Embodying the Kingdom: The Call to Discipleship

i love teresa of avila in her writings always addresses the lord as your majesty when he when she comes to pray she addresses him as your majesty and that's exactly right see he is he is the king and he has a kingdom and the herman the proper hermeneutic i believe of the new testament is a picture of how this vision of the kingdom of god and jesus come together so that as you would read at the end of the book of acts paul is in rome and he's preaching jesus and the kingdom and they come together if you have jesus without a kingdom you're in trouble if you have a kingdom without jesus you're dead [00:16:32]

so now if we can preach this you see and make it real let that water flow out from us we place our confidence in jesus and that will mean that we begin to step into his words and put them into practice so remember jesus says in john 6 the words that i speak unto you they are spirit they are life they are spirit that is their living and that's the nature of this reality which is the kingdom it is a living active presence and it does work with words you know that centurion was right about that it works with words and primarily the word that comes to us and us back to christ and then taking the word of christ and putting it into practice [00:66:08]

so now just jesus is is equipping his people i believe that when jesus sent him out he didn't send them out to start churches as we know them he sent them out to establish beachheads of the kingdom of god and it was to be a perpetual and ongoing moral revolution which is still in progress it's not done we're a part of this and then churches spin out of that and become a part of it so the the uh primary action here is the kingdom i do think that's a saving realization for us as we do our work wherever we're placed is that it is the kingdom that is working and then we are doing our part within that context [00:154:239]

i've been given say over heaven everything in heaven and earth see that's crucial to know because we're not going out on our own but we're going out on his behalf and of course that was very important in the context because if he just started out by saying go make apprentices among people of every kind the fellows standing there would probably have said well yes lord in the life of our recent successes in jerusalem we're ready to take on the world so he has to start before that i've been given say over everything in heaven and earth so go make apprentices to me disciples i use the word apprentice because it has a little more teeth in it and i think it is exactly what he meant among people of every kind all nations submerge them in the reality of the trinitarian god [00:208:159]

and the heartbreaking reality today is that because we don't normally have a gospel that naturally leads to discipleship we have divorced being a christian from being a disciple and so we have a sea of professing christians and i don't mean in the least to attack them in any way who have never heard of discipleship as something relevant to them and so we have this idea that being a disciple of jesus is an option of some sort and then we have even special pair church groups who deal with discipleship rather than seeing that as a normal function of the local people of christ the congregations so that's crucial because you really can't go on if you don't come through discipleship and everything afterwards that you attempt if you don't come that way will be hindered or just impossible [00:314:72]

as jesus is apprentice or disciple or student i'm learning from him how to lead my life in the kingdom of god as he would lead my life if he were i so i'm learning from him how to live in the kingdom of god as he would lead my life now i don't lead his life the challenge to me is to lead my life i am a particular person born in a particular place with a people and a history and all of that and that's where i'm positioned and now my task is to learn how to do that as he would do that if he were i and that applies to women as well as men young as well as old any kind of classification you want to make of human beings that's the challenge is to learn that [00:483:44]

jesus in the sermon on the mount leads us into the kingdom of god that's what the beatitudes are about they're proclamations of kingdom reality and that's what he's been teaching all along and the beatitudes give us the blessedness of the kingdom we talked about that a little bit last night and that's the foundation for his his teaching is the blessedness of life in the kingdom is the foundation for his teaching and then he gives the beatitudes trying to help people understand the the way the kingdom is open to the people that on the human scale are normally not thought to be well off and so he says now in the kingdom you have this inversion you know the first shall be last and the last shall be first and so on [00:770:959]

i say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that it describes in the pharisees you will not enter the kingdom of the heavens and it's in plural there most of the occurrences in matthew are plural the kingdom of the heavens referring not to heaven after you die but to the rule of god right now here and that's the kingdom of the heavens he says if you're going to enter that you have to go beyond the righteousness of the scribe and the pharisees and then he immediately begins to illustrate that with his teachings the old law the scribes and the pharisees said don't kill and the righteousness described in the pharisees is always i didn't do anything wrong that's the righteousness of the scribe and the pharisee [00:952:8]

and jesus goes beyond that and immediately into the heart of our lives our thoughts our feelings and begins to talk about things like anger and contempt and cultivated lusting you see that's where we have to go if we're going to surpass the righteousness of the scribe and the pharisee we have to go through an internal transformation that gives us different thoughts and different feelings and indeed transforms our very body itself in terms of what it is ready to do so that it is ready to do the right thing rather than the wrong thing and as we do that then we come to know the action of god in our lives because actually we can't do that on our own even and it looks rather hopeless but when we put ourselves into it as disciples of jesus we begin to experience the upholding and empowerment to become different kinds of people [00:987:199]

jesus just like a surgeon puts his knife into the roots of our behavior and says that's where we change and goes on to talk about regarding people as fools and then moves on the positive side and now i know you all know these passages so i'm not going to i don't take a lot of time over them but you know how he moves it gets to the situation where someone is offering their gift in the temple and they realize that there's a problem with the brother or sister and they leave their gift at the altar now if you know that situation you know that was one of the things you just didn't do you did not interrupt a ritual in the temple unless there was some ritual or ceremonial matter that made it necessary not no mere moral matter would justify it that jesus is turning that around saying go make things right and then come back and do it [00:1191:84]

jesus is saying here is you become the kind of person in his fellowship and in his teaching for whom that's just the easy and natural way to be and then that spreads and of course then in our our congregations and in our communities and the idea is to reach the whole world with this kind of humanity a new humanity in the kingdom of god that's what he's really talking about this is how we know the kingdom of god the deathless kingdom of god this is how we seek the kingdom and find it and that as a center of our life then enables us to be the kind of people that we all know jesus intended for us to be and a great burden goes off and we are allowed to just stand and minister the kingdom and let the living water flow and watch him do his work and rejoice in the lord [00:1450:24]