As we continue our journey into deep discipleship, weโre exploring our first example of these hidden assumptions in our hearts, these ideas.
Based on our initial pass last episode, we dig further into the idea of the Gospel to see if our assumptions about the Kingdom align with seven characteristics of it found in the Bible.
TRANSCRIPT
Episode 3: The Magnificent Seven (The Kingdom of God Explained)
Intro: Welcome to the Soil and Roots podcast: journeying together to cultivate deep discipleship. Iโm Brian Fisher.
This is Episode 3: The Magnificent Seven
A Brief Summary So Far
Weโre just beginning our journey together into Deep Discipleship here in Season 1. Hereโs what weโve explored so far:
1. The West suffers from a โGreat Omission.โ Though modern Christianity preaches and teaches about making disciples, weโre struggling to truly form them. Weโll be exploring various reasons why this Great Omission exists, though one of the reasons is modern Christianity is sometimes confused about the definition of a disciple.
2. For our purposes, a disciple is an apprentice of Jesus so that we become more like Him. That, over time, we do the things He did, relate like He relates, love like He loves, give like He gives. We hope and expect that, through our journey into deep discipleship, our character will be increasingly molded to be like Jesus. Another term for discipleship is character formation, or โspiritual formation.โ
3. Though there are lots of different ways this lack of deep discipleship impacts our churches and culture, as individuals, itโs normally evidenced through a sense of disconnection, that there must be more to the Christian life than what we normally experience. We love our pastors, churches, Bible studies, and fellowship, but there are times when we read about the characteristics of the Christian life in the Bible, and they donโt always match our actual experience. Are we experiencing an abundant life? Jesus promised that we would do greater works than He did. Do โgreater worksโ characterize my life? Am I able to truly forgive my enemies?
4. One of the things that most likely distinguishes Soil and Roots from other deep Christian journeys is our excavation into the world of ideas. Theologian Dallas Willard taught that this journey into deep discipleship isnโt simply about Christian traditions, our community groups, or even our stated beliefs. Itโs a journey into uncovering the hidden ideas that shape and form us, these often-unconscious assumptions and convictions that sit at the bedrock of our soils.
This first season, which runs through Episode 13, focuses on helping us get our arms and hearts around the concept of deep discipleship through the exploration of ideas. These ideas arenโt so much intellectual conclusions as they are our heartsโ experienced realities.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas, but weโre getting our feet wet by exploring one – an idea of the Gospel. Is the idea of the Gospel buried deep into our hearts solely about Jesus as a personal Savior, or is our idea of the Gospel aligned with the Gospel of the Kingdom – the good news that the king of the cosmos is redeeming and reconciling everything? There is a huge difference between the two ideas. And they have an enormous impact on how we view the world and operate in it.
Today weโre going to dig in a bit more, and weโre again going to reference the Creation Picture visual aid, which you can find on the Resources tab at soilandroots.org.
Seven Mountains
The Creation Picture provides some context for how we live and exist in the created order and how these ideas in our hearts form and change.
The outer circle represents all of creation. The mountains represent culture. The tree is you, the trees around you are other people. The roots represent your heart, and your roots are planted in the soil. The soil represents these powerful ideas that govern us. Ideas, systems, and how they impact our hearts. Soil and Roots.
Letโs take a brief look at the mountains in the background. The Seven Mountains are simply a way of describing culture. They are the institutions or areas where we all live and work in some form. The seven mountains are Family, Church, Education, Government, Media, Business, and Arts & Entertainment.
The original concept of the Seven Mountains was developed by Bill Bright (Campus Crusade) and Loren Cunningham (Youth With A Mission) back in the 70โs.[1] They have been used and, in some cases, abused ever since.
Weโre not going to abuse them; weโre just using them to visualize culture. โMountainsโ fits well into our nature motif, and โThe Seven Mountainsโ does a good job of describing and segmenting culture into chunks we can all understand.
When it comes to ideas, these powerful assumptions make the Seven Mountains idea factories that constantly package and distribute ideas of darkness and ideas of light. They are promoting and attempting to persuade our hearts to embrace their ideas.
Here at Soil and Roots, we distinguish between the ideas pumped out by culture and the ideas that actually form our hearts. We call these groups Ideas in the Air and Ideas in the Soil.
The most influential cultural mountain, by a huge margin, is family. Family has an extraordinary ability to form ideas in our soil because our hearts are so supple and malleable in the first few years of our lives.
As we finish exploring this idea of the Gospel today, itโs important to consider how the Gospel in our soil was formed. Was your heartโs idea of this good news formed primarily through the mountain of family? Or perhaps it was through a church. Or maybe it was formed through a combination of formal education and some sort of media?
