The Church and the Kingdom of God

Have you ever wondered why the Four Gospels refer many times to "the Kingdom of God" (or "the Kingdom of heaven" in Matthew) while they only mention the church a few times, whereas Acts and the Letters from the apostles mention the church many times and the Kingdom of God is seldom mentioned? In fact "Kingdom of God" or "Kingdom of heaven" is mentioned in 83 verses in the Gospels and in only 14 other verses in the rest of the New Testament. "Church" on the other hand is mentioned in only two verses in the Gospels, but in 71 verses in the rest of the New Testament.

Why the massive switch from a "Kingdom" focus in Jesus' ministry in the Gospels to a "Church" focus in the ministry of the apostles?

And what exactly is the difference is between the Church and the Kingdom (if any)?

Do you think they are two ways of describing the same thing maybe? Is the church the Kingdom of God by another name?

These are the questions we're going to have a quick look at in this post.

The first thing I think we need to sort out are our definitions. If we define Church and Kingdom correctly this will help us establish the similarities and differences between the two and enable us to answer some of our questions.

A reasonable definition of “Kingdom of God” is: all spheres on earth where God’s reign and rule (or God’s government) is accepted and embraced. The Kingdom of God is already in existence through Christ, though the fullness of the Kingdom still lies in the future. On the other hand, a reasonable short definition of “Church” is: the community of all who have faith in Jesus Christ.

It is clear therefore that though there is a close relationship between Church and Kingdom, they are not the same thing. The Kingdom of God is not a synonym for the Church. The Kingdom of God – or God’s sovereign reign and rule – is an idea or concept, a state of being, a way of viewing life and the world, and a goal towards which all of history is building and moving and which Christ lived and worked to bring about. The Church is the people who are committed to following Christ, and in so doing they are people who accept the Kingdom idea and work for its growth and further realisation in history.

If we were to put it in military terms, the Church might be compared to a country's army and Christ might be compared to country’s leader and the army’s commander-in-chief. In those terms, the Kingdom of God would be both the goal or objective of the war and the totality of the territory or people where the war aims have already been established and accepted.

The Kingdom of God is therefore both a different and a much wider concept than the Church. The Kingdom includes every area of life that is under the rule and authority of God. If God rules in a person’s life, they are in the Kingdom. If God rules a home, it is part of the Kingdom. Where a business is run on biblical principles, it is also part of the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God includes every human activity that is done according to his will. And God intends his Kingdom to grow and expand into every facet and area of life.

This expansion can take place either as person enters the Kingdom as a new citizen through faith in Jesus (the Bible calls this being “born again” into the Kingdom) or as Kingdom citizens bring different parts of their lives under the will of God. As we have seen this can include family life, work, hobbies and leisure activities, political and civic life, art and cultural life, as well as, of course, spiritual and church life. The Kingdom of God becomes a present reality when a sphere of life is ruled according to the Word of God.

The Church’s role is to work to help build the Kingdom. One of the problems of our time is that rather than seeing the Church (the community of believers) existing to help with the Kingdom project, there is a tendency to see the Church existing for its own benefit and for its own growth. And rather than the Church being the Kingdom vanguard in the world, often it has become a spiritual retreat from the world. What’s wrong with that? Well, to go back to our military analogy, it would be like working to recruit and train for the army as an end in itself, rather than as a precursor to going into battle and making the King's war objectives a reality!

The community of Christ’s people is critical to the God’s Kingdom project, but it is a huge mistake to confuse the project with the personnel. The Church must never be an end in itself. It must always be working to establish the kingdom of God. When Jesus comes back he does not just want to find a holy Church, but a Church that has established the kingdom of God as a reality in the world.

So why did the apostles switch focus from the Kingdom to the Church? I think the answer is that once Christ had inaugurated the Kingdom, the focus had to switch from the concept and project to the establishment of the people through whom the Kingdom project would be continued. That is not to say that the apostles’ forgot about the Kingdom. Quite the opposite – they realised that the Church had to be established to advance the Kingdom, just as an army must be recruited and trained before it can implement the King’s war objectives. There can be no Kingdom of God without the Church, so the Church is the focus of the apostles, but even then, not as an end in itself, but as the divinely appointed agent to work with him for the Kingdom.

Discipleship - Part 8

Introduction

Jesus said: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." (Luke 9:23)
 
We now reach the last in our series on Christian discipleship and I am very grateful that the late David Watson's book Discipleship has proved to be such a useful and reliable guide on our journey, even though I have often used it only as a jumping off point for my own thoughts on the subjects we have been looking at. Today we reach the final two chapters of the book on "The Cost of Discipleship" and "Abounding in Hope."

