It was great to see our new worship song, Build Your Kingdom Here, included by our youth in youth Sunday. It is a prayer appropriate to all believers—yet it seems especially significant on the lips of the next generation that God will use to expand His kingdom work in our world.
When I first heard this song on Air1 (local Christian station 88.1) I cannot say that it was “love at first listen.” However, the more I contemplated the message of this song, the more I was moved by its message. So, when God led us to our vision for 2014, “building God’s kingdom through a culture of discipleship, passionate prayer and engaging outreach,” it felt like the perfect theme song for our body in 2014.
Kingdom-building is something that comes natural to us as human beings. However, it isn’t always God’s kingdom which captures our hearts. A great example of our kingdom-building bias is the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11. We read in verse 4, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” It is in our DNA to want to build our kingdoms and make names for ourselves. Of course, for most of us, kingdom-building does not involve a tower. But like the saying, “A man’s house is his castle,” our homes can certainly become like little kingdoms. The same could be said for the cars we drive or success at work or even our recreational pursuits. Kingdom-building is natural for us.
As a result, to shift our focus from building our little kingdoms to building the eternal kingdom of the living God is not a small feat. Even for the disciples who walked with Jesus, especially earlier on in the Gospels, embracing God’s kingdom required a paradigm shift. They struggled to see things from a kingdom vantage. Probably nothing exemplifies this more than Peter’s “rebuke” of the Lord in the wake of Christ predicting his death in Jerusalem. We often focus on the first part of Jesus’ response, “Get behind me Satan.” However, it is what comes next that is most instructive, “You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men” (Mt. 16:23 and Mk. 8:33).
It took nothing short of a Copernican revolution, in the death and resurrection of our Lord, for the disciples to finally “get it.” And it was this revolution that saw the dramatic spread of the Kingdom in the book of Acts. And yet, by the book of Revelation, this kingdom focus seems to have waned. For example, Jesus says to the church in Ephesus, after remarking upon their hard work and perseverance, “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love” (Rev. 2:4).
In some ways, you could say that every generation of believers is in need of a little revolution. It is so easy to get caught up in the temporary things of this world and to let the things of the kingdom take a back seat. But what we see so clearly in the life and teaching of our Savior, and then again in the growth of the church in Acts, is that the heartbeat of the church is the work of the Kingdom through the Gospel of grace.
In a sense, you could put “building God’s kingdom” into every vision statement for every church. However, there are certainly times when God renews, refreshes, revives this vision for the Kingdom in a unique way. Maybe it is time for a mini-revolution in our church. Maybe it is time for a mini-revolution in your heart! For if we would see God’s kingdom built “here,” it must begin with each one of us, as individuals, placing God’s kingdom above all of the other little kingdoms that compete for our hearts.
How about you? Will you pray, “Build your kingdom here”? I am not talking about a one-off prayer. I am talking about daily asking Jesus to be king of my life, to direct the decisions I make, to work through me to accomplish His kingdom purposes. For every time we put His kingdom first, we are expressing the kingship of Jesus in our world and obedience to His command, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).
For Christ and His Kingdom, Pastor Dan