Seven Attributes of the Kingdom of Light
In the last episode, we talked about the difference between the Gospel of Salvation and the Gospel of the Kingdom, and how Jesus came to reconcile all four of our relationships: with God, with others, with ourselves, and with creation and culture. The Gospel of Salvation is true, though itโs essentially a subset of the broader Gospel of the Kingdom. They arenโt different gospels โ one is a reduction of the other.
Another important component of deep discipleship is curiosity. So, as weโre exploring the good news of this Kingdom, letโs take a look at just seven of its characteristics to see if our heartsโ ideas of the Kingdom align with how Jesus presents the Kingdom.
1. This Kingdom began with the arrival of the King. This King didnโt show up like many thought He would. He arrived in a rather unconventional way, born in a stable in a backwoods town in a forgotten part of the country. But when He was around 30 years old, John the Baptist proclaimed, โBehold the Kingdom of God is at hand.โ
2. The King is also the Key. In Colossians 1, Paul says we are transferred from the domain of darkness to the Kingdom of God through our redemption in Christ. The King is the Key.
3. The Kingdom is already here, but also not yet. Jesus came and inaugurated the Kingdom, but has not yet fully consummated the Kingdom. We are in this middle ground, this in-between period. So we are here in the Kingdom, but Jesus has not yet fully conquered the kingdom of darkness.
4. The Kingdom is cosmic in scope. It redeems all four of manโs primary relationships: with God, ourselves, others, and with creation and culture.
One sub-point on this. Some peopleโs idea of the Kingdom of Light is that it refers to the church, the people who genuinely follow Jesus. When I teach Soil and Roots classes and ask everyone to define the Kingdom, this is often the answer.
But the Kingdom of Light doesnโt mean the body of people who follow Jesus, though it certainly includes it. We find this spelled out in Colossians 1, the passage weโve been exploring.
Paul explains that Christ rules over everything, and then says that Christ is also the head of the body, the church. He considers the Kingdom and the Church to be two separate things. The church is part of the kingdom and plays a crucial role in its expansion, but it is not the same as the kingdom.
5. The Kingdom is both spiritual and physical. Just as many people assume the Kingdom means only the church, many also hold that the Kingdom is only spiritual. Itโs solely about the transformation of the heart, and so itโs only invisible.
Again, we find โreductionโ here. The Gospel of Salvation is true, but it is a reduction of the Gospel of the Kingdom. The church is part of the Kingdom, but it is only a part. The kingdom certainly is spiritual, but itโs not only spiritual. Itโs also physical. It must be.
There are numerous examples of spiritual transformation resulting in physical transformation in the Bible. Letโs consider Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10).
Zacchaeus climbs a tree and spots Jesus, who tells him heโs coming to his house. After an encounter with Jesus Christ, what is the first thing Zacchaeus does? He makes economic restitution to the people he cheated. He makes physical changes in the physical world (the exchange of money) because of his spiritual transformation. This happens all the time, and it should happen all the time.
When we choose to stop following ourselves and instead turn and follow the King, we make all sorts of changes to the physical world as a result of our inner transformation.
At the birth of the church in Acts 2, people began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with those in need. In Acts 6, we see the early church making provisions for widows who were being neglected. Church history is filled with story after story of people who made small and large changes to the physical world because of their spiritual, invisible formation.
For some people, the idea that the Kingdom is physical becomes contentious because they assume weโre talking about a palace, or a country, or a theocracy. But as weโll explore in Season 4, the Kingdom of God looks and operates very differently from our common understanding of kingdoms.
6. The Kingdom of God is growing
There are three great parables in Mark 4 where Jesus specifically outlines the growth and progression of the Kingdom of God.
In the Parable of the Sower, He describes the Kingdom as the good seed yielding 30, 60, or 100-fold.
In the Parable of the Seed, the Kingdom sprouts up overnight.
And in the third parable, the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Christ says,
โHow shall we picture the kingdom of God, or by what parable shall we present it? โIt is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the soil, though it is smaller than all the seeds that are upon the soil, yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and forms large branches; so that the birds of the air can nest under its shade.โ[1]
The Kingdom is growing and canโt be stopped.
One way to measure this growth is by looking at the number of people who follow the King over time. There are roughly 2.4 billion Christians on the planet right now. Thatโs about 30% of the worldโs population.[2] Christianity is the largest religion on earth.
How many of the 2.4 billion are actually following Jesus versus claiming Christianity as a passive religion? We donโt know. But letโs be conservative and say that only 1 billion people are genuinely following Jesus.
There are 8 billion people in the world, so thatโs 12% of the total population. So, the low end is 12%, and the high end is 30%. Somewhere between 12 and 30 percent of the worldโs population is following the king in His kingdom. Seems like the Kingdom is growing if we just look at people who profess faith in Christ.
But we might note that the world population is also growing. So, is the community of people in the Kingdom of Light growing faster than the world population, or has that community been stagnant?
