The Master Teaching: the Kingdom of God

The sovereignty of God is the primary message of the Old Testament. As Psalm 139 explains, "The Lord sits enthroned in the heavens, his kingdom rules over all." The prophets speak of God over all nations, pronouncing his words not only to Israel, but also to each nation: "He shall judge between nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples." (Isaiah 2:4) God is not just the God of Israel, but the God and creator of the whole world and all peoples. As John Piper says, "When we say God is sovereign, we mean he is powerful and authoritative to the extent of being able to override all other powers and authorities. That’s my effort at a definition." (What is the Sovereignty of God?) The sovereignty of God is absorbed into another proclamation in the New Testament. Jesus's primary message is "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel." (Mark 1:15) Let me untangle this a little. First, the kingdom of God is not a place or a time. It is God's ruling, his action, his influence in all of the heavens and the earth. The message of God's rule so present in the Old Testament is now being announced as the good news in the New Testament with the emphasis that the kingdom is "at hand." Jesus is proclaiming the good news that the kingdom is now accessible in ways it has never been accessible before. Roughly speaking, the sovereignty of God is the kingdom of God. Now let's explore what that means. It is well-known that the kingdom of God is "already, but not yet." God's kingdom has never not existed. He has always had power and authority over all he has made. Jesus was not announcing the kingdom coming from non-existence with his presence.The kingdom is now accessible through Jesus in ways that it was not accessible before. This is how the kingdom is "already." God's sovereignty is also "already" as seen in the Old Testament. But we also know that the kingdom of God is "not yet." God rules over all, but his kingdom is not fully manifested in this present age. We anticipate God's rule and influence to be much greater. We anticipate that it will be absolute in the sense that we will not be able to hide from it or avoid it any longer. I believe this is also the current status of God's sovereignty. God is able to override all other powers and authorities. God has won the war over all powers and authorities. But God's sovereignty is not complete in this age because there are other rulers and authorities that interfere with God and his kingdom. So we are taught to pray, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." We pray this because God's kingdom has not fully come and his will is not fully done on earth as it is in heaven. But even more exciting, we can understand much about God's sovereignty by studying and pondering Jesus's teaching on the kingdom in the parables. God's influence in the kingdom and his rule as our Lord cannot be separated. So, it would generally follow that God's sovereignty is like a treasure in a field and a pearl of great value. But his rule is also like a sower throwing seed on different kinds of soil or a man who has an enemy plant weeds in his field. (Matthew 13) Like the kingdom of God, the sovereignty of God is not in any trouble in this present age. It is always at hand and never at a loss even though there are other rulers and powers set against it, doing what God does not want them to do. I believe that Jesus's teaching on the kingdom of God stretches over all the great themes of the Bible and the deepest concerns of humankind. Not only does the kingdom of God draw in the sovereignty of God, it also draws in justice, grace, and the church. Each of these we see as "already, but not yet." They are fully present in the will and work of God, but thwarted by God's permission according to his good and loving judgment. We see perfect justice in Jesus and in the kingdom of God. We see complete grace as well. We also experience some of the called-out saints of the church. When some people talk about justice, they are really looking to the kingdom of God. The same with grace and the church. So the parables of the kingdom of God have much to teach us in all these areas. Jesus teaching on the kingdom of God also shows us how the aspirations of humankind can fall short of what God is doing now. The "already, not yet" aspect of each of these important areas teach us that God wants to be with us more than over us. God wants to be our friend more than to be fair. God wants us to grow in grace more than get his grace. God wants our life to be church more than for church to be our life. All of these are evident in the present reality of the kingdom of God and are expressed in these different areas as well. It is not surprising that the Master teacher would know this and give us what we need to navigate these ideas with grace and truth.

Renovare Essentials

Looking back over two years in the Renovare (reh-no-VAHR-eh) Spiritual Institute, I have changed my mind about several things in my walk with Jesus.  The new thoughts and ideas were only the beginning, but still an important beginning.  The best part of my learning was the discovery that these ideas are not new at all, but pillars of of thought and experience that reach back hundreds of years.  Renovare reintroduced me to these new/old ideas and showed me how they worked in real life.

