Seek First: The Kingdom

My name is Russ. I am one of the pastors here. And I stop.

You don't want to encourage me because you got lunch coming. Thank you. What was I going to say now? I'm flabbergasted.

I've had the privilege of having friendships with people around the world. One of those, I get to support a ministry in Nairobi. It's in the Mathari Valley. It's the second largest slum in Nairobi. Dense poverty, beautiful work in the midst of it.

And my friend Esther lives there. Esther's Kenyan, and she's a head teacher at one of the schools there in Nairobi. And one day we're talking. We're there at the school, and she looks at me. I'm carrying a backpack.

And she says, let me carry your backpack. And I said, no, no, I'm fine. I'll carry my backpack. And then she insisted. She said, let me carry your backpack.

And I said, you know, I'm a good Midwestern kid. Grew up in Indiana, you know, been in Cincy a lot of my life. And I said, well, my mama raised me to be a gentleman, and gentlemen carry their own backpack. And she looked at me and she said, my mother taught me to show hospitality to visitors. You're in my country.

Give me your backpack.

And I gave her my backpack.

I forgot where I was, right? I wasn't on my turf. I was on her turf, right? This was her turf. So I tell that story because we can do this with the Bible, because the Bible is not our turf in the sense that the Bible is about real people in real times and real places.

And none of them were good Midwestern kids like me, right? They were near Middle east kids and an ancient group of people, like, very different from me today. And when I read the Bible, assuming that, oh, they. They think and live the way I think and live, I can miss a whole, whole lot when I do that. Let me give you an example of this.

Seek first. Here's a. Here's something Jesus said in the sermon on the mountain. He said, but seek first the kingdom. That's the kingdom of God and his righteousness, the rightness that comes with it.

And all these things will be given to you as well. He's talking about worry wor about what you wear, what you're going to eat. He's like, relax. Seek first the kingdom. We can read that and think, okay, well, that's nice.

What we don't get, if we were from that time, that place, and we were those people, all sorts of lights would go like neon las Vegas lights would go off when we hear him say the word kingdom because it has a whole ton of meaning and significance for him and the people he's talking to. And we would miss it. Right. In fact, this is the thing he talked about most, more than anything else. You know, he talked about money.

Yes. Talked about love. Yes. But this was his dominant favorite topic, the kingdom of God. Matthew will call it the kingdom of Heaven.

John, writing to a whole different kind of people, called it eternal life. But it all means the very same and specific thing that they get and that we can misunderstand because we aren't them. Right? And Jesus didn't invent this idea. It's.

It's a theme that runs through the Bible from Genesis and Revelation. Kind of walk from the left to the right of your Bible today to see this thing, kingdom, and how it's there from the beginning to the end. That Bible is a library, and it looks like a book, but it's actually a Library of Books. 66 of them, 40 different authors. 1500 years is the span of time it was written.

And yet you've got some themes like this one, from beginning to end, all the way through it. We see it like, if you just open your Bible, let it fall, and you're going to find words like rule, what a king does, he rules, reigns, kingdom, dominion, authority. You may see the word Messiah, which is Hebrew, or the word Christ, which I grew up in church, I knew it wasn't Jesus last name, Right? I knew that much, but I didn't see it as a title. It's a title, Messiah, Christ.

They both mean king, kingdom and king. Right. To the first followers, right? They went around their world and they repeated this little mantra, jesus is Lord, over and over again. We see this theme and one of the big mistakes we make because we hear how Matthew says it, the kingdom of heaven, and we go, oh, well, he's clearly saying that's where we go when we die.

Seek where we go when we die. And man. So I have a friend, a young friend in my life who isn't currently following Jesus, but told me they were like, well, you know, I was baptized as a baby, so, you know, my soul is saved. They were kind of joking when they said it, but what I realized, that's what she thinks I want for her. And do I want that for her?

Yes. Do I want so much more for her? Yes. Right. Because it's so much more than this.

It's so much more than life in the future, forever. It is life now and forever. Right. An invitation into the kingdom. The kingdom.

All right. So what do we mean when we say the word kingdom? Here you go. The kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven is where what God wants done, is done. Pretty simple.

