We’ve spent over half a year exploring and re-discovering the Forgotten Kingdom and only scratched the surface. But all good things must come to an end, and it’s time to move on to some other good things as we prepare for Season 5.
Let’s review our journey so far at a high level, and then we’ll explore the Lord’s Prayer – specifically the very first thing Jesus instructs us to pray for – that His kingdom come.
We most likely pray the Lord’s Prayer regularly. Do we grasp what we’re asking for when we pray that His Kingdom come? What, exactly, does that prayer request mean?
Quick Season 1-3 Review
Season 1 of the Soil & Roots podcast starts with Episode 1 and runs through Episode 13. It introduces the main challenge Soil & Roots and many other great ministries are working to solve: the Great Omission.
In modern Christianity, we talk a lot about making disciples though it appears we rarely do it.
We’ve defined a disciple as an apprentice of Jesus for the purpose of being formed more like Him. That we increasingly think like He thinks, relate like He relates, and ultimately love like He loves. Today we call this character formation, or heart formation, or spiritual formation.
At the end of Season 1, we introduced the Three Primary Problems: the main challenges or obstacles to our spiritual formation today: the Discipleship Dilemma, the Formation Gap, and the Forgotten Kingdom.
Season 2 runs from Episode 14 through 25, and it’s all about that first primary problem, the Discipleship Dilemma.
To become more like Jesus, we slowly and patiently get to know two people: Jesus and ourselves. However, many of us live in a struggling culture that is worshipping and idolizing the self, so modern Christianity often downplays or outright rejects the exploration of our hearts. Thus, our dilemma.
However, our discipleship is often stunted because we don’t take a journey inward, or as Proverbs tells us, we don’t draw out the true purposes in our hearts.
We here call the habit or process we use to journey into our souls “Heartview.” All human beings display Eight Indicators that point us to the actual condition of our hearts, and we introduced you to all of those in Season 2. If we pay careful attention to our indicators and those around us, we’ll learn to better discern our inner conditions as we grow to love like Jesus.
Season 3 focuses on the Formation Gap. It runs from Episode 25 through 59. To be formed more like someone else, human beings typically and intentionally become part of efforts that include the Five Key Elements of Formation: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.
We looked at all sorts of intentionally formative human experiences: becoming an athlete, a soldier, a happy married couple, a college graduate, a successful tradesman, and on and on. In every case, we intuitively know that the best opportunity to become formed more like someone else must involve all five elements. And we see the five elements littered across the New Testament and the discipleship journey in the first century.
However, when it comes to our spiritual formation now, many if not most of us no longer have access to Five Element Communities. If we take a hard and honest look at our modern Christian experience and our church life, we find pieces and parts of the Five Elements. We live in a Formation Gap. So, we explored that in some detail in Season 3 and talked about how to recreate the types of spiritual formation journey we find in the Bible. At Soil & Roots, we call these communities Greenhouses.
The Forgotten Kingdom
With that backdrop, we launched into Season 4, which stretches from Episode 60 through the next episode, 95.
The Kingdom of God is the primary theme of the New Testament and is woven throughout the Old. The term “Gospel” is often partnered with the phrase, “of the Kingdom.”
The “good news” that John the Baptist and Jesus announced is the Gospel of the Kingdom. Yet if we lined up ten people who follow Jesus and ask them what the Gospel of the Kingdom means, chances are we’ll hear ten different answers.
Thus, the reason the Forgotten Kingdom is the third primary problem. If the community of people following Jesus isn’t clear on what the Kingdom of God is, we’re going to cause confusion inside and outside the church. And that’s exactly what’s happened in modern Christianity.
We’ve tackled several critical questions about the Kingdom this season:
- What is it?
- When is it?
- Where is it headed?
- What are some qualities of people who seek it first?
Defining the Kingdom
We first worked to define the Kingdom of Light. And we discovered that well-meaning, intentional Christians have all sorts of definitions.
Many disciples think the Kingdom is simply Heaven, what many see as a spiritual-only, ethereal existence divorced from the Earth. We discovered that can’t be the full definition. The Kingdom is here on earth right now, so it’s obviously bigger than our modern conceptions of Heaven.
Some think the Kingdom means the church, but that’s a reduced conclusion. The church is a component of the Kingdom. The church serves our King as He grows His Kingdom. But the body of believers worldwide is still not the fullness of the Kingdom.