The Renovare Essentials Conference overviews some of these ideas about Christian spiritual formation.  Dawn and I attended one of these conferences a couple of years ago.  We wanted to understand Renovare's goals and foundations better before investing ourselves into the Spiritual Institute as well as starting this education together as much as possible.  We drove to Phoenix to spend some time in learning, praying, and talking about all this calling from God.

The most pronounced theme of the Essentials conference was God's grace.  Dawn and I found this relieving.  Renovare has a lot of material about spiritual "disciplines" and we both are aware of the tendency to take these exercises and make them into competitions and divisions in churches, so grace was a great place to start.

What I needed to learn is that God's grace is not so much about fixing my past or securing my future as living in the present.  The forgiveness of my sins is essential, but it is not everything.  The open door  to heaven is my hope, but it is not all that there is.  God's grace is provision for my life, rather than for my death.  If God's grace is God acting in my life, it is not an "over-and-done" thing as much as the living hand of a living God.  The question in my life has moved from "How can I or anyone else get saved by grace?" to "How can I or anyone else live by God's grace from moment to moment?"

Dallas Willard says,"God's grace is opposed to earning, not opposed to effort."  This expresses another idea I learned at the Essentials Conference.  The proper response of my will to God's grace is more about training that trying.  Because of God's mercy, he is not opposed to my trying, but also because of his mercy he tells me that trying will not accomplish what he wants in my life.  Jesus makes this plain when he speaks about following him: "Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me."  (Matthew 10:38)  The grace of Jesus calls for great effort.  The point of this grace is Christ-likeness.

In areas of importance, training is required.  People do not speak of medical trying, but medical training.  The same is true for the military, musical performance, and pastoral work.  People do not trust someone who has merely tried the field, but someone who has trained in the field.  The orientation of the will is different when a person trains for something as opposed to when they try something.  Because of the importance of following Jesus, discipleship requires the intention of training and not merely trying.

With grace as the motivation and hope and with training as my intention, I found myself asking about the actual means of Christian spiritual formation.  This is where spiritual exercises enter.  The means of producing spiritual change in my life is very rarely direct.  I cannot become humble, patient, or joyful by just practicing being humble, patient, of joyful.  This is the fast track to burnout and frustration.  Instead of focusing on the direct practice of being joyful, I learned that I needed to indirectly exercise in order to obtain joy or patience or humility.

Lifting weights is an example of and indirect exercise.  Most people do not lift weights to get better at lifting weights, but in order to enhance their ability elsewhere.  Exercise indirectly prepares a person for practice.  Without adequate strength poor performance and injury result.  Similarly, solitude, silence, fasting, and prayer can be exercise that prepare me for practicing a life with God.  

Without spiritual exercise, spiritual practice is powered by my own abilities and costs me dearly.  I cannot make myself grow, but I can be prepared for the spiritual growth and change that God's grace brings.  Spiritual exercises are the means of effort that work God's grace into my life and train me for my work with God in my life.

For Christian spiritual formation, God's action in my life - his grace - is the most essential.  This grace, by its very nature, calls out a response beyond trying: training.  In this training, spiritual exercises are a primary means by which the Spirit forms me into Christ-likeness.  The Renovare Essentials Conference will examine and teach these ideas and the ways to work them into everyday human life.

The Gift Is Not Like the Trespass

Romans 5: How Faith, Hope, and Love Relate to Being Good


In answer to the question "Who is well-off?," Paul answers in chapter 3, "The one who is justified freely by God's grace." (v.24)  This is in direct contrast to the one who seeks to justify himself and seeks to obtain goodness on his own.  Such a blessedness from God frees me from boasting and worrying about how I am doing compared with others before God.  Instead I am free to be good because it is a gift that God gives by the blood of Jesus, which reconciles me to God.  That is, it places me before him in the relationship as son; it brings me into the home of the Trinity as family.  I am justified and made right by the work and invitation of Jesus.

