37. What does "Thy Kingdom Come" mean? | John Ortberg

When we pray, "Your will be done," we are not resigning ourselves to fate but surrendering to a power greater than ourselves.

HERE'S HOW:
Today, take some time to prayerfully consider how to take one or all of the three steps below:

Choose Actively: Make choices that align with the teachings of Jesus and contribute to the betterment of the world.

Surrender to God's Will: Surrender our desires to God's will, allowing it to guide our actions and decisions.

Pray for God’s Kingdom on Earth: Pray for God's kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven, seeking justice, peace, and love to prevail in the world.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:11

So I will start by telling you about two different prayers that can actually sound a little bit similar. One of them is, Your will be done. Not my will, your will be done. The second one is whatever. Whatever happened will happen. I don't care. There is a world of difference between those two prayers. We're invited to pray the first one, never the second. We are learning together from the greatest teacher of all time, Jesus of Nazareth, greatest talk of all time, the Sermon of the Mount, and the great prayer that He's given to us, 57 words that change the world. Our Father, who is very near us, closer than the air we breathe, hallowed be your name. May people treasure your character, how good and uh strong uh for love you are, and then now today your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And the primary message that Jesus brought, of course, was uh about the kingdom of God, and that's just simply God's action, God being at work, and his good news was not that the kingdom of heaven is coming to being, it has always existed. His good news is that now through Jesus it has become available to ordinary, messed up, fallen, broken, screwed-up people like me and like you. And so we are to pray. Your kingdom come, your will be done right here in this world, uh as it is in heaven. Heaven is that place where everything is the way that God wants it to be, everything runs according to God's will. In this world, God's kingdom is present, God's will, God's person is here, but other kingdoms are present as well. Other wills are present as well. And it's very important to understand this. Dallas Wood writes about this, I think, in very helpful ways. Many, many folks have talked about the kingdom of God in a um dynamic that involves, yep, it's here already, but it's not yet. It's not yet here in its fullness. And very often this gets talked about in a way that makes people say, Well, I'll put off living in this kingdom until not yet, not yet, not yet, because I don't know how much it's here. It is fully here. God cannot be present without being fully present. It's simply that it's here, present, uh, in a world where lots of other wills God allows to be present as well. Aquinas talked about this uh with a distinction that I think is kind of helpful when we think about God's will in our lives, that uh there's God's antecedent will, and that's God's will, if nothing but God's will ever got done, and then God's consequent will. What is God's will uh after the fact that lots of people have chosen selfishness and lots of things that God Himself would not have chosen, which God allows so that we can be free. For example, Elder Stump gives an example around this one. Um, and mom's antecedent will, she has a two-year-old, he loves pizza more than anything. Um, she gets pizza, wants the family to have a happy pizza dinner, but then that two-year-old starts throwing the pizza on the floor, jamming the pizza everywhere. She ends up saying, if you don't eat your pizza now, you're gonna have to go to your room. And then he hits his sister and um throws the rest of his pizza on the table, and so he has to march off uh to his room. Her consequent will is that he sit in the timeout chair and contemplate on the trajectory of his life. Her antecedent will was that the family have a happy pizza dinner together. Now, God's antecedent will for this rule, for this world, is that uh all beings come to know him and love him and treasure and love each other. It's for flourishing, it's for shalom. But we live in a world where everything is messed up, where sin has messed everything up. Now, we all have our own little kingdoms. And it's very important that you understand that God treasures the fact that you have a kingdom, that you have a will. That's why God gave you a body. Our bodies are that little sphere in which we're first able to understand about kingdoms, because I can make my body do what I want it to do. And it's very important that you know that part of God's will for you is that you choose, is that you will. I was talking to a friend quite recently whose daughter just chose what college he was going to go to, and he was saying, Man, I was so proud for her. It's very important you understand very often when you think about what God's will for my life, it's not necessarily um you gotta guess what college does God want you to go to, what job does God want you to take, what person does God want you to marry, where does God want you to live? Um, if you're a parent, you have a child, you understand. If you always told that kid, um, move here, go to this school, choose this major, take this job, and they just did what you told them to do, would that be a good thing? The correct answer is no, that would not be a good thing. Because you want them to develop their own character and their own judgment. So often your will for your child will be, I want you to choose so that you get a really good chooser. God wants you to develop a really good chooser. That's why God gave you a chooser. But now, of course, the problem is that sin has got me into our kingdoms. A kingdom is simply a system of personal power, starting with each one of us in our bodies and our minds and our wills. And then we intersect and blend