I’ve been thinking about the Kingdom of God.
Sometimes we think life is here and now, then we die and live in the Kingdom of God.
But is it closer than we think?
In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray, “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
In that one line, we are praying that the Kingdom of God comes into reigning existence on earth. The perfect order that God created in heaven that existed in the Garden can exist again. We are praying for ourselves to fall in line with the will of God, to work as the perfect system that God designed, not the dysfunctional power structures we have implemented.
This is a huge prayer because it disrupts the world we know. It alters our systems of power and oppression, of self-serving, to become something more like what God intended His Kingdom on earth to be.
That Kingdom is not an American, political, racial, or ideological perspective. It is the Kingdom perspective.
That is what we are working toward when we pray the Lord’s Prayer. We are actively saying, “My will will take a backseat to God’s.” When we follow after Jesus wrestling with the scriptures, our desires will fall in line with God’s. When we engage in prayer following the prompting of the Holy Spirit, we tend to think more as God thinks. When we pray that prayer, we are asking to become more in sync with the Kingdom.
Our prayer is not a future idea—it is for right now. We are practicing, preparing, and praying for the Kingdom, to work in the economy of the Kingdom, to live in the ways of the Kingdom, here and now.
The Kingdom of God is at hand.
Blessings,
Andrew