In chapter 4, Paul explains that any boasting based on being a Jew is excluded because Abraham is the father of all who trust is God, whether Jew or Gentile.  Everyone is blessed through Abraham's trust in God.  His faith does not belong to the covenant of circumcision, but precedes and transcends it.  Circumcision comes from faith; faith does not come from circumcision.  Who is well-off?  Who is good?  Anyone who will trust in God and embrace the door he has opened into his home through Jesus.

Now Paul explains how I am justified or made good.  He moves into the question "Who is good?"  Paul describes goodness with three words: faith, hope, and love.  Faith gives me access to God's grace.  By trusting him, I obtain his favor and his ability to do what I cannot do on my own.  Such trusting brings hope.  I find that I am confident about my present and future life because I trust in God and his grants his grace.  Even suffering brings hope because through trusting God in suffering, I find perseverance and then a real change in my character.

I have experienced this change in an experiment in which I explored the power of the gospel.  Is it really enough?  Can it really satisfy my deepest longings and set me free from my most addicting habits and sins?  To this I found it to be remarkably able.  I let go of the remedies in which I had been seeking and trying to fix myself and manage my own goodness.  I surrendered to God and did what he asked and found that even though it seemed at first "the long way around," he addressed the root of my problem - my trust and love of him - and changed my character - the center of my own personal "kingdom" - into something else.  Such inward and outward change has brought me hope, so that I seek to grow daily into the likeness of Christ.

Such hope can only disappoint me if I am not continually bathed in love.  Faith (trust) is fleeting if I do not know who I trust in and what he is like.  Hope disappoints me if I the reason for my confidence is not based in the trust of a loving God.  Without love, changes in character quickly become a source of empty self-righteousness and boasting, which lead to bitterness, envy, and death.  Only love keeps hope from becoming senseless positivism.

Paul explains the great love of God: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (v.8)  God does all the work before there is any promise of our accepting and enjoying it.  The feast is laid out before he knows if we will come at all.  Actually, it is laid out as we actively rebel and attack him.  He plans for our arrival home even as we are abandoning him for our own desires and interests.  This is the love that God has.  When we were his enemies, he already had the treaty written out and waiting for our commitment.

To understand God's love, I must also understand myself.  To minimize or excuse my own rebellion against God, my own lack of concern, my own desire to have my own way, my own rejection of his love is to misunderstand how much God loves me and empty the cross of all its power.  Without sin, the cross is superfluous, even foolishness.  If I am "not that bad," then God is not that smart, or even enjoys cruelty for the sake of cruelty.  I must embrace my origin as sinner and never let that go in order to see God's love for what it is.

So Paul explains simply that from the time of Adam, "sin was in the world."  His evidence for this is that even though people "did not sin by breaking a command" before Moses, "death reigned."  The outcome of sin is death, so even without a command to break, the outcome of sin was still obvious among all people - death.

God's remedy is not a simple reversal of the problem.  "The gift is not like the trespass." (v.15)  I do not have to "make up" for each and every sin that I have made in the pattern of my predecessor Adam.  His one sin is the father of all sin - a lack of faith.  All sin is not trusting or loving God.  I do not have to climb back up out of the pit I have dug through my lack of trust and separation from God one step at a time.  Instead, "the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification."  (v.16)  I am made into a son by Christ's one act of grace rather than having to "make up" for all my acts of disobedience and mistrust.

In this way, the gift is like the trespass.  Adam's sin is the model and picture and precursor to all sin.  It is faithlessness, no more and no less.  Christ's work is the work of ultimate faith.  It is the complete opposite to Adam's betrayal.  "Just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous."  (v.19)

What a picture of God's grace!  Who is good?  The one who trusts in God's love, receives God's love in his own heart, and finds hope in the changes that love brings to his life.  Such goodness is not earned by a simple reversal of doing good for all the bad I have done.  Instead, it is embraced by trusting that Jesus' work on the cross has indeed made me good enough to bring home to God and live in his presence and be changed completely from the inside out.

Lord, I am so grateful that your gift is not like the road I have taken away from you.  You have brought me back to you with one sweep of your mighty, loving arms through Jesus obedience to the cross.  The way is before me and there is much work to do, but none of it will bring me home to you.  I am already there, already in your presence daily because of Jesus.  My work will only make me more at home with you, more like Jesus.  That is what it is all for.  My praise to you!  You have made an everlasting way to you that I can walk for all eternity even though I started out as your enemy.  Amen.

