First the Kingdom, part 9: The Simplicity of Christ

When dealing with the Kingdom of God it can easily become overcomplicated. Jesus had a way of hiding His message from the proud, the arrogant, and those who seemed to be wise. At the same time He could bring the most powerful teachings to the uneducated, whose hearts had been melted by His gracious nature. Of course God can use anyone, even intellectuals, for he took an intelligent, educated man like Paul, and broke him down to see the simplicity of Christ!

The devil hates the Gospel of the Kingdom. It is most dangerous to his domain. It does not concern him if we stay in our little circles and comfort one another in the knowledge that heaven awaits us. If we devote most of our time and resources to building great monuments to the prophets and to polishing their sepulchres, he is not hindered. He loves it when we attack one another over subtle differences and interpretations of Scripture. As long as we are not transformed into warriors for the Kingdom of God, he is pleased.

But venture out into the call of Christ to kingdom living and proclaiming, and it becomes a different story. You will easily become misunderstood or overlooked, even discredited. While the Gospel of the Kingdom of God is the most liberating word that you will ever hear, it is also the most threatening to our adversary’s power. Why do you think that the religious authorities in Jerusalem, and the political authorities in Rome were so fearful of it?

It seems the enemies tactic today is basically to encourage people to ignore it. He can so easily entice them to an easy form of religion that requires absolutely nothing of them. They might be willing to pay a price to achieve their own personal safety and comfort, but dying to self for an unworthy world full of sinners? Now that is something else!

The Gospel of the Kingdom is simple, and yet powerful. We are challenged first to repent. This is a very unpopular message. We want to hear that we are all okay. Even repentance has been watered down to just “thinking positive.” Jesus would say that we can only be positive after we faced the negative fact about our selves. “All we like sheep have gone astray, we have gone our own way.” The solution according to Jesus is to lose your life for His sake! Reject the way you are going and follow Him!

Where is He going? To the Cross! The only way to understand and to receive the genuine reality of God’s purpose for us and this world He has created is to lose our lives and to find them in Him! This is not theory or a good idea. This is reality — a wonderful reality to those who accept it! When we repent and believe the Gospel that Jesus has presented we are empowered to live as our Maker intended.

From the outside it might appear that we are hindered from the freedom that others desire. The truth is that He has given us freedom from the things that imprison those very same observers.

The situation is so simple it seems complicated. Life for humans in the very beginning was easy, pleasurable and wonderful. The descriptive word is paradise. Now the modern man has a problem. How can he explain the desire every human being has for something we have never seen? we tell fairy stories and fantasies about something we have absolutely no reason to believe exists, outside of the fact that God has placed it into every heart.

Scientists might tell us that survival belongs only to the strong, and that evolution is making us better and stronger all the time. And yet, there is this desire to save the weak creatures in this planet. Why? Because God has set eternity in our hearts. we know instinctively that something is not right when the strong destroy the weak.

Because repentance and submission to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords sounds so difficult, we choose the harder way. The very concept of the Kingdom of God is now being used as a means to an end. This too is the work of the devil. He [...]