LET YOUR KINGDOM COME!
(The
Lord’s Prayer- Part II) Matthew 6:5-13
I
want to start our time with a quote from someone who had known a thing or two
about prayer. Edward McKendree Bounds better known as E.M Bounds (1835-1913)
was described as a slender man, only five feet five inches tall. He was born on
the American frontier, had little formal schooling to speak of, lived through
and served in a war that would scar a nation for generations, owned no property
or wealth, held no church office, and died in relative obscurity. Yet he lived
a powerful life of Prayer. Here is a quote from “The Power of Prayer.”
“To
pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be calmness,
time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the littlest and meanest
of things. True praying has the largest results for good; and poor praying, the
least. We must learn anew the worth of prayer, enter anew the school of prayer.
There is nothing which it takes more time to learn.”[1]
No
doubt, E.M Bound has spent a lot of time in the school of prayer taught by our
Lord Jesus Christ himself. When I read books on prayer I am personally
challenged about my own personal prayer life. Last week we began to unpack a
well-known prayer called the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer has six petitions,
three directed towards God and three towards the needs of human beings. We
looked at the first of the three that targeted towards God.
We
learned that God is our heavenly father who is a Holy God and His name is to be
regarded Holy by all people. Today, we will look at the second petition, LET YOUR KINGDOM COME! What does it mean to pray, “Let your Kingdom Come? What
would that look like when that prayer is answered? These lead us to other
broader question What is the Kingdom of God? When will it come? What must I do
to get into the Kingdom of God?
I.
WHAT IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD?
For
a moment I want us to look at the redemptive plan of God which began with the
call of Abraham in Genesis 12. This call included, that God would bless Abraham
in turn Abraham would be a blessing to all nations. Out of Abraham God formed a nation called
Israel, with the intentions of being their King and leading them by his laws.
Unfortunately, those intentions were briefly disrupted when Israel rejected
God’s rulership and disobeyed his laws.
In
their rebellion at one point they came to prophet Samuel and demanded him to
give them a king. They said to him, “You are old, and
your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us,
such as all the other nations have.” But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this
displeased Samuel; so, he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told
him: “Listen to all that
the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they
have rejected me as their king.” I Samuel 8:5-7. One wonders, how could they so
easily deviate and forget God after seeing all the powerful things that God did
for them? How could they reject God who had won all their battles by his mighty
hand? Yet history tells us that the Israel reject God as their King, and instead
they choose a tall, handsome man named Saul as their king.
Do
we see this phenomenon playing out even today? Saul became a prototype of the
selection of human leadership. Many in the world today instead of entrusting
their lives to God to save and to lead, they look to human leaders. Instead of
obeying God’s laws, they run after man made ideologies and philosophies. Coming
back to our question.
The
Kingdom of God is where God dwells with his people. It is the reign of God that
he brings about through Jesus Christ. It is the establishment of God’s rule in
the hearts and lives of his people. It is defeating the forces of evil. It is
saving people from the power of sin. It is the creation of new heaven and earth
where righteousness, love joy and peace dwells forever.
So,
what, why should I bother to know about the Kingdom of God, you wonder? It should matter to us because it mattered to
Jesus and his disciples. The message of the Kingdom of God was central in Jesus’
teachings. The first message that Jesus ever preached was in Matthew 3:2, “Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Throughout his ministry he taught
many things about the Kingdom of God through parables and real-life stories.
Even
after his resurrection he spoke about the Kingdom for forty days. (Acts 1:3-4)
He commanded his disciples to take the message of the Kingdom to the four
corners of the earth. If the Kingdom of God was of that much importance to
Jesus and his disciples, don’t you think it should be important to us as well? How has your understanding been of God’s Kingdom?
II
THE NATURE OF GOD’S KINGDOM
Let
me share a familiar scripture which is often read only during Christmas. Isaiah
9: 6-7, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his
shoulder, and his
name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince
of Peace. Of
the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold
it with justice
and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.”
What can we learn from this scripture? First,
God is going to establish his kingdom through his son. Second, His son will be
called wonderful counselor, mighty God, Everlasting father and prince of Peace.
Third, His government (kingdom) of peace will endure forever. Fourth, in his
kingdom there will be justice and righteousness for evermore. When we follow
through Israel’s rich history we see one expectation coming through over and
over again that was the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth. Daniel interpreted
the dream of the king Nebuchadnezzar laying a time line for God’s kingdom to be
realized.
The
interpretation goes like this: There will be the rise and fall of four
kingdoms, namely Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. After that God will
establish his Kingdom that will endure forever. Daniel 2:44, “And in the days
of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be
destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in
pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand
forever.”
The
Jewish people have been expecting God’s Kingdom to come for centuries. Jesus
echoed the same sentiments when he taught his disciples to pray saying, “Let
your Kingdom Come.” This brings us other questions: When will it come, and what
must I do to get in?
III
LET YOUR KINGDOM COME
When
did the Kingdom of God begin on the earth? It was when Jesus was born, the
Kingdom of God has made its entry. Listen to this angelic pronouncement of
Jesus’ birth to Mary. Luke 1:30-35, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found
favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your
womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will
be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord
God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his
kingdom there will be no end.”
N.T.
Wright in his book, How God became King notes, “We find in the very earliest Christian documents that
all of these pointed to a strange new reality: that in Jesus, Israel’s God had
become present, had become human, had come to live in the midst of his people,
to set up his kingdom, to take upon himself the full horror of their plight,
and to bring about his long-awaited new world.” Through his birth, work, death
and resurrection Jesus has laid a foundation for his eternal Kingdom. Then you
may wonder, where is it, why can’t I see it? Jesus answered to those wondering Pharisees
who had asked the same questions.
Luke 17:20-21, “Being asked by the Pharisees when the
kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming
in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or
‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God
is in the midst of you.” When Jesus said, the Kingdom of God is in the
midst of you, what was he referring to? He was saying in a fact that the
kingdom of God is not yet has been made visible so that you can say look here
it is or there it is, but it is hidden in the hearts of his followers and
believers.
Even
today the Kingdom of God is not seen in that physical sense, but it is very
much present in the Church of which Jesus said, later on in Matthew 16:18-19, “I
will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I
will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth
shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in
heaven.” As we read this scripture we come to realize that the Kingdom of God
in one sense is the Church that Jesus began to build through his death and
resurrection.
When
I say the church, I am not talking about a particular denomination or a
building, but I am talking about the universal church which is made up of
believers from all walks of life from all over the world. Has the Kingdom of
God already come, yes in one sense, it is right here in our hearts, but in another
sense in its finality is not yet come, that’s why we are taught to pray, “Let
your Kingdom Come.” We want to
see God’s Kingdom coming into every heart everywhere.
God’s
Kingdom is open for all people, but only those who repent of their sins and accept
Jesus Christ as their savior will enter. Jesus taught us to pray Let your
Kingdom come, it is not an excuse for us to be passive but for us to be
actively participate in seeing His Kingdom come into this world. How do we do
that? By loving and worshipping our awesome king Jesus. By living out the kingdom
principles of righteousness and justice in our day to day world. So, we pray,
“Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name, let your kingdom come.” Amen!
