Matt Chandler - The Kingdom Now

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab them; we are going to be in Acts chapter two. We will be finishing our series on the kingdom of God today. For the last 12 weeks, that is what we’ve been discussing—looking at and diving into it. Also, it is Pentecost Sunday, a day that the church has historically celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit and the expansion of the kingdom of God to the ends of the earth. Therefore, I thought we could conclude the series by going back to the very first weekend when we defined what the kingdom was. We used Steve Timmis’s definition of the kingdom; Steve is the CEO of the Acts 29 church planting network, and we are heavily involved in that network—700 churches, 30 languages, something like that—all over the world. It’s pretty cool! Here was his definition: the kingdom of God is where the Father’s rule is exercised through the Son by the power of the Spirit. There is your triune nature of God expressed in this way: where the reign and rule of God are willingly obeyed, gloriously displayed, and happily enjoyed among His people.

One of the reasons I love Steve’s definition is that, biblically and experientially, this is how we have learned to submit to the God of the Bible. He starts with that stage one of sanctification, where we willingly obey the Word of God. You typically can’t start with «happily enjoyed,» and the reason why «happily enjoyed» isn’t the starting point is that, for many of us, we have to grow in trust of God as our Lord and Savior. Many of you will remember what it was like to become a Christian, experiencing those spaces where it was really easy for us to say yes to God and follow Him, but then there were other areas that required faith. In those moments, we wrestled with ourselves, saying, «No, no, I’m going to trust the God of the Bible more than I trust my own intuition.» This willful obedience to the Word of God then led to the glorious display of God’s goodness and grace because all the «thou shalts» and «thou shalt nots» in the Bible are about your joy in His glory. Every time we submit our compulsion to the Word of God and orient our lives through the power of the Spirit to God’s revealed will, we gloriously display His wisdom and mercy to the rest of the world. Finally, upon those two foundations, it can be happily enjoyed among His people. But you don’t start with «happily enjoyed»; you start with willful obedience. You begin with the decision to submit your life to God as King, and that is very different than just being a social conservative. That’s very different than saying, «I grew up in the South.» Fill in the blank; submission to King Jesus as Lord of our lives is willful obedience. It shows and proves, and this is the aspect I want to continue to emphasize because I believe it’s a confusion of our day: that Christianity is not primarily about personal comfort or human happiness. Are you with me? Christianity is not primarily about personal comfort and human happiness; that’s not what the kingdom is about, nor what the gospel is about. In fact, you and I, as Christians, find ourselves in the tension between human flourishing and the cross and self-denial. That’s where we find ourselves: God has made known to us the path of life. All the «thou shalts» and «thou shalt nots» are about our joy, but we live in a fallen world. Thus, we find ourselves in the tension between human flourishing and the cross of Jesus Christ. This makes us seem odd because if there’s any unforgivable sin in 2018, it’s not giving in to your personal impulses, right? I mean, that cannot be forgiven because that’s who you really are. Those impulses you have, sexually or financially—you should never suppress those; those are who you are. Give yourself over to those impulses, because if there’s one lesson thousands of years of human history has taught us, it’s that we know what’s best for us. If anyone can lead us to our own personal happiness, it’s us—not to make a joke, but history shows us that we break everything! Every philosopher and every culture has struggled to understand why we can’t achieve our own happiness. The Greeks tried it, the Romans tried it; they all had different ideas about why we can’t reach where we want to go. C.S. Lewis expresses this beautifully: «I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew that a bottle of port would do that. If you want a religion to make you really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.»

Now, think about how foreign that sentence is to large swaths of American evangelicals. If what you want is to feel really, really comfortable, then I definitely don’t recommend Christianity. What did Lewis imply could bring him that comfort? A bottle of port! If you want to be happy for a few moments and then be overcome by guilt and shame, there’s a way to do that. But coming to Christ as King assures you into a kingdom not of personal comfort and human happiness, but what I would argue is a joy that transcends all understanding.