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Today is the day. Now is the time. The Advent is upon us. The Kingdom of God is here…now. If this brief series has been successful, you now have the necessary framework through which you can experience THE Advent. We’ve pulled our heads out, by(reconsidering) John the Baptist kicking off the Kingdom in the wilderness. We’ve examined our emotional over-attachment to the nativity scene and the Religious Industrial Complex which leverages the baby in the manger. Last week we had to admit that the Kingdom didn’t come through religion, but twenty miles away in the wilderness.

The last layer to extract is that of time. The mental, emotional, and ritual distraction continually redirects our attention to the Kingdom at its infancy, OR at its final culmination, but rarely the NOW. If Christ is the King, the world is asking, where’s His Kingdom? We look daily upon a suffering, delusional, hateful, and unjust world, and the best comfort religion can offer is that the Kingdom is still coming. “It’s not here” feels like a cop-out. Two thousand years later and the Church is still waiting. Is “One Day” the best we can get?

NO!

My desire for all comers is for each to experience Christ’s Kingdom just as it was in His day…which is the only way we can. People couldn’t perceive it then and we struggle to perceive it now despite all generations being within it. It is “entered” or “received” with difficulty, because we assume it’s like every other kingdom in the world.

There…it ISN’T!!!

“The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” (Luke 17:20-22)

No pointing finger can direct us because is not a “THING”, it’s not an object, it is a “NO-THING“, it’s a subject, but it’s not a nothing. The Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom of God is not an other-worldly place, it’s the depth dimension bursting through and powering every particle of our universe. It’s the antecedent to the material world, which is the illusion.

Evangelicals tell us Heaven is the place saved people go after they die, making “one-day” heaven the goal of religion, throwing in “one-day” eternal torture as an opposing destination. We must rethink (repent) of this. Heaven is anywhere the Spirit of Christ exists. Our desire must not be for Heaven, but for Christ himself. Here’s your test: If Christ were to dwell in Hell, would you accept Hell to be with Him?

Let’s press this through by examining our lives. What’s the most pressing thing of your day? Do you toil under a cruel taskmaster? Do you feel weighted down by debt or slavery to a lender? How are your most vital relationships? Is there a pain-gap between you and your parents, your spouse, or your children? When was your last prayer that God clearly and decisively answered? Do you struggle daily with lack in basic provisions? Do these questions evoke any sense of self-pity? Do you feel forgotten? What about anxiety of uncertainty? Why haven’t your rituals, incantations, effort and output kept all these at bay?

What if I told you these common daggers of life are not evidence that the Kingdom of God is still to come, but are the scourge of Love proving the King is reigning. Oh, did you want Lions laying down with lambs and every tear wiped away? Did you want freedom from toil, if so, then death is your greatest hope, not Christ or His Kingdom. The reason the Jews didn’t recognize their messiah, is the same reason why we don’t recognize the Kingdom as it is now.

“Then he said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered, “The Christ of God.” ²¹ And he strictly charged and commanded them to tell this to no one,²² saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” ²³ And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. ²⁴ For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:20-24)

Jesus explained to his disciples that His Kingdom will be rejected by religion. If you can see “The Christ of God” then His Kingdom has come into view. Self-denial and cross bearing are kingdom experiences. False teachers promise wealth, health, and promotion, but the moment we become willing to die to ourself for the sake of another, the Advent of the Kingdom has come through us. If it seems like this Kingdom kind of sucks, or doesn’t meet expectations, then we are at the precipice…the good part is on the other side of the suck…not instead of it. We must follow Christ’s example to experience His Kingdom in and through the struggle and pain of life.

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,⁶ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,⁷ but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. ⁸ And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. ⁹ Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹ and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:5-11)

Christ’s Kingdom is counter-intuitive. His Kingdom has no “power-over” dynamic like that in politics, business, and religion. These “exzousian” and “doxa” (powers and glory) are Satan’s kingdom which Jesus rejected. The Hallmarks of the Kingdom’s Advent are not rising in power, status, privilege, and posture, but the humiliating experience of being forsaken, overlooked, rejected, and marginalized. Our King has not forgotten us in our pain, but has built His kingdom “in the midst” of our most painful and arduous trials…in and as our very life.

Within five minutes, our lives may be pulled into some reality which we will find undesirable or even excruciating. The Hells of your life are not proof God’s Kingdom is still yet to come, they are its coming which we’ve rejected. We enter the kingdom with difficulty, not because we won’t convert to religion, but because we want a life that is better than that of Jesus. We join the kingdom by joining Christ in his suffering when, in faith, we join our suffering. Faith is powerfully real when the suffering Christ is experienced as our suffering. Accessing the Kingdom in faith turns enemies into friends, pain into healing, weakness into strength, and death into new life. Once we discover that nothing worse than what happened to Christ will ever happen to us, our disposition to His kingdom changes, and suddenly our tears are wiped away and all sad things become untrue. Everything is made new.

Christ has come. His eternal Kingdom awaits us in our next struggle. This kingdom entered by any other gate, is not God’s Heaven.