[Jesus] talks about the kingdom all the time, every day, almost every hour…But…[w]hen he talks about it, it skips from analogy to analogy…He does not say what it is, only what it is like. It’s like a tiny seed. It’s like a big tree. Like something inside you. Like a pearl you’d give everything to possess. Like wheat growing among weeds. Like the camel climbing through the needle’s eye. Like the way the world looks to children…Like getting a day’s pay for an hour’s work…Like a wedding party…Like a treasure, like a harvest, like a door that opens whenever you knock. Or like a door you have to bang on for ours in the middle of the night until a grumpy neighbor wakes up and lends you a loaf. The kingdom is – whatever all those likenesses have in common. The kingdom, he seems to be saying, is something that can only be glimpsed in comparisons, because the world contains no actual examples of it. And yet the world glints and winks and shines everywhere with the possibility of it. – Francis Spufford, Unapologetic

The followers of Jesus are to be different…different from both the religious and the irreligious….And this Christian counter-culture is the life of the kingdom of God, a fully human life indeed but lived out under divine rule. — John R.W. Stott

God’s aim for our lives is not that we would simply obey him, but that we would treasure him. Jesus tells us 3 things that must happen to you for Jesus to become your treasure: You need eyes to see the treasure. You must lose it all to get the treasure. You have to smile at the cost of the treasure.