At the time of Christ, there were roughly 300 million people on earth. How many people followed Jesus at the time of His death? Estimates differ, but most sources claim that between a few dozen and 500 people claimed to follow Christ at the time of His ascension.
Letโs just say there were 500 followers at that point out of a population of 300 million people. What percentage of the world population was Christian at the time of His ascension? Itโs โ.0000-somethingโ percent. Really, really small. Itโs a lot less than the 12-30% of the world population now.
The point is that if we were to measure the growth of the Kingdom of God among people who profess to follow Jesus, it has grown exponentially over the last 2,000 years.
Of course, other world religions have grown and continue to grow. But for Christians in the
West, we often seem to forget that Christianity has exploded around the world and continues to grow with no signs of letting up.
7. The Kingdom of God is greater than the Kingdom of Darkness
This is another characteristic of the Kingdom that doesnโt always seep into the idea of the Gospel in our hearts.
This conflict between the two kingdoms is not Star Wars. There is no force. There is no need to have a balance between good and evil. There is no Ying and Yang.
Jesus Christ and His Kingdom are greater than the Kingdom of Darkness.
Thereโs a passage where Jesus is casting out demons, and the Pharisees accuse Jesus of casting them out by the power of Satan. Jesus responds,
โBut if I cast out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are undisturbed. But when someone stronger than he attacks him and overpowers him, he takes away from him all his armor on which he had relied and distributes his plunder.โ[2]
Jesus is taking a shot at the powers of darkness here. Jesus, the stronger man, is binding the darkness and plundering it. Heโs come to take His stuff back. And thatโs what Heโs been doing ever since.
How the Story Ends (at least this part)
Weโll explore the Kingdom more fully down the road, but letโs take a look at how this part of the story ends. If Jesus inaugurated the Kingdom when He arrived, what happens to it at the end of the age?
Paul lays out some information about this in 1 Corinthians 15. Heโs describing the order of resurrection โ who gets their new and improved bodies and in what sequence:
โBut each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christโs at His coming, then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to God the Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death.โ[3]
What is our King doing right now? He is reigning and putting all enemies under his feet.
Hereโs some more info from the Revelation:
โThen the seventh angel sounded; and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ; and He will reign forever and ever.โ[4]
At the end of the age, Jesus will finish conquering the Kingdom of Darkness (it will be consumed as it were) and hand His fully established Kingdom back to His Father.
The Story of the Kingdom of Light
Letโs finish off today by picking up the story of the Kingdom when Jesus comes on the scene.
This new King arrives to challenge the rule of darkness. This is not the King we expect. He doesnโt come with trumpets and fanfare. He comes as a zygote, born months later in obscurity, and grows up in a town that some think would be better left off the map. What a strange way for a King to appear.
And yet He splits time in two, and His arrival heralds a new Kingdom โ a Kingdom that dives beneath the surface to transform the human heart – the very place where the kingdom of darkness first took its deadly aim. And though that transformation starts in the heart, it certainly doesnโt stop there.
This King of Light repeatedly attacks and vanquishes the ideas of darkness with the ideas of His Kingdom. He proves His Kingship over both the physical and spiritual realms by repeatedly ignoring the laws of physics and sending the sons of darkness screaming in fear. He stakes His claim as the rightful ruler of the cosmos by boldly announcing to the Kingdom of Darkness and its strong man that He has arrived to plunder it.
Our King forever proves His love, authority, and power by not only willingly dying for us who murdered Him, but by then defeating the first and worst consequence of manโs original rebellion โ death. Just as the curse infected the entire cosmos, the reverse of the curse is happening cosmically.
And, curiously, just as the Father invited Adam and Eve to rule His creation, His Son, the King, invites His children, his brothers and sisters, to participate in the expansion of His Kingdom, His new creation, which is slowly but inevitably swallowing up the kingdom of darkness.
As the roots of our hearts are rescued from the ideas of the domain of darkness, as our spirits become molded in the ideas of the Kingdom of Light, life springs up out of the depths of our soil, and we join our King as He makes things right.
We are, right now, in the already but not yet, but we already know what โnot yetโ means. One day the King will present His Kingdom back to His Father, having rescued, restored, reconciled, and redeemed all of it. All enemies will be defeated, including the first and final enemy of death. The kingdom of darkness will be no more, although its destiny is even now sealed. It is, right now, being swallowed up in light, heart by heart, idea by idea.
The Kingdom of God is growing, expanding, transforming, and renewing. And it cannot be contained.
This is the Good News of the Kingdom of God. This is the Gospel.
Is this the idea of the Gospel in which our hearts are rooted?
Thanks for listening!ย If youโd like more information on Soil and Roots, check out the website at www.soilandroots.org.ย Feel free to drop us an email at fish@soilandroots.org. Weโll see you next time.
[1] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Mk 4:30โ32). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[2] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Lk 11:20โ22). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[3] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (1 Co 15:23โ26). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[4] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Re 11:15). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