My lasting impression from all we have looked at is that being a disciple of Christ is great joy, great privilege and a great challenge! This last part in the series seeks to explore these ideas further.

The Cost of Discipleship

As always, Watson writes nothing if not clearly as he begins his chapter on the cost of being a disciple of Christ. He says, "Jesus never promised an easy life to those who followed him." Those eleven words are enough to destroy any notion that being a Christian protects you, like some kind of spiritual vaccination, from anything bad happening to you. That's simply not the case. Likewise, those words shatter any false notion of the so-called prosperity gospel - that if you are a Christian, you will receive material gain. Again, simply untrue. No, being a follower of Jesus is often anything but "easy"!

As Watson puts it, the church is not a "comfortable club" but "God's agent for the healing of the whole of creation." Think about that for a second. If that's true, a Christian, or more accurately and corporately Christians as the church, no more enjoy a peaceful, easy life, and can no more be said to have withdrawn from the realities of the world than could the staff in a hospital emergency department have been said to have an easy job in a refuge from the world!

The first cost of discipleship is obedience. Once you are a Christian, your life is no longer your own. You are no longer in charge: Christ is in charge. And you cannot surrender yourself to him a bit. He demands unconditional surrender. That means he wants all your trust, loyalty and obedience. It is as simple as this: You cannot claim to be a follower of Jesus while deliberately, wilfully and persistently disobeying his commandments and instructions.

The second cost of discipleship is faith. You cannot really be a Christian without faith. It would be like trying to be a swimmer without water. Being a Christian is all about having an intimate loving relationship with God through Jesus. Everyone knows that trust is the foundation of any relationship, especially any kind of loving relationship or friendship. Faith is simply trust in God. It is far more than merely believing in God (in the sense of believing that God exists). It is even far more than believing in certain doctrines about God. Faith is a lively trust, reliance, dependence and commitment to God. Although faith is different from obedience, faith cannot be separated from obedience. As I think Bonhoeffer put it: "Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedience believes."

The third thing to point out is that the only way to discipleship is the way of the cross. Christian discipleship is the way of the cross because the only way to enter the Christian life and the Christian community is through the cross, in other words through the atoning death of Christ. But the Christian disciple is called to take up his cross daily and follow Christ. So what does that mean? It means that you have to die (and I have to die), at least it means the selfish centre of us, the sinful, ungodly part of us has to be dethroned and destroyed. And in its place Christ takes command of our lives. And it probably means you will face opposition from the world around you.

Watson quotes anonymously what it means for us to be "crucified with Christ" by extending the rather gruesome metaphor like this (incidentally, an Internet search reveals Watson is paraphrasing a very similar quotation from A. W. Tozer here):

To be crucified with Christ means three things. First, the man who is crucified is facing only one direction; he is not looking back. Second, the man who is crucified has said goodbye to the world; he is not going back. Third, the man who is crucified has no further plans of his own. He is totally in God's hands. Whatever the situation, he says, "Yes, Lord!"

Becoming a Christian is like stopping your car and moving over from the driving seat to the passenger seat and letting Christ get behind the wheel. As any driver knows, that's not an easy thing to do. It's not "comfortable". It may feel "wrong". After all, almost from the cradle we are raised to believe that we are in charge of our lives and no-one else. Our default setting is so well captured by the poet W. E. Henley in his famous poem Invictus:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Yet for the Christian, Dorothea Day's poem My Captain based on Henley's poem is what rings true:

I have no fear, though strait the gate,
He cleared from punishment the scroll.
Christ is the Master of my fate,
Christ is the Captain of my soul.

Scary maybe. But you cannot claim to be a follower of Christ if this is not true of your life.

The fourth cost of discipleship is what Watson calls the pain of relationships. Both the Old and New Testaments are clear: no-one is in relationship with God on their own. There are no solitary Christians. God does have a relationship with you as an individual, but it is always also as part of his relationship with his people as a group. The classic covenant expression in the Bible speaks of this "I will be your God and you will be my people."

The trouble is that we often find relationships with people hard. People do things to us. People say things to us. Or people don't do or say things. And quite often we get hurt by what people do or don't do. The temptation might be to walk away. Now of course there are times when we actually do have to walk away. The Christian life is not a call to live in abusive relationships as if everything was okay. Yet even with this proviso when we as Christians experience others who have hurt us, the normal response we are called to is not to walk away but to forgive and go on to a restored relationship with that person. There is a fundamental principle at work here: as we have been forgiven, so must we forgive. We allude to it every time we say the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us." That's not easy, but it is necessary if the church is to show the world that we are really God's people.