Some think the Kingdom is only spiritual – it’s the invisible work of Christ on earth.
You may remember I asked the AI bot ChatGPT what the Kingdom is and it gave me the spiritually-only, individualistic reply:
Present Spiritual Reality: Christians believe that the Kingdom of God is a present spiritual reality that exists in the hearts and lives of believers. It is often described as the reign or rule of God in the lives of individuals who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. It involves a personal relationship with God, transformation through the Holy Spirit, and living according to God’s principles and values.
We discovered that is also insufficient because we can’t just split the spiritual from the physical.
Spiritual transformation brings about physical transformation. A transformed heart impacts both the spiritual and physical realms. It’s impossible for it not to.
In trying to define the Kingdom, we eventually discovered that modern ideas about the kingdom have been drastically reduced, like so many other assumptions about Jesus.
Modern Christianity essentially promotes two variations of the Gospel: the Gospel of Salvation and the Gospel of the Kingdom. Most people today are familiar with the first (the Gospel of Salvation), which is focused on just one relationship: our relationship with God.
The Gospel of the Kingdom, however, encompasses all four of our relationships: with God, others, ourselves, and even creation and culture.
We eventually adopted an eight-word definition provided by theologian Dr. Jeremy Treat.
He defines the Kingdom as “God’s reign through God’s people over God’s place.”[1]
There’s a lot packed into those eight words.
Who is reigning over the cosmos? Jesus. Who is declaring His kingship? His church. Who is serving Him to grow His cosmic Kingdom? The church. What is God’s place? Well…everything.
We’ve rediscovered that the Gospel of the Kingdom is the cosmic restoration of everything. It’s the redemption of all four relationships: with God, others, ourselves, and creation and culture.
When is it?
Once we adopted Treat’s definition that the Kingdom is “God’s reign through God’s people over God’s place,” we tackled the next prickly question: When is the Kingdom?
Again, we find a slew of opinions and assumptions here, and they’re related to the confusion over the definition of the Kingdom.
If we assume the Kingdom only refers to Heaven, the Kingdom is entirely in the future with very little application today.
If we assume the Kingdom only refers to the church, it’s pretty much the same story.
If we assume the Kingdom is only spiritual, we may believe the Kingdom is already present but doesn’t really impact much tangibly. Any physical restoration in the Kingdom may be well into the future or may not happen at all.
But even if we agree that the Kingdom is the restoration of all things, spiritual and physical, visible and invisible, people, creation, and culture, we find sharp disagreement on timing.
We find Splitters and Joiners.
Splitters (at least those who agree that the Kingdom means cosmic restoration) see that restoration split into two timeframes: the church age (right now) and a future millennial kingdom.
People and communities experience new creation now as a result of Jesus’ first coming, but His first appearance doesn’t redeem creation and culture. That redemption doesn’t occur until His next coming – when He comes to rule for 1000 years. Ultimately the church fails to redeem creation and culture on behalf of our King, so He comes back and does it Himself.
Joiners don’t hold to a literal 1,000 coming millennium, so the Gospel of the Kingdom is cosmically transformative in all four relationships right now. There aren’t two redemptive ages: there is just one, the Church Age.
Though Joiners often disagree amongst themselves about the trajectory of the current age, those who are Kingdom-minded believe that the Gospel does stretch to creation and culture right now.
Thus, the church should be proclaiming and teaching the Gospel of the Kingdom – God’s reign and redemption over the cosmos – and sees the church as Jesus’s primary catalyst for redeeming people, communities, and creation and culture…right now.
So, as we can see, there’s a lot of confusion and differing perspectives on both what the Kingdom is and when it is.
I suspect this confusion is why many of us know very little about the Kingdom and are rarely taught about it. Thus, one of the primary reasons the Kingdom has been forgotten.
Does it matter? A great deal. As we’ve explored, our confusion about the Kingdom leads to confusion about our purpose. It leads to confusion about Jesus’ purpose. Are we here just to say a prayer of salvation and then wait for Heaven? Are we here to simply learn to be better evangelists and help as much as we can as we wait for the creation and culture ship to sink? Or are we part of God’s cosmic redemption and restoration right now?
Those are all different assumptions about Jesus’ purpose and our purpose, and we should be wrestling with them far more openly and frequently.
Where is the Kingdom headed?
