Sermon
Series: God is Closer
Than You Think
The Kingdom – It’s Here Now
John 1:14-15
Dr. Larry D. Thorson
Well we’ve come to the last sermon
in our series God is Closer Than You
Think. Next Sunday of course is
Easter and we begin a new series entitled That
Empty Tomb Feeling. It’s a study
from the Gospel of John 20-21 and other passages about different reactions of people
to Jesus’ empty tomb on the first Easter morning. It’s about what we do with feelings of
disappointment when things don’t turn out as we expected. Where do you go and what do you do with that
disappointment? What you do with it
determines what it does to you. Along the way you’ll meet some interesting
ordinary people like you and me who struggle with the same things we do. Invite your friends to this series.
Now back to God is Closer Than You Think.
Every week of this series we’ve been
gaining an understanding about the nearness of God and the powerful
relationship we can enjoy with him now.
• Week 1 was about his desire to be with us.
• Week 2 was all about our choice to be with him.
• Week 3 we talked about the presence of
God’s Spirit within
us.
• Week 4 Pastor Scott talked about how
his voice whispers to us through each day in many
ways and how to hear it.
• Week 5 we talked about how God is
reflected in and through the people around us.
Today we’re concluding this series with
the overall mission of Jesus: to bring God’s presence and power into our lives.
Jesus taught his disciples to pray “your
kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” God wants what goes on up in heaven,
his kingdom to be active in our world today.
God wants the world transformed through Jesus Christ.
But we can barely imagine what that
would look like. Even thinking about it
boggles our mind. What really is happening in heaven that would be happening on
this earth if God’s kingdom were to come?
That’s what I want to look at this
morning. John writes in Revelation 7:16
that in the day when God’s kingdom is fully realized never again will people
hunger. Never again will they thirst. Think
about what that would look like—the elimination of hunger. No more pictures of little
children with swollen bellies, no scarcity. No mothers trying to scrounge
around for enough food so that her baby could survive another day. No more
organizations to feed the children. No more need for World Vision or UNICEF or
food banks. But it’s not just the end of
poverty.
The Old Testament prophet Amos wrote: “‘The days are coming,’ declares
the LORD, ‘when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman and the planter by
the one treading grapes. New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from
all the hills.’” (Amos 9:13)
That was written in a semi-desert
context. Middle Easterners would reap and then have to wait a long time for the
rains to come again because the ground wasn’t very fertile. Yet Amos uses
imagery to talk about what the earth would be like if it were redeemed from the
curse that came with Adam and Eve’s sin. The one that plows and the one that
reaps bump into each other because there’s such abundance. “New wine will drip from the
mountains and flow from all the hills.” That doesn’t mean that there’s literally going to be
Chardonnay in the
Here’s how that imagery would sound
today: We’d say things like, “Every day the stock market will end a little
higher than the day before. “The bull
will dwell on Wall Street forever; the bear will visit it no more. Interest rates
will never have to be raised again. Little children in the
Isaiah
2:4 says, “He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against
nation, nor will they train for war anymore”—no more fighting, no more
hatred. They won’t have any use for
swords so they’ll turn them into farm equipment.
The apostle John says in his vision in
the book of Revelation that the street of the city of
When teenage girls in that city look
at magazine covers and then look in the mirror, they would think to themselves,
“I look just right.” Because society would have learned to see and celebrate
the beauty that God sees when he looks at human beings made in his image, every
one of them. Whatever their shape or size or color, they would all look in the
mirror and say, “I look
just
right.” God doesn’t want this to be
something that happens off in the future—but today. In your life—his kingdom in
your world.
In Revelation 21: “On no day will its gates ever
be shut, for there will be no night there.”
Now
in biblical times, of course, there wasn’t electricity. Night was a time of
darkness, a time of vulnerability, a time when crimes were committed, a time of
fear. The city gates would be shut to protect the city’s inhabitants from
intruders. But the Bible says that in
the
Luke
Thought
He Did.”
And then the most beautiful words of
all about the kingdom, from Revelation 21:3–4, “And I heard a loud voice from
the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with
them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their
God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or
mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’”
Think about these words, “He
will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or
crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away.” Anybody want to live in a world like that? No
more Kleenex; no more funeral homes. We will turn caskets into toy chests. John
Ortberg says hearses will be converted to sports utility vehicles with names like
“Eternal Voyager” and “Jeep Grand Resurrection.” And there will be counselors,
but you’ll just go to them when you’re so full of gratitude and joy that you’re
willing to pay somebody to listen to you right now. And every day you will be home with God,
never separated by sin.
Every tribe and tongue and people and
nation will gather like brothers and sisters around the throne, and you who
listen to my voice right now, you who sit in these chairs, you think about
this: you will see the living God. No more doubt, no more questions, no more
wondering “why?”
