The Kingdom -Vol. 2 -Another Excerpt

My friend Steve Brown and I are excited to see our second volume on the Kingdom of God now available. To give you just a taste of  what this book that is all about -- Jesus’ great sermon on the Kingdom life -- we will share this week another excerpt from the Introduction.

Realize there is no way to live this life on our own power. The more we read these teachings of Jesus, the more we may find ourselves saying, “God have mercy on us.” The Sermon starts with a beatitude (“blessed are the poor in spirit”) that is a confession that we are spiritual beggars…that we cannot do this without help. But each of the Beatitudes is a reminder of the grace that God intervenes to give his people. Of the “poor in spirit” Jesus says, “theirs is the Kingdom”! They taste the powers of the coming age (Hebrews 6:5). They receive strength to turn and live a new way.

In Matthew’s Gospel before the Sermon, we have this statement of Jesus in chapter 4: “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near’” (v17 Holman). In calling people to repentance (metanoia), he was calling for a radical change of mind and heart that would not only involve a commitment to a whole new way of conduct but to a whole new dependence on God for the power to live that new life.

It can be no accident that as Jesus gives these teachings, he includes two vital sections on prayer—one in chapter 6 and one in chapter 7. If we fail to trust in and rely on the “much more of the heavenly Father” (7:11), we will find our engine sputtering on Jesus’ narrow road, our wheels stuck in a rut, or the car careening off a ledge. We can agree that the Sermon makes us even more aware of our need for God’s grace and mercy, but we must also hear that God will give both.

As Glen Stassen and David Gushee say in their recent book, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in the Contemporary Context, what is described in the Beatitudes is “participative grace.” In contrast to the “cheap” and one-sided grace Bonhoeffer so famously described, participative grace grasps us, teaches us, trains us and empowers us to live the new life.

Trying to live the Sermon on the Kingdom life without the grace of God is like an ordinary person trying to climb Everest without oxygen. Apart from God’s grace, the message of this sermon will either wear you out or turn you into a legalist who wears everybody else out. In neither case will you find the Kingdom.