It is what he's able to make happen. Wherever he's able to make everything happen, that's where it is. So let's walk through this. Because in the very beginning in Eden, the words at the beginning of the Bible say, in the beginning, next word is. Anybody know it?

God. Right? God rules in the beginning, right? He arranges the world the way he wants it. And over and over again.

What is it named? Good. Good. Good. Good.

Good. Good as in. Right. It's the way it's supposed to be. And he creates us and plants us in that world.

And we are experiencing a right relationship with him, easy and free with him strolling with the day. We are open and completely trusting. No betrayal, no rejection with one another, naked and not ashamed. There is no shame, no guilt, no regret. It doesn't exist.

And we have a deep purpose in life as we name the animals and as we garden, as we continue to create with him, right? As junior partners, being fruitful and multiplying. This is what the world looks like when it's good. We are experiencing full tanks of meaning, purpose, belonging, inner wholeness and full freedom, right? Because this is where what God wants done gets done.

That's all. Genesis 1 and 2. Turn the page of Genesis 3, it goes bad, right? Because God has made us in his image. And one of the things that means is that God has a will and so do we.

And we can choose. And what do we choose? We choose to be like Him. We want to decide what's good and what's evil. And here's what happens.

Whenever what we want to get done gets done, things get broken and chaos reigns, right? And every one of those relationships gets broken. Every one of them. Beautiful thing is that God doesn't leave us there, right? Bible takes a gigantic turn in Genesis 12.

This passage is so big because in this moment, God says, here's how I'm going to change things. And this is what he does. The Lord said to a man, Abram. Later he gets called Abraham, if you've heard that name. Go from your country, your people, your father's household, to the land.

I will show you. In that time and in that place, family is everything. Your land is everything. And this God shows up. And it's a God, not just of your family or your land, a God of the whole world.

And he says, abram, leave all that behind. Follow me, right? Follow me. And then he gives him a promise. And this is crucial to recognize there's a promise here, right?

I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you. That word bless first turns up in Genesis 1, that when God created everything and he creates us, and he blessed us, right? And now in Genesis 12, he says, Look, I'm going to bless you. I'm going to. I'm going to call a people out.

I'm going to choose a people, right? You and those that come from you. I'm going to choose you, and I'm going to bless you. I'm gonna make your name great. And you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you. And whoever curses you, I will curse. And all peoples on earth, everybody, everywhere, will be blessed through you. Hear the promise. God says, I'm going to put it all back together.

I'm gonna reconcile it all that got broken. And I'm gonna do that by collaborating with us, collaborating with Abram and his people. And through collaborating with them, I'm going to bless them so that everybody, everywhere can experience what the blessing of when God gets what he wants, right? So God calls Abram out, and he follows. And he has kids.

He has a kid, and that kid has kids, and that kid has kids. And they grow up into this people, this nation. They become what we call the nation of Israel. And they carry this promise with them. They are God's chosen people.

This is deep set in them. They carry this promise that God's going to bless the world as he blesses them and through them. And a lot happens to them, right? We find that they find themselves being slaves in Egypt. There are millions of them by this point.

And God again calls and collaborates with another human being, Moses. And with Moses, the people are freed. And then after a shaky start, they eventually step into the land God promised them. And then, even though God is functioning as their king, he's doing all the things a king does, right? Protects them.

He's. He's there as the judge. They are clamoring for a human king because, come on, God, all the other nations got one. Can we have one too? Right?

And so he gives them. There's Saul, there's David, there's Solomon. Some of them are not so good. Even the best that they are, they're still.

There's still a lot of flawed human in there. But that's as long as it lasts before the nation splits in two. And then you wind up with A northern kingdom and this lower kingdom that was called Judea in Jesus day, and that's where he was. And that northern kingdom, eventually an empire comes in. The Assyrian empire comes in and just wipes them out where they don't exist any longer at all.

Remember, these are the people of the promise. This doesn't look very promising, right? And then eventually another empire comes into the southern kingdom and just takes over, right? So they're under the boot of a Babylonian empire, and the people are suffering and they're aching and longing because they're like, God, you gave us a promise, you're going to bless us. We're going to bless the whole world.