God's great plan is to bring reconciliation and peace to all things under Christ. That involves all horizontal relationships between creatures as well as each creature's vertical relationship with the Triune Creator. The church's life is supposed to be a witness to God's grand redemptive plan of cosmic renewal. Indeed as Christians we are supposed to be a foretaste of it on earth now. How heartbreaking it must be to our heavenly Father to see his children squabbling and fighting as much as we do!

Abounding in Hope

Watson concludes his book, as we conclude this series, on a positive note in a positive chapter called "Abounding in Hope".

He begins with a great quotation from F. R. Maltby: "Jesus promised his disciples three things: they would be absurdly happy, completely fearless, and in constant trouble!" And Watson calls this a fair summary of the New Testament church. The point being that throughout the Bible there is a strange paradox that the joy and the suffering of being God's people always seem to go together - along with glory and agony, rejoicing and weeping, life and death. Certainly these ups and downs characterise the earthly life and ministry of Jesus himself.

There has to be autumn and winter as well as spring and summer in the seasons and so with life many of our joys can only exist by coming through sorrows. This might be supremely demonstrated in the death and resurrection of Christ, but it applies equally to most things in life.

One thing that thrives during our seasons of winter is hope. Just as we hope for the spring in winter, not as a vague possibility but as a sure and certain expectation of what will come, so our hope in God for the future is waiting for what we know is certain to happen. In this hope we are also freed up to live in God's love and work in God's service for him and for other people.

This in some ways is the very essence of being a Christian disciple. It is a task in which we need not be fearful. It is a role in which we need never be without hope. There is a great quotation on hope from C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

Hope is one of the theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean we are to leave this present world as it is. If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next...Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.

You see it is precisely when you don't have to worry about the future because it is all safe and secure in Christ that you can jump headlong into working for God in this life. And that is what Christ is calling you and I to be for him: disciples who are absolutely committed to following him without fear and overflowing with love.

The American missionary, Jim Elliott, who was killed for his faith in South America in 1956 wrote: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot loose."

The question is: Do you have this hope in your heart? Are you ready to be this kind of radical disciple? May God give us all the grace to answer yes to both questions.

Discipleship - Part 7

Introduction

Jesus said: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." (Luke 9:23)
 
We now reach the penultimate post in our series on Christian discipleship. We are using David Watson's book Discipleship as our starting off point and guide for our thoughts on this subject. Today we reach the tenth chapter of Watson's book which deals with the kind of lifestyle a Christian disciple is called to follow. Watson calls this the simple lifestyle.

Simple Lifestyle

Watson begins the chapter by highlighting the shocking inequalities that exist between the rich and the poor in our world. It is difficult for people who live in Western Europe or North America to really grasp how well-off the vast majority of us are. Even the poor in our societies are comparatively rich compared to billions of people who live in truly abject poverty in Africa, Asia and South America. Watson's point is that if Christians and the church appear to line up on the side of the rich, it is difficult for the poor to take us seriously. This leads him to question how we live and encourage us to live much more simply in our lifestyle. Watson wrote this in the early 1980s, just before environmental concerns became a major political and lifestyle issue. But if anything the need to life sustainably and simply has only increased in the 30 years since Watson wrote his book.

It is crucial that we get our relationship with material possessions and money right. So much of the Bible and Jesus' teaching in particular focuses on this that it cannot be ignored by any Christian seeking to be faithful to his or her Lord. While Watson balances what he says by pointing out that neither poverty nor riches are to become idols for us, and that Jesus does not call his followers to a life of poverty as such, he does call us to a life of simple living.

What does a simple lifestyle look like? Well first and foremost, it is a life based on faith in God. It means we trust God to provide for us as we follow and obey his commandments. This is not a "let go and let God" mentality. We cannot abandon earning a living and "trust" that God will provide! No, God usually provides by giving us a job to earn money! (Of course, not everyone can work, and this is a separate discussion.) Second, a simple life is a life of integrity. This means we live honestly, that we are trustworthy in business, transparent in our lifestyle, and so on. Third, we are called to identify with the poor and those in need. We need compassion and dedication to keep an eye on our spending habits and be challenged to help others as much as we can. Fourth, our life will be characterised as one of love, that is agape love that is focused on the well-being of others.

These four elements: faith, integrity, identification with the poor, and love, are like tools that we need to shape and mould our lives into how Christ would want them to be. They are tools to make us more Christlike. The raw materials the tools work on are our time, our talents, our possessions and our money. The result will be a simple life that satisfies us far more than gaining the whole world of material possessions, that is a better witness to others, and a life of obedience that pleases God for it seeks first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.

Next time, we reach the end of this series by looking at the cost of discipleship and the encouragement we have in Christ to keep going as disciples.