Come Home and Live.

(Sermon I preached a few weekends ago at FBC Shawnee's "Shimmer" youth retreat)

This weekend we are spending time here together and in our host homes discussing and digging deeper into the Kingdom of God. For most of my life that has been simply another “Christian phrase.” You know, those phrases that we don’t really understand and probably couldn’t explain if someone asked us to, but it sounds nice. If someone asked you, a Christ follower, to explain the Kingdom of God, what it is, where it is, how you get to it, would you be able to? If your answer is, “yeah, probably not,” don’t worry, you’re not alone. 

The author of the Good and Beautiful Life, which is the book our weekend is based off of, talks about the serious issue today’s Christ followers have with the “The Kingdom of God.” We don’t understand it, we can’t describe it and we rarely talk about it. Yet in scripture, we find that Jesus talked and preached about The Kingdom of God and its’ being near, all the time.

In the 4^th chapter of Matthew, after Jesus has been baptized and tempted for 40 days, he begins his ministry. He begins to preach and the first thing he preaches is “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is near.” As Christians we hold tightly to the words found in scripture, we often use them to guide us, we teach and preach the words of scripture, yet here is the thesis, the main point, of Christ’s ministry and we read it, we smile and nod and walk away unchanged.

 “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘repent for the Kingdom of god is near.’” Though that may sound like a warning, like a “get off facebook and pretend to be doing homework cause mom and dad are home!!!” Or a “you better straighten up cause God’s coming, God’s knows what you’ve done and he’s gonna be pissed.”  Jesus proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God actually isn’t a warning at all, it’s an invitation. The word repent in this context can be translated as “change your mind,” change the way you think, change the way you see, understand that the kind of intimate relationship we can have with God in heaven is now possible on earth.  The invitation is to come and live in the Kingdom of God that is here, right now.

I don’t know if many of you have had the chance to spend anytime around my daughter, Abigail, but she is generally the most joyful, talkative, outgoing little extravert on the planet. As an extravert, she’s a pretty adaptable and fiercely independent little human. When she gets to be a teenager we are in trouble, because she’s got a mind of own and a will the size of Texas. Because of her personality she will normally reach out for other people to hold and interact with her. At first she plays, talks and snuggles with whoever is paying attention to her, but then after a few minutes you can tell she starts to get a bit uncomfortable. She realizes the woman holding her doesn’t smell like mom, she doesn’t look like mom; Abigail starts feels uncomfortable in the admirer’s arms. You can begin to see the stress on Abigail’s face and in her body language. This is when she begins frantically reaching out for me or Ray. See, Ray and I are home for her. Our arms, our voice, our love; it’s Abigail’s home.

The Kingdom of God is very similar to that picture.  The Kingdom of God is home. This home is what we were created to be apart of, where God desires us to dwell and what Christ died for us to experience. Home is a place where our insecurities die, where need to be in control of life disappears, where our struggles with lust, lying, and looking for things outside of us to fill the inside of us are healed. The Kingdom of God is home and what we see in looking at the meta-narrative of scripture is that God has been and will continue to call us home.

But, before we can fully understand this home and live into the reality that the Kingdom of God not only waits for us in the next life but that it is here, it is now and it is for everyone, there is one crucial thing that must happen. It is what is intended to be the foundation of our relationship with God. It is what makes the gospel of Jesus Christ complete. It is one of the few absolute truths that exist in this world. And it is that you are accepted.

You are accepted by God, as you are right now, today in this very moment. You are accepted by God in the very best and worst moments of your life. You are accepted because you are God’s most precious and prized creation. No matter if you are sitting here, the picture of perfection, never done anything wrong your entire life or if you’re sitting here believing the lie that you’ve screwed up too badly to ever receive love, you are offered the same acceptance.

This is where we often run into trouble. There’s got to be a catch; it seems too simple. There are a lot of wonderful things about our society. Advancements in technology, surgical care, greatness in the arts and even sports many times are a result of our society. Yet these achievements come at a price and that price is believing in and surrendering to the message that our individual worth is dependant on our abilities, our achievements and our successes. In our society who we are is based on what we do. Another way to say that is that our being flows from our doing.

 It starts from a young age. We give you grades in school and award those with the highest GPAs. You try out for sports, music and theater and are placed based on your abilities. As parents it’s standard to punish or reward you based on your behavior. While that may be the way society, school and (debatably) parenting must work, it’s not the way God works. So the trouble we run into is that we assume God works the same way the world does.

I’m here to tell you that God doesn’t work this way. You are accepted because God created you. You accepted because Christ gave his life for you. You are accepted not because of anything that you have done or are able to do you. You are accepted solely because you are the prized and precious creation of The Creator.  And until you and I come to place where we can fully live in truth and reality of our acceptance by God, His Kingdom will be something we talk about, read about, smile, nod and walk away unchanged. We will never experience it; at least, not in the way we were created to.

In Matthew 13, we find Jesus preaching to crowds of people, so many in fact that he has to get into a boat on the lake and preach to the people on the shore so they wouldn’t crowd in a clobber him to death. In his famous style, Jesus is preaching in parables. So rather than directly answering people’s questions, he tells stories that illustrate the answers. In verse 44 he tells two really short parables about the Kingdom of God (or heaven), saying this “The Kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought the entire field.” He continues on saying, “again, the Kingdom of God is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.”  Now there are two primary ways that scholars have interpreted these parables. One way is that we are the seekers and finders of the treasure and that when we find the Kingdom of God, it is so amazing and life-changing that we sell everything, give up everything in order to keep it. I personally prefer the other interpretation, which is that we are the precious treasure; we are the fine pearls. God seeks after us tirelessly, and when we are found, he sells everything to keep us near, because that’s how valuable we are to him.

Isn’t’ that the story? The one that many of us have heard so often that sometimes its profound power is simply lost. Jesus Christ, the only Son of our Creator God brought reconciling salvation to us and then gave his life that we can experience and live in the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in Heaven.

Unlike society, in the Kingdom of God, what you do and how you live come from who you are. You are precious, prized and accepted creation of God. The characteristics that flow from a person who lives in the Kingdom of God, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithful, gentleness and self-control, those actions, those doings, flow from someone who understands and lives in their acceptance.

At our host homes and tomorrow night we will talk more about what it looks like functionally to live in the Kingdom of God, but I needed to talk about our acceptance first because if we don’t know and don’t believe the truth about who we are, talking about how to live . . . it’d be like trying to describe the mountains to blind person. The ways in which we are called to live as citizens of the Kingdom of God, our doings, it must flow from our true-selves, from our accepted being. In the Kingdom of God our doing flows from our being.

You are the precious, prized and accepted treasure of God. Not because of what you do, but because of whose you are. The invitation is that the Kingdom of God is here, so come home and be healed from your insecurities. The Kingdom of God is here, so come home and be free from your fear and anxiety. The Kingdom of God is here, so come home and be released from your addictions to lust, lying and the limelight. The Kingdom of God is here. Come home and live.