And how that cannot happen. That cannot happen when we're under the boot of this empire. And so the prophets collaborating with God, the prophets begin, begin to hear this language in the prophets that God is going to send a king who's going to set things right. You see it over and over again coming in the prophets. One of them is this Isaiah 61, Isaiah, in collaboration with God, inspired by him sharing God's word, says this.

The spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me. Sovereign is kingdom language, because the Lord has anointed me. That word anointed is kingdom language. The word messiah just means anointed one anointed to be king, right? So people read this and they were like, oh, there's a king who's going to come and he's going to do what when he gets here, he's going to proclaim good news to the poor.

He's going to. He's sent to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and to release from darkness for the prisoners. Proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. A king's going to come and he's going to bring God's kingdom with me, with him. And now finally, the good that God wants to get done will get done, right?

And yet here they are aching under the boot of an oppressive empire. Not just the Babylonian, because the Persians come in and take over for the Babylonians. And then Alexander the Great from Greece sweeps through and he takes over for them. And then Rome follows along and we get to Jesus day, right? And they have not, for a very short period of time, they had any kind of freedom from an empire.

And all along they've said, hey, God, you gave us this promise all the way back, and now you've given us another one that you're going to send a king who's going to set things right. And it's not Happening. They ache for this. 400 years, the end of the Old Testament. From that last word to the first word in Matthew is 400 years.

400 years of silence. 400 years of oppression. 400 years of going, God has given us this promise and we have not let go, right? Aching, aching for God to get what he wants and to bless them so that the whole world can be blessed. And then the first words in Matthew, what do we read?

This is the genealogy. Fancy word for family tree, right? This is the family tree of Jesus, the Messiah. Jesus the king, the son of David. Oh, he's part of that lineage, right?

Like the king and the son of Abraham, the promise. And then Jesus starts. When he starts to go around preaching, he's got one message. It summarized Matthew. Matthew summarizes it in Matthew 4.

From that time on, Jesus began to preach. Repent, rearrange your thinking and your life, right? Why? For the kingdom of heaven, kingdom of God has come near. It's so close you can touch it.

Do you hear how that would sound to them? My grandparents. Grandparents. Grandparents were praying for this day. And here he is.

The king has come. And it stirs them up. And they've been waiting for so long. They've been suffering under the rule of oppressive empires for so long. They've been expecting him.

But here's what he does. He is not the kind of king that they expect over and over and over again. Even here. He says, the kingdom of heaven has come near. And how is that possible?

Because there's a Roman garrison right next to my town, and every couple of days they ride through in full military garb to remind me to keep paying the heavy taxes that I'm supposed to pay and keep doing what they want me to do, right? This does not look like blessing in any way. And yet Jesus shows up and he says, the kingdom has come near. Because what he knows is that he's the king. And when the king shows up, the kingdom comes with him, right?

And he says, it's so close you can touch it because I'm right in front of you.

I'm right in front of you. And then he starts to do things like heal the sick.

And he starts to demonstrate what it looks like to be in the kingdom, that when. When God gets what he wants, these things are the things that begin to happen. People are healed of every kind of disease and sickness, it says. And then he gets up. Luke says this.

He gets up in front of his home, synagogue, kind of like. Kind of like his church, and he gets up and he reads a passage, the passage, you'll recognize it. The spirit of the Lord is on me, he says, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. This is Isaiah 60:1. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery for sight of the blind, to set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

And then he looks them in the eye and he says, this scripture is fulfilled right here in your hearing. Right here in front of you. Do you hear it saying, the kingdom has come because I'm here. I am the king, right? And then he starts to teach what life in the kingdom looks like.

And, man, it's crazy talk. Seriously. Love your enemy. What? Love your enemy.

Have no contempt for other people. Relax. Like you can be the most relaxed person in the neighborhood. You don't need to worry because you seek first the kingdom of heaven and all the other stuff that man, just relax. You'll get it too, right?

Over and over and over again, he's teaching things that are like, man, this kingdom you're talking about feels really upside down and extraordinary and good. And in there, we'll come back to this. He says, look, pray this. And in that prayer, he says, pray, your kingdom come, Father. Your kingdom come.

