[ Your kingdom come ]

This is pretty cool stuff that my friend Josh shared with some of us on campus via e-mail. Thought I'd pass it on.

He writes:

November 1, 2007 11:55 p.m.

I was walking home tonight, thinking about some things Jessie Marshall and I chatted about—the willingness to come together as believers and pray and things like that—and I got to the Lovejoy Garden near Caldwell Hall, and I stopped walking. I was thinking about the “Lord’s Prayer” that Katie referenced in her talk tonight, and as I was thinking about believers coming together, this hit me:

Jesus taught his disciples to ask, “your kingdom come...”

When I think about all the stories of all the awesome things that God has done in any community of believers, they all seem to start with the same thing: a few people get together and earnestly ask God to bring his kingdom into their lives. That’s it. No plans, no programs, no advertising campaigns, no “vision.” Simply: your kingdom come.

If the new covenant is the picture of God’s immanent and intimate restorative work in all of creation, the process by which he is radically altering the makeup of his people on a heart level, then perhaps the “kingdom of God” is just some way of plugging into that idea. In a kingdom, there is a king, and everyone submits to the king. If we are brought into God’s kingdom, then, yes, it is a process of submitting ourselves before God, accepting his rule and reign in our lives. God’s kingdom is what happens when people get on board with what God is doing in this new covenant brought about through Jesus’ death and made effective through his resurrection.

Now, if Jesus is the one who ushers in the new covenant, he is also the one who teaches about the kingdom of God—and in fact he is the king. So what does Jesus say about his kingdom? What’s it like? What does it look like when people are aligned—on a deep heart level (and here we’re talking about what people really want to do)—with what God wants? Well, Jesus says a lot of things trying to explain it: “The kingdom of God is like...” One of those things is this prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples as part of a big block of teaching in Matthew’s story about Jesus’ life.

The contrast is between the people who are out for their own gain, the “hypocrites,” and the people who actually care about what God wants, who are even willing to not care about what people want. The prayer Jesus teaches is one of humility before God, with awe even for God’s name. Jesus teaches them to ask God: “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” Father, bring your rule upon the earth—we want to submit to you and what you want, so let it be what you want that matters, what you care about that gets done. Then we have some stuff taking the idea further, and so when God’s kingdom comes, cool things happen: God, we are trusting you to give us food today to eat—that’s how much we are submitted to you in trusting relationship. More than that, forgive us our debts, the things that we have done that make it possible to call what you’ve done for us “grace,” and so as part of that, we’re also forgiving other people who have done something to us, so that what we show to them can be called “grace”—in fact, we’re so serious about this, we’re asking that you only forgive us as much as we forgive other people!

And, yeah, keep us away from temptation, from evil, from the evil one—that’s an old kingdom, but we belong to you now, we’re subjects in your kingdom. And with many other words, Jesus is pointing his followers (and us, if we claim to be his followers) to the kingdom of God—God’s total rule established on the earth, in which he alone calls the shots—which Jesus himself is bringing about by his death, and his resurrection. This is the “new covenant,” the new thing that God is doing through Jesus—such that all who respond to Jesus get to be a part of the restorative work that God is doing and get to enter into this “kingdom” of his.

As God changes us on a deep heart level—making us truly want what he wants—we will actually begin to want to ask God to bring his kingdom into our lives. And the cool thing is, he will.