We’ve been invited to participate in the Kingdom of God—right here, right now. This isn’t one of those “mark your calendar” invitations for a future date.
There is a default kingdom we have been experiencing and functioning in for our entire lives… the kingdom of the world. It has its perspectives, its attitudes, its practices, its methods – it’s ways. Because we have spent our lives deep inside the kingdom of the world, its ways come naturally to us.
Richard Rohr, in his book Breathing Underwater, said, “Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often have been given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else—and often more so, I’m afraid.”
The drift towards default – the kingdom of the world and its ways – is more widespread in American Christianity than we realize. There is much that falls under the label “Christian” that doesn’t look like the Kingdom of God at all—but instead looks exactly like the kingdom of the world.
There is, however, another way. A different and better way. The Kingdom of God way.
The Kingdom of God doesn’t have the same… Read More
