This morning I spoke on ‘Your Kingdom Come’ at St Mark’s church. They are running through the Lord’s Prayer over a few weeks, and I got this fantastic, and, I think, pivotal line of the prayer.

I have uploaded my notes, which is in the form of a mind map, here as some requested.

As I have pondered on this, I have come to think that we understand so little and that for me, as a Christian, there has to be more to life than this! In fact, at Staff Conference I stood behind someone during one of the worship sessions who had that logo on the back of his t-shirt. It got me thinking.

Jesus said ‘Your Kingdom Come’. That’s quite interesting terminology. There is nothing there about ‘take us to your kingdom’or ‘keep a space for us when the time is right’. As I thought on this it kind of led me to think to a reversal of things.

I have been fortunate recently to be able to read a lot of good stuff that fuelled my thinking, one in particular being Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. Here, Rob talks about the kingdom being the here and now, and how the kingdom, in the end times, comes here. That is, God comes to live on earth with humankind, not that we go to heaven!

But that still causes me to say

there must be more to life than this!

If the faith is only about being with God, whether that is on earth or in heaven, after we are dead what does it offer to people like Tom who are not even contemplating death for another 60 or so years! I’ve spoken to Tom loads, and I am not an expert on young people, but it seems to me that very few 12 year olds have their mortality on their minds!

I was exploring this morning the belief as I see it, that the Kingdom of God has started. All through history we see that God has chosen to try to live with us. In Eden he walks in the garden, in the desert he travels ahead of the Israelites, he was on earth in the form of Jesus for roughly 33 years, and now he is here in the form of the Holy Spirit.

For some reason God loves to just hang out with us – that’s quite an amazing thought! And if God is hanging out with us, isn’t that a great reason to be partying and having a great life?

In John 10:10, Jesus tells us he came so that we could have a good life. The word for life here is ‘zoe’; the literal translation being ‘life as God has it’. Jesus came so that we can experience life, have life, in the same way that God experiences it!

wow!

What a reason to party.

Why then are there so many miserable faces in church!!!

It’s a mystery! But it has something, I believe, to do with the fact that we are scared. Scared to believe that we are made in the image of God, scared to believe that God fully accepts us as we are, scared to believe that it is as easy as Jesus says it is, scared to believe that it really can be true.

God paid the bill, there is nothing else for us to do but to enjoy the party!

Followers of Jesus, enjoying life, accepting they are created as they are meant to be, not trying to be anything they are not, fully trusting God, not looking for the next clever trick, sold out on love for God and allowing him to transform them and so their communities through them …

If that were a reality what sort of world would we be living in?