We just finished up exploring where the Kingdom is headed.
Is our final destination a divorced, ethereal, spiritually only existence called Heaven, or is the life after life after death the New Heaven and the New Earth? Is God’s original purpose, that He will rule and reign the Earth with His image bearers, going to find its ultimate fulfillment, as it appears at the end of Revelation?
Will there be continuity between this life and the next? Will we float on clouds in one long worship service, or will the New Heaven and New Earth feature work, play, discovery, exploration, creativity, art, music, sports, hobbies, technology, and deep, abiding relationships with God, others, ourselves, and creation?
What is the fate of the earth? Is our ultimate desire to escape this planet and leave it in the rearview, or is Heaven steadily and inevitably coming to Earth right now?
As Elizabeth Barrett Browning poetically noted:
Earth is crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees
Takes off his shoes –
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.[2]
Qualities of a Kingdom-Dweller
For a while, we turned our attention from what the Kingdom is and when it is, and we explored some of the perhaps hidden qualities of Jesus, and how we might be formed to adopt them as we seek to become more like Him. What are some deeply formed heart characteristics of a Kingdom-dweller?
They are courageously curious. Jesus is deeply and intentionally passionate about pursuing the hearts of people, and so should we. That requires a sometimes-risky curiosity as well as learning how to listen to hearts and not just words. That most likely means we learn to talk far less and to listen far more.
Kingdom-dwellers practice particularity. They intentionally seek out and pursue the individual. In an age of big communities, big churches, big technology, big social media, and increasingly suffocating loneliness, this can be a challenge. Deep disciples tend to simplify so that they have the time and energy to serve the one, versus splitting themselves into different groups to reach higher numbers. It takes a lot of trust in God and it’s pretty counter-cultural, particularly in an age of mega-churches and disconnected social networks.
Kingdom-dwellers are learning how to release control. Ouch! When things don’t go our way, when people don’t do what we want, when suffering inevitably touches our lives, or when God seems to call us to do things that appear downright goofy, we learn to let go. We stop trying to control the narrative, the outcome, and our reputation. We stop trying to control God, our spouses, our children, and our key relationships.
If there’s one thing we sense by reading the Gospels, it’s how free Jesus is from the control of others, and how free He is to abide in His Father. A kingdom-dweller practices releasing control.
A deep disciple learns to be restful in the tension. We’ve explored the Six Stages of our spiritual journey. Stages 1-3 are often marked by firm conclusions, strong doctrinal convictions, assurances in the promises of God, and bold proclamations.
And that’s all good – until we hit the inevitable Wall and it blows our world up. What seemed certain in our faith is no longer certain. We spend far more time in Lamentations, Job, and some of the Psalms. We relate far more with Jonah, Job, John the Baptist sitting in prison, or Peter after Jesus’ arrest.
In Stages 1-3, life seems pretty simple. When we hit the Wall, life is anything but.
On the other side of the Wall and Stage 4, we become far more comfortable with tension. We accept it as a fact of life, and certainly of deep discipleship. It’s not that we give up on our doctrine, our Christian worldview, or the promises of God. It’s that we come to accept that life isn’t neat, isn’t easy, and that having doubts and questions doesn’t make us less of a human or a Christian, it makes us more so. We realize that God seems to deeply appreciate and welcome our authentic, raw selves, even when those don’t match up well with the image we should be portraying at church. We learn to wrestle. A lot.
A Kingdom Dweller understands that most individual, community, institutional, and even cultural change happens…from the inside out. Though working on systems, institutions, governments, churches, and families from the top down has its merits, this ministry is named Soil & Roots for a reason. God is most concerned about who we are and who we’re becoming, and that lifelong transformation starts and continues at the bedrock of our hearts.
A deep disciple learns to suffer well. Suffering may well be the most formative experience in our lives, and we learn to suffer authentically and suffer in community.
And, lastly, a kingdom-dweller models Jesus as the great Idea Revolutionary. By His words, deeds, relationships, and example, Jesus confronted, challenged, and changed a dizzying array of bad, harmful ideas from the Kingdom of Darkness. He challenged both Ideas in the Air (those in culture) and Ideas in the Soil (those in our hearts).
And so should we. A deep disciple learns to look at individuals, communities, and all seven mountains of culture to discern the underlying ideas that drive them. And they creatively, winsomely, sacrificially challenge dark ideas with light ideas, those that lead to human flourishing.