Spiritual Exercises as Part of Jesus' Yoke of Grace

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

In my last post, I wrote about the means that Jesus gives so that people might come to know God.  Certainly, these means provide for a great beginning to knowing God, but they are also the places where friendship with God can really take root.


Strangely, I hesitated to bring in prayer as one of those means.  One reason is that I do not consider myself a really great pray-er.  I do not find myself asking for a lot.  I kind of have to make myself ask.  I have been given much, but I think that more of that comes from an ingrained sense of self-sufficiency that makes the humility of asking foreign to me.  I am working on it.

Another reason for not involving prayer in the introduction to knowing God is that prayer is so easily misconstrued for other things.  Although scriptural meditation and contemplation have their places in the realm of prayer, prayer is most fundamentally asking.  Prayer without request is not Christian prayer.  Certainly asking can be simply directed toward the fulfillment of my desires, but it also encompasses interceding and confessing.  The point is that it is directed to God and not merely to a state of mind.  The many fashions and misunderstandings of prayer make it a minefield when seeking God at first.  Not everything "spiritual" is good.

Also, prayer is so common and subjective that it is difficult to hear God initially amid the many other inner voices and feelings.  My prayer needs a lot of help from the outside.  I need the Bible, the church, and the creation in order to find and hear God.  Without them, I would find prayer to be very confusing and disheartening.

That being said, without prayer, the Bible, the church, and the creation are extremely limited in their own ability to present the knowledge of God.  They may present many facts and even truth, but without prayer, they are a table set without a feast.  Jesus sets the table that I might be nourished and filled, yes.  Even more, though, he sets the table that I might be filled with the company of God himself.  Such a feast is designed to be shared, not merely hoarded or admired.

This sharing of the feast is what spiritual exercises are about.  They are the ways in which each person can partake of the means that Jesus has provided for our friendship with himself and the Father.  In essence each spiritual exercise is one of prayer and one of practice.

Spiritual exercises are all prayer in that they are yearning for God.  Without the yearning and asking for God and his good gifts, spiritual exercises are useless and possibly harmful.  Whatever is done is done for the sake of knowing God and Jesus, whom he sent.  This is the fundamental reason for Christian spiritual exercises.

The "classic" exercises of solitude, silence, fasting, study, worship, etc. are the tried and true methods with thousands of years of practice behind them.  They are the means for feasting with God.  Each can be used to serve other purposes which can widely be understood as looking good or feeling good.  These are covered in the Bible by Jesus when he says, "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness to be seen by men.  If you do you will have no reward from your Father in heaven."  (Matthew 6:1)  James covers the other aspect of incorrect motives by saying, "You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures."  (James 4:2-3)

This does not mean that spiritual exercises are all drudgery.  They are feasting with God and should be understood that way.  On the way, a person may find that they "look good" or "feel good," but these are not the primary motives.  When they take the place of seeking and knowing God and his goodness, then they become diversions and shows for other people.  Jesus' advice on prayer can be used with spiritual exercise in general: "Go into your room and close the door and pray to your Father who is unseen.  Then your Father, who sees what is unseen, will reward you."  and "Do not keep babbling on like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.  Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him."  Talking about spiritual exercises is dangerous if it does not lead to practicing them.  Doing spiritual exercises for the sake of reporting to them instead of seeking God is dangerous.  What is exciting is that God rewards those who seek him and he knows my needs deeply and intimately, so that I so not need to try to secure rewards and pleasures from other people or my own impulsive desires.

So if I practice silence, it is with the hope and expectation that God will be with me.  If I study the Bible or creation, it is with the hope that I will hear God and know him more fully.  If I serve other people, it is with the goal of them seeing what I do and praising God for it.  The only thing that enables me to get through the "dry" times is the goal of seeking the best for God in each circumstance (that would be his "glory").  If I slip into seeking pleasure or others appreciation, then spiritual exercises quickly fade.

