Embracing the Father's Kingdom.
When we pray, “Your kingdom come,” we pray for the capacity to be 'a kingdom echo.'
Movies were a massive part of my life growing up.
There was little I loved more than visiting the library with my mom and being given the opportunity to check out the same VHS tapes over and over again. As a result, I still get excited walking into the public library, and not only because I love books. It turns out that the public library hasn’t really innovated as an industry, so they still look and smell the same. To this day, the moment those doors slide open, I’ve overwhelmed by the sights and smells of my childhood and I’m taken back to memories of afternoons spent with the stories I loved.
As I got a little older, we had a neighbor across the street that had a huge movie collection. They even had a binder with each tape assigned a correlating number. They gave me full permission to come over, grab the binder, and borrow any movie I wanted.
It was heaven.
Star Wars. Indiana Jones. Back To The Future.
These movies helped raise me. I feel like I have an almost personal relationship with these characters, so much so that at times I emulated them.
This was especially true, when in the later years of elementary school I found my way to The Karate Kid and the Rocky franchises. Out of the gate, I was hooked. I memorized every line. I mimicked the training montages. I wanted to be Daniel LaRusso and Rocky Balboa.
I don’t think I’m entirely unique in this. While it may not always be movie characters, we’re all prone to emulate those we admire.
I bring all this up because I think there is a connection in this with Jesus’ second petition in the Lord’s Prayer.
In Matthew 6:10 He prays
“Your kingdom coming. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Remember, we’re bringing three questions to each of these petitions: What do these words say about God? What do these words say about us? How might we more faithfully pray like this?
What do these words say about God?
To summarize it in a sentence, here's how I would put it:
Through His prayer, Jesus teaches us that the Father is a heavenly king with a perfect kingdom.
Understand, this concept would have been more familiar to Jesus' Jewish listeners in the first century, compared to the idea of God as an intimate Father, which we discussed last week. At that point in history, the Jewish people had been eagerly anticipating the arrival of their Messiah King for hundreds of years, who would establish his promised kingdom. However, there was a significant dissonance between their expectations and God's actual plan. Therefore, many individuals in this culture were eagerly awaiting a military Messiah. This is one of the key reasons why the crowd in John's Gospel, at one point, attempted to make Jesus their king by force. They were anticipating a warrior king who would liberate them from the oppressive rule of Rome, granting them freedom.
If you think about it, there were basically waiting for Thor.
If you haven't seen Thor: The Dark World, it opens with the Asgardians engaged in a battle that is not going well for them. Right as things start to look most bleak, the rainbow bridge known as Bifrost appears, and Mjolnir, Thor's hammer, comes flying out. Then, Thor himself emerges in all his majestic glory, looking oddly similar to the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus often portrayed in American churches these days. Then, within mere moments, he, and he alone, puts an end to this entire battle with little to no effort.
In essence, this is the type of military warrior messiah for which the Jewish people were waiting. Someone who would appear like a hero, lead them into battle, and throw off the chains of the Roman government. While they may have misunderstood the nature of how God was going to establish his kingdom on earth, they were right to see God as a king with a kingdom. Therefore, the important thing for us to realize and understand is that Jesus said we should beg the Father to bring his kingdom and his will on this earth.
Now, I don't know about you, but I grew up a faith tradition that consistently emphasized God's kingdom as a place called heaven, that we would eventually leave earth in order to inhabit. However, there was rarely anything specific about heaven conveyed, other than the notion that we would sing a lot and not be sad anymore. Don't get me wrong, I like to sing and dislike being sad, so there are aspects of that vision that are truly beautiful.
But as I got older and paid closer attention to the Scriptures, I began to see two problems with this vision I'd been handed since youth. The first was that I didn't find it to be a biblical depiction of God's eternal kingdom. The Bible's vision of eternity isn't one of us all becoming naked baby angels who play harps in the clouds all day. The vision that John portrays in Revelation 21 is of God remaking this earth—a new creation, a new earth that is free from all of the grief, pain, and death that poisoned His first creation.
Now, the second problem was the positioning of the kingdom of God as something to which we escape. When the kingdom of God is only something to which we escape, we miss the opportunity to prayerfully expand the kingdom of God in the here and now. More on that in a minute.
But for now, remember that this petition teaches us that God is a heavenly king who rules over a perfect kingdom.
What do these words say about us?
In short, they remind us that we are subject to God's caring reign. Now, I think that this is harder for us to embrace functionally because of the culture in which we live. In our culture, we are just simply not accustomed to being subject to anyone. In fact, we are oftentimes conditioned to believe that we should be the kings and the queens of our own little kingdoms. No one really has any business telling us what we should or should not do, even God.