Your will be done. Where on earth kingdom come, right? Yes, your will be done. And then after this teaching, the next two chapters, Matthew 8, 9, are nothing but just rapid fire stories of what it looks like when the kingdom comes, right? I mean, Isaiah knew it, right?

The captives are free. Binding up the brokenhearted. Here's what happens in the next two chapters. There's a man with leprosy. He gets healed.

There's a paralyzed servant of a Roman leader who gets healed from a distance. Hey, go home. He's fine, right? He heals his friend Peter, Peter's mother in law. He heals her.

He frees people from demonic oppression. He heals people who are paralyzed, deaf, mute. He brings a young girl back from the dead. This is what it looks like when God gets what he wants, right? He sets things right.

This is what it looks like.

And then Jesus has one invitation. He says, hey, come follow me. Be my disciple. I will train you. Josh used the word padawan last week.

Some of us perked up, right? Apprentice, trainee. He's like, I want to train you to be like me and do what I do, right? This is the same invitation for us just to come follow him, join in, follow him as he lives in God's great and good kingdom, right? And then he trains them some and he sends them out and this is what he tells them to do.

The exact same stuff he did. He tells him, he's like, hey, go out and proclaim this message. The kingdom of heaven has come near. Preach that and then heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons freely you've received, freely give. And all of that happens.

And then one day he asked them, he's like, hey, who do you think I am? And one of them answers, they go, oh, you're God's Messiah. You are the Christ of God. You are. Those two words, they mean king.

You are the king. God promised to sin, to set everything right.

Could it be more clear? But even still, again, he's the king that they don't expect. Because even then, they are expecting the kind of king who would take them at his right and his left, and together with them, they would start a militia and work their way towards Jerusalem, oust the puppet king in Jerusalem, and from there work their way towards Rome, take over, eventually establish their own empire centered in Jerusalem where Jesus is on the throne, right? That's what they think. And here's what he tells them after he says, come, follow me.

He says, look, I'm going to be really clear with you. We are going to Jerusalem, but we're going to get there and I'm going to suffer and I'm going to be executed and I'm going to. I'm going to die and I'm going to return to life, right? And they are still confused. But what he's saying is at the core of the kingdom is sacrificial love.

That Jesus, that through his death and resurrection and his sacrificial love for us, that is the thing, right? That is the thing that will defeat Satan, death itself. He tells them this about love. Somebody asks him, they go, hey, what's the greatest commandment? Here's what he says.

Love first, love the Lord your God, all your heart, soul and mind. And he says, second. Here's the second commandment. Love again, love your neighbor as yourself. He says, what does it look like to be in the kingdom?

It looks like love, right? And then everything he said would happen is what happened. He gets arrested, he gets rejected. Interesting. The Roman soldiers, they put a robe on him of royal color.

They put a throne on a thrown a throne on his head made out of thorns. But what are they doing? Hey, this is the king. They mock him. They get on their knees and start saying, hail, this is king of The Jews.

And then when they put him on the cross, the sign over his head, the reason he's on the cross, here's what it says.

Yeah, it says, this is Jesus, King of the Jews.

But what we know now is that in the kingdom of God, death does not get the last word right because of Jesus. So the king returns, raised from the dead. He's defeating sin, Satan, death, all of those things on our behalf. Book of Acts tells us that he keeps showing up for the next 40 days or so, and he keeps proclaiming. What?

What is he teaching? He's teaching about the Kingdom of God. See, he's talking about it all the time. He's demonstrating it. He's telling it over and over and over again.

And then he looks at the people he's been training his disciples and he says, look, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. This is the kind of thing a king can say. I got all the authority it's given to me. Therefore I'm going to send you. What?

Go and make disciples. Do what I did for you, but do that of all nations. Can you hear Genesis 12? To be blessed so that all peoples will be blessed through you. Baptizing them in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you, and surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

And they did it. They began to stretch out throughout Judea and then to other people groups and other nations. And within a generation, within a generation, they reach Rome itself. At the very end of the Book of Acts, it says our brother Paul, that he proclaimed the Kingdom of God in Rome and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ the Master, Lord Jesus the King, with all boldness and without hindrance, the kingdom of heaven. And the church continued to grow then and stretch out all the way through the Roman Empire.