Most importantly, prayer depends on God.  The Holy Spirit is who enables all actions toward God.  The "burden" of seeking God and knowing him is too much for any person to carry on their own.  Asking God through prayer for his help makes the burden "easy and light" because he is at the other end doing most of the lifting.  My task is small in term of lifting the yoke, but necessary in term of shouldering the yoke and putting in my own effort.  The yoke of spiritual exercise is "easy and light" because it is performed in and through prayer, but spiritual exercises are a yoke because they take genuine effort.

This effort component to spiritual exercise is practice.  The most dangerous kinds of "spiritual exercises" are ones that remain mere topics of conversation or interest.  It is tempting to remain a spectator in the sport of spiritual exercises.  People can talk about them, study them, and even admire them, but without practice they will not really be spiritual exercises, but only spiritual wall hangings in a person's life.

It is necessary to talk about them and think through them, but only as a precursor to doing them.  The talk and thoughts of a person intending on making a trip around the world is different from a person who just talks about going around the world.  The first one plans while the second one merely wishes or pretends.  Intention takes the vision of spiritual exercise and turns it into action.

Another part of practice is starting small.  While inaction is on the major causes for failure in the practice of spiritual exercise, not far behind is the tendency to do something "big."  It is not enough to be still five minutes in a day, I must try to spend eight hours in silence.  It is not enough to study and memorize Psalm 23, I must outline the whole book of Psalms.  Usually, this tendency to do "great" things stems from more pride than devotion.  This is not to say that moving toward eight hours of silence is not good, but it takes practice to do this successfully and usually, starting with what a person can do rather than what they think they should do.

My own experience in memorizing scripture demonstrates this.  When I started my kids on the task of memorizing Bible passages, I did not start with Romans 8 or the Sermon on the Mount.  We started with Psalm 23.  Just like when I first started to memorize scripture recently, I found one of my main difficulties was knowing that I could and that the effort was good.  I had been not merely saved by grace, but paralyzed by it, thinking that all effort was seeking to earn God's favor.  This came from a misunderstanding about spiritual exercises being merely works of the flesh or natural human ability.  I found that what made them works of the flesh was not that they were work, but when they were merely of the flesh.  Depending solely on my own abilities and talents when performing such work meant that I was not doing them in prayer but by sheer "willpower" or pride nor was I practicing them as much as performing them.

I return to Jesus picture of the yoke that is easy and the burden that is light.  Strangely enough, the yoke of spiritual exercises is best taken up by those who are "weary and heavy laden," more than those who sense and trust their own power and ability to accomplish things.  To practice them, I must first come to rest and stop doing what I have been doing to better myself and run my life.  Jesus begs the weary to come to him and find rest.  Spiritual exercises are all about that rest.  The passive part of them is releasing the results to Jesus, who carries most of the burden.  Ironically the release takes real effort.  Who would have thought that letting go could be so hard?  Yet this is the rest that Jesus invites me into that involves a yoke and real effort.

Rest is trust.  Rest is humility.  Rest is effort in the right direction for the right things.  Fortunately, rest is possible because God is always at work.  The heart of rest is prayer for grace, asking God to do what I cannot do.  Such rest only comes through practice, since even grace freely given must be received.  In this way when Jesus calls me to rest, he calls me to pray to him and practice life with him under his yoke of grace.

Wow.  I never thought that the yoke Jesus was talking about was grace, but now I see it clearly.  It is the favor of God that I might work with Jesus, learning to be gentle and lowly of heart through practice.    Also, it is taking on his burdens and resting from my own.  Finally, it is continually relying on and asking for the favor of his strength to do what I cannot, bear the yoke.  And so grace is the easy yoke of Jesus: resting from my work, practicing his work, and praying for his continual lift in the process.

Lord, please let me take this yoke and leave my own behind.  Let me shoulder your grace, which is your rest, your work, and your salvation for my hungry soul.  When I say, "Give me your grace" or "Have mercy on me," help me to remember taking on this yoke that you offer to the weary and heavy-laden.  That is what I am, so this is what I so desperately need.  Amen.