Rather than live surrendered to a God who often doesn't seem to see things or do things the way that we would prefer, we just simply fashion a God in our own image. But as the late Tim Keller once said, 'If your God never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.' If we are going to truly embody this prayer, we have to learn to see ourselves as subject, meaning we are invited to willfully live under God's caring reign. In short, we belong to Him.
This is tremendous news because He is a caring and compassionate King, unlike so much of the broken, poisonous, awful authority we experience in our daily lives. We see the brokenness of narcissistic political leaders. We've had spiritual leaders in our lives that have been toxic, damaging, and abusive. Some of us had parents that did the same, so this trauma started at birth. As a result, the notion of being subject to anyone or anything is understandably scary to us. This again is why it's important that we remember the character and nature of the God who is our King. He is good. He is kind. He is caring. He is compassionate. Furthermore, God only ever wants our best. It's critical that we keep all this in mind when it comes to His commands that are contained in Scripture.
Sometimes we forget this, and as a result, we resist the commands of Scripture. We end up viewing the Bible as some sort of divine suggestion box from God. The suggestion box is less common today, but there was a time when almost every business seemed to have a literal box somewhere on the premises, inviting people to write down and deposit suggestions on how they could do better. Here’s the thing: The business was in no way obligated to respond to them; they were simply suggestions. Oftentimes, that's how we're prone to view the Scriptures. It's like God has written down some suggestions for how we can be better, and we are free to take what we want and ignore the rest.
But the problem with that is that God doesn't intend the Scriptures as open-handed suggestions in our lives. They are His caring commands. God created you and me, and as our Designer, He created a way in which we flourish. When we ignore His way, we simply don't.
The commands of God in Scripture are about our care, not about control. God isn't some petulant puppeteer pulling the strings in our lives according to His random whims. He is for us. He actually wants us to flourish, longing for our peace and joy, so much so that Jesus laid down His own life to make that possible for us. When the Bible talks about sin, it is describing rebellion against God's care for us. Rebellion against God is rebellion against our own good. So, in that sense, sin is self-harm. Sin is choosing suffering, pain, confusion, and hurt.
Because the Father is a heavenly King with a perfect kingdom, we are subject to His caring reign. And that brings us to the third and final question.
How might we more faithfully pray like this?
When we pray, “Your kingdom come,” we pray for the capacity to be what I want to call 'a kingdom echo.' Just like I used to emulate Daniel LaRusso's 'crane kick' (which, by the way, 'If do right, still everyone can defend'), we're asking God to help us emulate Him and His kingdom. In his book on the kingdom of God, Pastor Jeremy Treat summarizes God's kingdom like this:
“God's reign through God's people over God's place.”
So, in this sense, the kingdom is present in every single place that God reigns. Jesus' kingdom has already come, even though we still wait for the full consummation of it. We don't yet live in the New Earth. We still live in the old, and as a result of that, a huge sum of what happens inside of us and a huge sum of what happens in this world is in active rebellion against God's caring reign.
So what does it mean to be 'a kingdom echo’?
I'm assuming we all know what an echo is. An echo is a sound reflection that occurs when sound waves bounce off a surface and then return to the listener. It creates a repetition of the original sound, but often with a slight delay due to the distance between the source and the reflecting surface. So, if you stand in a cave and you shout, the sound wave bounces off the walls, and then you hear it reflected back. That's a bit like what we're after in this prayer.
When we pray, 'Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,' we aren't asking God to whisk us away to another place. We aren't even just asking God to usher in a new creation. We're asking God to reign right now, right here, in and through us. As we bring our lives into alignment with His way, by His grace, with the help of His Spirit, we echo back His kingdom. We are a reflection of His reign on this earth.
When we pray, 'Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,' we're begging God to bring His heavenly best to our earthly experience. Not just at some point in the future, but right now.
EXPERIENTIAL
And so here's the question that I want to invite you to bring to the Holy Spirit this week:
Where is the Father inviting me to further conform to His will?
Maybe there is an attitude or a behavior in your life that you know is clearly out of step with God's will for you. Maybe you have done something to cause a rupture in a relationship that He wants to help you actually repair. Maybe there's something good and beautiful that He's inviting you to do or to create this week. Maybe there's a specific way that He is inviting you to be with Him. Maybe there's a way that He wants to use you to care for the world or to care for the people around you.
Let's seize the grace held out to each of us and seek to emulate and embody our heavenly King and His perfect kingdom together.
An easy way to engage…
What is one way God might be inviting you to echo His kingdom this week?
My mom and I have had some recent strife between us. I was not kind or compassionate toward her in her struggles and grief, and I hurt her when I intended to draw her closer. We have had an opportunity to hear one another and I have repented to her and asked for her forgiveness. Each time we talk I feel it lying between us. It is my deepest desire that this rift would be truly mended. God has used this example to open my eyes to so much of what has been missing in too many of my relationships, and I want to be obedient to anything He would call me to or ask. 💔