Day Three

Matthew 6:10

    Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

“A little taste of heaven on earth.” That is a phrase you have maybe heard from a friend returning to rainy Ulster from a sunny holiday abroad or from someone who has just finished a delicious meal in a fancy restaurant. It is to experience something truly wonderful, so much so that it may even seem otherworldly, but at the end of the day the best this world has to offer it still only from this world.  Throughout history there have been multiple attempts to try and create heaven on earth, however none of these have ever been successful and many have ended in disaster.

The Kingdom of God is radically different. In God’s Kingdom all evil and injustice will be forgotten, sin and death will be no more, and all God’s people will live with Him under His perfect rule. God dwelling with His people is a major theme throughout the Bible. In the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve would walk with God until sin spoiled this relationship and they were put out of the Garden. As the Children of Israel journeyed through the wilderness, they had the tabernacle in the middle of their camp and God dwelt in the tabernacle being present with His people in a special way, however the tabernacle was only temporary, and was later replaced by the temple in Jerusalem. This temple was meant to be a permanent structure through which God would be with His people, but it was destroyed. In the New Testament, Jesus came as the true and better temple, He is Immanuel, God with us (Matt 1:23).

There is an already and a not yet dynamic to the Kingdom of God. As God’s people today we already get to experience some of the benefits of His Kingdom, but we will not experience it in full until Christ returns. When we pray for God’s Kingdom to come, we are really praying for Christ to return to put an end to all the injustices of this present evil age and to bring His people to dwell fully in the presence of the glory of God. So, we can say that the Kingdom came with Jesus and yet it is still coming as we await Christ’s return.

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matt 13:31-32). This Kingdom starts small and unimpressive but grows far beyond our wildest expectations. Jesus also said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18). As the Kingdom grows it will face severe opposition and persecution, but the Builder is the sovereign and all-powerful Lord. No enemy can defeat Him, nor any obstacle stop Him. Christ builds His Kingdom as the gospel advances, being proclaimed to all peoples and every nation. The really exciting thing is that He calls us as his people to come and participate in sharing that gospel.

One vast difference between heaven and earth is that God’s will is not perfectly followed on earth because of our sin. When we pray for God’s will to be done what we are really doing is asking God to help us to live according to His commands and to follow in His ways. Left to ourselves we could never do that and so we need God’s help and the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us to do God’s will. We all face circumstances that we want to change or situations that we want to improve and there is nothing wrong with praying for those things, but this part of the Lord’s Prayer helps to remind us not to focus too much on ourselves because we do not live in isolation. God is not Santa or a genie who grants wishes. We don’t come to Him with a long list of everything we feel we want. “Your will be done” means putting ourselves second and God’s will first. If we really mean these words when we pray them and with God’s help seek to do His will. Then He will begin to use us as the very means through which His Kingdom advances in this world.