Thy Kingdom Come
This brings us to the last question of this season: What are we praying for when we recite the Lord’s Prayer?
When we pray to the Father, who is in Heaven, that His Kingdom come, His will be done, right here as it is in His place, what do we mean?
As you might imagine, the Lord’s Prayer is one of the most studied, most taught, most scrutinized passages of the Bible. So, there’s no shortage of perspective on what we should mean when we pray the Kingdom come.
I found an article written by Erik Raymond (a pastor in Boston) that is worth wrestling with. He suggests there are three aspects to our urgent plea for the Kingdom to come.
The first is a Cry for Loyalty.
“This kingdom has a physical and a spiritual aspect to it. There is a driving desire to return securely to Eden where God is rightly honored and his people are blessed with unimpeded access to God and his gifts.
When we pray, ‘Your Kingdom come,’ there is a real sense of yearning and loyalty. We are anticipating the coming Kingdom, on board with God’s agenda, and that we love the King himself. Those who love the King eagerly yearn for his kingdom.”
The second cry is a Cry for Treason!
“When I talk about this prayer being a cry for treason I mean that Jesus is teaching his followers to pray for the overthrow of the kingdom of this world, the coup of its leader, and the establishment of a new king. This is a cry of dissatisfaction. It wants a chance.”
He’s not talking about military coups or bloody revolutions. “When we pray for the kingdom of God to come we are pleading for the kingdom of Satan to be toppled…We know it is a matter of time, because on the cross the kingdom of God burst into the world with a head-crushing blow to the serpent.”
I love that.
The last plea is a Cry for Conquering.
“When we pray for the kingdom of God to come we are praying that God would conquer souls! And that he would shine the kingdom of grace upon the hearts of men, women, and children so that they would see and savor the kingdom of glory!”[3]
“Thy kingdom come” is a cry for loyalty, treason, and conquering. That the physical and spiritual reality of the Garden of Eden is and would be returning to Earth. That the spiritual powers currently wreaking havoc around the world are and will be defeated. And that the hearts of people are and will be rescued from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.
The Kingdom and the Four Relationships
When it comes down to it, do we contemplate how our request for the kingdom to come impacts not just our relationship with God, but with our other three relationships?
If you’ve been with Soil & Roots for any length of time, we talk about these frequently.
God has placed us into four categories of relationships: with Him, with others, with ourselves, and with creation and culture.
And we play a vital role in each relationship.
Jesus provided us with what’s known as the Great Commandment: to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That covers the first three relationships: God, others, and ourselves.
And we’re to rule and steward the earth: creation and culture. We find that in Genesis 1, Genesis 9, and Psalm 8. Our role related to creation and culture is to steward it, reign over it, mold it, and manage it on behalf of our King.
If we accept the definition that the kingdom is “God’s reign through God’s people over God’s place,” that seems to include all four relationships.
So, what is our expectation when we pray for the kingdom to come related to all four relationships?
What does it mean for God’s reign to increase, for His will to be done regarding our relationship with Him? As we discussed last time, if we are living temples for the Holy Spirit, perhaps we’re praying for more and more human temples worldwide. That Heaven continues to come to Earth.
What does it mean for God’s reign to increase, for His will to be done regarding our relationship with others?
I can’t help but think this includes a prayer for unity – something that seems to be in short supply in many corners today. Unity doesn’t mean we agree on everything. It does mean that we give ourselves up for one another, and that we seek the flourishing of one another, despite our disagreements.
As we’ve explored before, many of us are comfortable praying for more human temples and greater unity in the body. Though I’m not sure how often we wrestle with the Lord’s Prayer concerning ourselves and creation and culture.
What does it mean for God’s reign to increase, for His will to be increasingly done, regarding our relationship with ourselves, in our hearts?
In Philippians, Paul writes:
And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God. [4]
God’s kingdom continues to come, His will continues to be done in our hearts as we become conformed to Christ. As our character becomes more like His. That we increasingly think like He thinks, relate like he relates, do what He did, and love like He loves.
In other words, the Kingdom comes in us as individuals through this journey of spiritual formation. And that means we increasingly know the heart of Jesus and our own hearts, our stories, our true ideas and desires. The kingdom increasingly comes into our hearts as we allow ourselves to awaken to the reality of His heart and the reality of our hearts. This is an area that requires a ton of exploration and discovery in our current age. It’s the Discipleship Dilemma.