You will see and look into the very
face of God, and he will be your God. And your every thought will be a prayer,
and your every prayer will be a conversation with God. And God himself will
wipe every tear from your eye, and then he’ll remove the tear ducts, and he’ll
simply point his finger and sadness and sorrow will be banished.
When Mark summarizes the gospel that
Jesus proclaimed in Mark 1:14–15, he is summarizing this very fact:“After John was put in prison,
Jesus went into
See, this is the gospel. It is now possible for human beings to live in the
presence and power of God. You can do
this right now, and it’s the greatest offer you will ever have. And if you want
it more than anything else—which any sane person would—then Jesus says, “Just
follow me to be my fully devoted follower, and you will learn from me how to
live in my Father’s kingdom.” Even the
purpose of his miracles was to authenticate the presence of God’s kingdom on earth,
so that people would know that the kingdom was now a reality.
In Matthew 12:28, “But if I drive out demons by the
Spirit of God, then the
We begin by praying, “Your kingdom
come.” Make up there come down here. The
kingdom is where people shamelessly adore and love God and are freed from sin
so they never cease doing just the kinds of things that God wants. That’s the
kingdom.
John Ortberg describes how a number of
years ago he spent a few weeks in
Amharic,
the national language in
The sincere prayer of a blind,
illiterate, peasant woman asking for the kingdom of God to come truly will have
had a greater impact on the final outcome of all of human history than all the
maneuverings of Caesar, Napoleon, and a thousand other giants who grabbed for
power, but never bent the knee to pray this one prayer. Ten billion years from now it will be a
blind, illiterate, peasant woman from
If you want to experience the
closeness of God—if you want to know the fullness of life that Jesus offers, a
life with him—then pray. First, pray
that the kingdom will come in my life and in your life. “God, your kingdom come,
your will be done just starting right here, starting in this tiny, little piece
of the kingdom, right here, this body.” Now, don’t glide too quickly over that.
That was the hardest prayer Jesus ever prayed.
In the
Even in the suffering, we can
experience the nearness and care of God.
It also means, “God, may I become the kind of person who does your will
from my heart. May your kingdom come to
earth in my life. May I be a kingdom bearer. Not just a kingdom pray-er, that
too, but also a kingdom bearer in my life.”
“God,
I choose to be with you. I want to know the fullness of your Spirit working in
me. I want to hear and respond to the gentle whisper of your voice each day. I
want to see you revealed in and through the people around me. I want up there
to come down here in my life. I want to be close to you.”
So today is character time. The
closeness of God sometimes begins with his gentle voice of conviction—asking
you to clear out the idols and weeds in your life that are keeping you from experiencing
his kingdom’s power and fullness.
I’m asking you today to pray to God,
“All right, God, your will be done in my life, in this relationship. Your will
be done, not mine, with my children, my marriage, my friendships, my career.
Your will be done. And may I bring the reality of your kingdom into my
relationships. God, make me a kingdom
kind of servant and a kingdom kind of encourager and a kingdom kind of
confronter and a kingdom kind of friend.”
There is power in that prayer. You need to know that the God who desires to
be with you, the God who is so much closer than you think, is the God who is
looking at you right now and his heart wells up with love. It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t
matter if you fall, if you fail, if you stumble, if you achieve great things or
you don’t achieve apparently great things at all. You are chosen of God. You
are declared holy by God. You are the beloved of God.
I’ll give you a little parable about
this, and with this, we close. This is from a book I just love called The Whisper Test, written by Mary Anne Berg.
“I
grew up knowing I was different,” she writes, “and I hated it. I was born with
a cleft palate. When I started school, my classmates made it clear to me how I
looked, a little girl with misshapen lip, crooked nose, lopsided teeth and
garbled speech.” That’s how she learned to think of herself. “When schoolmates asked, ‘What happened to
your lip?’ I’d tell them I’d fallen and cut it on a piece of glass. Somehow it
seemed more acceptable to have suffered an accident than to
have
been born different. I was convinced that no one outside my family could love
me.“ There was, however, a teacher in
the second grade who we all adored, Mrs. Leonard. She was short, round, happy, a sparkling
lady. Annually we had a hearing test. Mrs. Leonard gave the test to everyone in
the class, and finally it was my turn. “I
knew from past years that as we stood against the door and covered one ear, the
teacher sitting at her desk would whisper and we would have to repeat it
back—things like ‘the sky is blue ’or ‘do you have new shoes.’ “I waited there
for those words that God must have put into her mouth, those seven words that
changed my life. Mrs. Leonard said in her whisper, ‘I wish you were my little
girl.’” And the little girl who thought
of herself as a reject and a loser, as someone outside, as unacceptable, found
out somebody wanted her, and it changed her life.
And so it is in the
Adapted from John Ortberg’s God is Closer Than You Think