And it got shaky for a long while, right? But the message stayed alive and people continued to follow Jesus. And then eventually that message crossed the ocean, it reaches America, and eventually it stretches west and it lands and gets to Cleaves, Ohio. And here we are.

How about that Garden of Eden? All the way to right here, right now, right?

So last week, Josh shared a vision for the kind of church we want to be that we can imagine, that we could be, right, that we could dream of being in just 36 months. And that at its core, is a church. We want to be a church that's making more and better disciples. That one invitation, Jesus Christ. Gifts, right?

Come follow me and Then go right and make disciples more and better disciples both when we're gathered, when we're here, and when we're not here in our life. For what? For the reconciliation of the world, for everybody, everywhere. The end of that statement, there's a final sentence, and it says this. And every day, every place, we seek the kingdom of God.

It's crucial that we know what we mean when we say it. We seek.

We seek anywhere where God gets what he wants, where God has done what he wants done right and is doing what he wants to be doing. We seek it, we pursue it, making Christ known, embodying the fruit of the Spirit, and joyfully building a kingdom legacy for generations to come. It is a beautiful vision. It's a beautiful thing to imagine. It's so good.

But here's the thing. We will never get there without seeking God's kingdom. Because here's the challenge. There are actually two kingdoms in the Bible, starting in Genesis, and we see it all the way at the end. There are two kingdoms.

God has a kingdom, and you have a kingdom, and I have a kingdom.

So we see it in Genesis 1. Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness, and let them rule. Do you see it? Let them. Let us rule over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky and over the cattle, over all the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So my kids were young, my two oldest, two boys, and the oldest was four. And then the middle kid, the next one. The next son is two. And as parents, we sort of had made this decision in advance because what we had watched is that the oldest had two years to use his size as an advantage over his life. Little brother.

And we knew that the day would come when the little brother would push back, and we just decided to ignore it right in advance. I'm not pro violence. I'm not saying I'm pro violence, right. In any way, but it was kind of like, the kid's gonna get what he deserves, right? And maybe he'll respect his little brother a little bit after this.

And so. So we have committed to this. And then the oldest comes in the room one day, and he goes, cooper, hidden. And we just casually go about our business. Again, cooper hit me.

Fourth time, Cooper hit me. And we turn and look at him, and blood is pouring out of his lip. And we go, oh, Cooper hit you? And he's like, what is wrong with you?

And so now we gotta deal with it. And so my wife Jen takes care of the oldest and the blood. And I go in. I've sent Cooper to his bed. And I go in and I sit down and I go, hey, what did you hit him with, right?

Because I'm thinking, like, Thomas the train would do a pretty good job, you know, something. And he looks at me. He's a grown man now, still, few words, right? Opposite of his dad, man of few words. He looks at me and he goes like this.

Two years old, he goes.

Because at 2, Cooper ruled, right? That he had a realm in which he could get done what he wanted to get done. And what he wanted to get done was take his fist and put it in his brother's lip. Cooper, rule. You rule, right?

You got a fist, you got more than that, right? You have a realm in which what you want to get done, you can get done done.

And from the very beginning, remember Genesis 3? What did we learn when we tried to get done, what we want to get done? What results? Brokenness and chaos. And some of us in this room know that at the deepest of levels.

But when his kingdom comes, when he's the king, goodness happens.

So the challenge is this is what do we do with our little kingdom, right? We have these little kingdoms. He's got his great and good kingdom. What do we do? The invitation is to take our kingdom and submit it, surrender it to his great and good kingdom so that wherever I am, what he wants to get done gets done, right?

Because his kingdom come, his will be done right here in this piece of earth. And here's one of the challenges for us as we think about this as a church, that our vision can be beautiful and great and good, and we will not get there if we are just the kind of people who are pursuing their own individual kingdoms and we just happen to come together as a church.