Lastly, what does it mean for the kingdom to come, for God’s will to be increasingly done, related to our relationship with creation and culture?
In our modern age, this relationship is the one that gets the least attention by far.
We’ve already explored one of the reasons why: well-meaning Christians disagree on whether the current kingdom of light is impacting creation and culture. Some hold that the kingdom of light is and should be taking back creation and culture, and others believe the kingdom of darkness will maintain its stranglehold on this last relationship until some future prophetic time.
We don’t talk about this disagreement much, but if you look carefully at how church institutions do or do not interact with creation and culture, you can pretty easily spot their underlying ideas.
Many churches, whether they’re conscious of it or not, promote the idea that the Kingdom is only spiritual and that the primary work of the community of disciples is primarily spiritual. Unfortunately, this often promotes the idea that the physical world (the body, creation, institutions) is either inherently bad or inherently hopeless.
The idea that the physical world is bad is derived from Plato – the ancient philosopher. It’s not the biblical assumption about the physical world, but you’ll find it all over modern Christianity.
The idea that the physical world is hopelessly doomed is a more modern assumption, and we’ve dug into that from a few angles.
So, what are our ideas about the Kingdom as it relates to creation and culture? Does God’s redemptive reign extend to the physical world, to nature, to governments, to the arts, to education? When we pray the Lord’s prayer, do we expect the Gospel of the Kingdom, the good news that Christ is reconciling everything, to influence if not transform not only our souls but the world around us?
Even if some of you answer the question with a “not yet,” meaning that our King will reconcile creation and culture but it won’t happen in this age, does that mean we ignore the physical world right now? Does that mean we abandon creation and culture to the kingdom of darkness?
Do we continue to live as if our prayer for the coming Kingdom only refers to the invisible?
I don’t think so. Whether you believe the Gospel of the Kingdom is redemptive in all four relationships right now, or you believe it’s only redemptive in three, it’s very hard to abandon creation and culture if we want to fulfill the Great Commandment – to love God and our neighbor as ourselves.
Why? Because we’re integrated beings living in an integrated world. If we care about people, we care about stewarding creation and culture, we care deeply about things like clean drinking water, environmental issues such as pollution, and protecting wildlife and oceans. Disciples care about housing, architecture, building codes, public safety, and proper engineering. We care about the arts, education, music, movies, and sports – not just because they do or do not proclaim “spiritual messages,” but because they’re part of our integrated reality. They exist inside God’s kingdom and are therefore subject to the King.
If we care about human flourishing, we can’t promote human flourishing without stewarding creation and culture. If we leave creation and culture and the physical world to the kingdom of darkness, we’re allowing evil to flourish while harming the neighbors we claim to love.
I’m just asking – where are the churches that have specific visions and plans to redeem the fashion industry? Where are the Christian churches and communities working to protect endangered species? Do those not fall under the role of stewarding creation and culture?
Go back a few hundred years in the West and we find a very different set of Christian ideas. We find Christian influences embedded and assumed in education, in the arts, in the management of creation, in music, in the formation of new governments. Not so much today. Today we find a deep (and generally unconscious) split between the secular and sacred, between the physical and the spiritual.
We are integrated beings living in an integrated world. There is no secular, there’s only sacred. The physical and spiritual worlds are far more intertwined than many assume, and the Gospel of the Kingdom is far grander, far more comprehensive, and far more powerful than we often realize.
So, let’s not only remember the Forgotten Kingdom, let’s join with the King of Kings who is, right now, reconciling the cosmos. I can assure you; His life, death, resurrection, and ascension are powerful enough to do just that.
[1] https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/kingdom-god-8-words/#:~:text=More%20By%20Jeremy%20Treat&text=But%20if%20the%20theme%20of,the%20kingdom%20in%20eight%20words.
[2] https://mrsdkrebs.edublogs.org/2021/07/15/poetry-friday-earths-crammed-with-heaven/
[3] https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/erik-raymond/mean-pray-thy-kingdom-come/#:~:text=When%20we%20pray%2C%20%E2%80%9CYour%20kingdom%20come%E2%80%9D%20there,the%20King%20eagerly%20yearn%20for%20his%20kingdom.
[4] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Php 1:9–11). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