and merge, and there's families and there's neighborhoods, and um, there's multinational corporations, and sin gets into all of us, and it's it's deeply messed up. So we have to surrender. That doesn't mean we don't care, that's not whatever. For you to have desires of your heart is a really good thing, but then we're called to surrender what we happen to desire in service of what is good. And ultimately, that is the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is real, it has always existed through Jesus. It has now become present and available to you and me, and to want that above all else is what we're and so we pray, God, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, right here where we are. Make up there, come down here. And then Jesus in the scripture is full of what does that look like? I'll just talk about it from one verse in Romans 14, verse 17. Paul says, For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking. We are constantly shrinking the largeness and vastness and goodness of God's kingdom and turning it into something that's legalistic or something that we can control or something I can measure, so I feel like, well, I'm in, too bad for you, you're out. It is not a matter of eating and drinking, which is what they were turning it into back in Paul's day in the Church of Rome, all these rules about dietary laws and so. But of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Now let's unpack that for a minute. Mirislav Wolf is a theologian at Yale, and uh he has a huge project to look at human flourishing, because he's convinced that rightly understood the kingdom of God is really about human flourishing. He said basically there's three elements to human flourishing. One is uh I will enter into shalom or flourishing when I do good, when I become a person who just genuinely from the inside is truthful and generous and loving towards other people and uh live with a kind of peace and a uh a spirit of servanthood. Now, um when sin gets into me, then that's not present, and I am not what Paul calls righteous. Righteousness is that genuine kind of good, and I violate other people's kingdoms. Years ago, a group of folks from a church where I worked went to visit Jim Collins, and Collins talked about one of the big problems at work is uh you end up with some guy who is this kind of tyrant, and he is the genius with a bunch of very capable helpers. But they feel their personhood diminished because they're just bossed around. They're treated as less than it. It was kind of ironic. Everybody went there, felt like I kind of feel like that's what life is like here where we're working. When our kingdoms are diminished, we feel violated. But in the kingdom of God, it is not so. God, uh Dallas Willie writes, I don't think I've read this yet. Dallas Willard writes, God is unlimited creative will and constantly invites us even now into an ever larger share of what God is doing. That's why in the Bible the idea is we're gonna end up sitting on thrones. Our prayer is not whatever, we're not called to passivity, we are called to choose and to will and to submit our wills to His. So it's righteousness, it's good. And then Paul says it's peace. Miroslav says that when human beings flourish, um, they do good, they also do well. When we live uh with great suffering could happen to our bodies. Uh slavery is an example when people's personhood and their kingdoms were violated, they were considered not to be persons, and so their kingdoms were taken away, and that stops human flourishing. Um the Bible's word for this peace in the Old Testament was shalom. Uh the harmonious webbing together of God and all of creation, the climate, the earth, creatures, and especially human beings, and mutual delight. And then the third dimension, Miroslav says, of uh shalom is emotional. Um we feel a sense of goodness. Even if we did virtuous things, uh and our lives were not suffering in their circumstances, it wouldn't be good if there wasn't a basic sense of emotional well-being internally. So the kingdom of God is not a matter of legalism of um eating and drinking righteousness, doing good, peace, doing well, and joy in the Holy Spirit. And so now we pray. This is the prayer today, not whatever. As you go through the day, um think, choose, desire. That's a really good thing, and then surrender that. Oh God, your kingdom come. Your will be done. We are, I live in the fellowship of the withered hand. And I often wish that the kingdom of God was a matter of circumstances, but that's not what Paul writes. I ache, I get real scared about the future. I don't mean that I used to be scared about the future and I have delivered in that. I think in these days a lot, um, yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil because you are with me. I wish that um truth were known. I wish that justice would prevail, even though I don't know what all that would mean for me and where I have fallen short from that. I wish that people that I love could be safe from great suffering that I fear for them. I wish that relationships that are broken in my little world were not broken anymore. There's all kinds of things that I cannot fix it. But see, my prayer is not to be what I used to think it was. It's not, God, get me out of there so I can go up here. It's not the old Star Trek, Scotty, be me up prayer. It's oh God, oh God, oh God, make up their come down here. That's the prayer today. Your kingdom come on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Reddit, your kingdom come to Ukraine and Russia and Gaza and Israel, your kingdom come to the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, your kingdom come to my neighborhood, to my home, God. Would your kingdom come to my home, to my family, to my body, my mind? Make up their come down here. That's the prayer for today. Make it a golden rule day.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

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