It's the pursuit, the seeking of his kingdom, not ours. And even in the most subtle of ways, there are ways that we can be so excited about the kind of church we are. And really what we're doing is we're just taking what the church offers and letting it help us pursue our own kingdom, right? That there are ways that we can soak up the good things, the good worship, the good teaching, the good prayer, the good things, and soak them up in a way that we just go, isn't it so good that we get all of this and we like it our way, and we get it our way, and it's just so good, and we soak it all up? What was the promise?

God wants us to bless his people. His people. Bless them. So that what all peoples may be blessed through them. Right?

So easy. If we aren't the kind of people who are submitting our kingdoms together to his great kingdom together, that we're going to miss it. And seeking his kingdom together. Man, that is heaven breaking into earth. When I say heaven, I mean eternity.

It is eternity breaking into earth. Revelation 22 we're going to get all the way to the right of the Bible now. This is the we started all the way to the left, now we're all the way at the right. This is what eternity looks like for you and me. Revelation 22, verse 3.

No longer will there be any curse. The curse is gone. Fully right. The throne of God. Throne.

The Lamb will be in the city and his servants will serve him. They we will see his face and his name will be on our foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of the lamp or the light of the sun. For the Lord God will give them light and they will reign.

R E I G N Reign forever and ever. We will reign with him forever and ever. That's eternity for us. Our little kingdom committed to his great kingdom. That's where we're headed.

And that's the life that we can begin to experience here and now. And there is so much more to this than we can accomplish in this 30 minutes. In fact, these next several weeks, we're going to continue to kind of unpack, starting with last week's vision, sort of from there, the implications of these things. But it's crucial for us to recognize that we are on the same page when we say kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven. It is anywhere where God gets done what he wants done.

So I've got a couple of invitations for you. In this one is the next, several teachings are just going to continue to unpack and unpack and unpack what this looks like for us here as the people of God who gather up here in Cleves, Ohio. So keep coming, keep showing up. Let's keep walking through this together. My second invitation is this is I'm inviting you to join me in a workshop starting on Monday, October 21st.

It's just a couple of weeks away. It's eight weeks on a Monday night. And what we'll be doing is simply getting into getting our hands into this kind of stuff where we can learn what it looks like to live in the kingdom. We're calling it Foundations. Here's the thing.

At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says this he says, if you hear my words and put them into practice, you're like a man who built his house on a rock. Right? What he's saying is you can have a life that's solid and founded. Sound good? A solid and founded life, Right?

Life in the kingdom is solid and founded. And so in foundations, we're going to spend time doing that. We'll do it in smaller communities, kind of guided through the whole thing. You get to interact, process together, practice together, learn together. So that starts in two weeks.

Foundations, you can sign up for that on the website events page. Looks for look for foundations and you'll see it there. And so love to have you join in. So that's a couple of invitations of where we're going. What about today?

Jesus gives us the perfect practice for how to step in, to be seeking the kingdom. And he gives it in that prayer. I referenced it before, right? When he taught us to pray. Here's what he said.

He said, you should pray like this. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Simple, profound. We become the kind of people who are praying this every day.

What that's doing is saying, God, I know I've got a kingdom, right? And I'm laying it at your feet that in my kingdom, it will be what will happen, is what you want to have happen, that your kingdom come in this piece of earth, into this heart, into this heart, into this life, to our homes, families, neighborhoods, where you work, where you play, in our church. Your kingdom come. Because when I'm the king, it goes so bad. But when he's the king, it's so much better than I can give words for.

Right come, kingdom come. So we together can just start to simply pray this, pray it every day, pray it on the way to work, pray it before you get out of bed. Pray it at the end of the day, Father, let your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Jesus not only taught this prayer, he lived it. When his life got to the hardest moment, when he was about to be arrested and he knew he was going to be executed the next day and a horrible death on the cross. He's praying and he says, my Father, if it's possible, take this cup of suffering from me. And then he says, yet not as I will, but as you will. You hear it?

Your will, not mine. He's just inviting us to follow him, to surrender ourselves in the way that he surrendered himself, trusting that what God can do and what his plans are, even if we don't understand them, are far better for us and everybody else than anything we could ever imagine.