We're democracy people. And kingdom language and ideas is foreign to us. We're not geared towards thinking this way. Now, to be fair to us, the early followers of Jesus who understood empire and kingdom had a hard time getting as well. His disciples who were with him for three years watching him proclaim and demonstrate the kingdom of God and teach them through parables all these aspects of the kingdom of God, and then spend 40 days between resurrection and ascension hearing more about the kingdom of God. They say to him at the end of it, Will you now restore to Israel? They're stuck in a geopolitical mentality, a place. And Jesus was bringing them a spiritual kingdom that doesn't match the power kingdoms of this world that was overturning through service and love and a demonstration of God's better way. See, there's always a danger to want to change things through power and institution, but the way we really change things is through love and servanthood, the Jesus way. And that's called the kingdom of God. It's difficult. We don't have the structures to understand it all the time. I mean, I just think of my own upbringing. I was brought up in individualistic America. Individualism has some good, it's caused people to have initiative. When De Tocqueville came to U.S. from France, he was amazed because the individualism submitted to the community value. That you use your individualism to bless the community. But that has shifted in my years of living on this earth. It's seen an aspect of self-presentation, self-identity declaration. How can I declare myself identity? God gives me identity. And so it's always an uphill climb to understand. Even when I speak of with the kingdom, it sounds like I have an accent. Some of you are trying to go, where are you from? Where does this come from? Because the kingdom will never match up perfectly to any culture. I say that a kingdom is both incarnational and prophetic. Incarnational, it will find its expression. The kingdom looks like this in Greenwich. But the kingdom will always have a foot that's prophetic that will make it sound like it's standing against the culture. Because the kingdom of God will never match up completely to any culture, to any social structure, to any belief system we have. And we're going to find over these next six weeks that all of our allegiances need to go to King Jesus before they go to anything else. And if there's anything driving us as a church or as individuals outside of those things, we're missing the point. Now let's be honest. I'll be honest about myself. I love having a savior. I want to be rescued. I know I can't rescue myself. But I don't necessarily like having a king. I don't like people telling me what to do. Even when they have authority. Is there anybody that can relate to that? But you can't have Jesus as Savior and not have him as King. The early church called him Lord, Curios. The only one that was called Lord in that society was Caesar. They would call out Curios Caesar, he is the Lord. So when the church announces that Jesus is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, it is undercutting everything of the culture of that day. And when we say we are of the kingdom, we are undercutting every other allegiance that we falsely put ourselves under. I think God's calling the church in America to get back to the kingdom. It's fun pastoring a church full of people. Well, you are the church. It's fun being in a building with the church inside it, of people who want to make a difference by being people that are submitted to the king and living for his kingdom. We're going to study, we're going to learn, we're going to use our minds, but I want to remind you that the invitation from Jesus is not simply to get a good theology of the kingdom, but it's to enter into the kingdom and to carry the kingdom wherever we go. Tim Keller has written a book called King's Cross. In it, he walks through the Gospel of Mark and talks about how difficult it is for us to really get our minds around Jesus because we're democracy people. We're used to negotiating. We're used to figuring out how to get our way. And Keller says this when you're in the kingdom, you don't go into the king's throne room and negotiate. You go in and you get on your knees and you lay your sword in front of him and you say, Command me. And then his ways become your ways for his glory. We're about to meet. The Savior at the table. But I encourage you to come when you're coming, maybe not with your knees, but with your heart, to say, Jesus, I don't want you just as my rescuer. I want you as my Lord and King. And I choose today to put myself back on the altar as a living sacrifice to you so that you would live your way through me for the healing of the land and the place that God has placed me. Come, Lord Jesus, make yourself known in this place.

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