Your Kingdom Come

When the love of God moves toward you, it's the kind of love that produces an action and response.

Prayer is an invitation to think about the things that occupy the heart of God, to care about what He cares about, and to move with God on His mission. It's an invitation to life and a life well lived. The Lord's prayer is familiar to many of us, but it's like a key to a home that we haven't taken the time to move into. Prayer is the key to life. He is being pulled up into His world.

The more time we spend in His Presence the more we'll see His character.

We see in God, our Father, our rescuer, yet God is not tame. Be ready, you're with a lion! Proximity to our God in Heaven will greatly change your priorities.

In Matthew, Kingdom is paired with repentance. It teaches us that a Kingdom is coming. Its arrival changes everything.

How do we better understand "Your Kingdom Come"? We first must ask two essential questions:

1) What is the Kingdom?

• A Kingdom is a place in time, inhabited by a certain people, and ruled by a certain king. The Kingdom takes on the nature of the king.
• "God, you come and be the ruler right now." We are saying when we pray, "Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven." We are asking God to have his perfect will in our midst, perfect peace. We can't even conceive how good that is. We live in a broken world and we are a mess, but we know what is coming and have hope. As Christians, this is our message: we need Jesus to invade this place, we need the Kingdom to come, and we need salvation. In the gospels, the good news of the Kingdom was Jesus's main message. He was saying that something Heavenly was at hand, it would change everything, and His Presence marks the inauguration of it.

2) When is it coming?

• It's referenced as both past, present, and future. We live in the already/not yet.
• In Matthew 4, Satan tries to tempt Jesus. In his last attempt, he offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world if He would worship him. How can the enemy offer kingdoms of the world? Because, according to Scripture, they're currently under his dominion. He is called the ruler of this age. That doesn't mean that God is not ultimately in control or has no power over the enemy, it just means the enemy has a longer leash at the moment. Jesus refuses to worship him and the first thing He does is say that the Kingdom is at hand, something new has arrived. What Jesus said was revolutionary.
• When we pray, "Your Kingdom come, Your will be done", we are saying His Kingdom is here, right now, but we are also asking for more because we know more is coming.

When Jesus explained what the Kingdom is like in Matthew 13:1-32, He gave three parables.

1) The Soil: you have to RECEIVE the seed for it to bear fruit.

2) The Wheat and Weeds: there's the work of the enemy and the work of God, and we live in the in-between. LIGHT INVADES THE DARKNESS.

3) The Mustard Seed: the seed of the Kingdom starts small, but it grows and LIFE BURSTS FORTH.