The Kingdom of God and Submission to His Authority

That's the basis of a kingdom. A kingdom has to have a king, and from the very beginning, God starts out wanting to let us know that he is the king, not only of the natural order, but of everyone who lives in his world. He is the king, the absolute authority. He controls everything. In the Garden of Eden, one thing God did not control was human beings. He said to those who were in the garden, this is the way I want you to live, but he gave also the capacity for us to be able to say yes to God and no to God. Adam and Eve knew exactly what they were supposed to do. God said you can do anything you want, you can eat anything you want, but not this tree. Don't eat anything on that tree. If they accepted and acknowledged the authority of God over them, they would have said the tree is off limits. Instead, they began to think, perhaps the tree would provide good food for us. It would be nourishing. We know what God said, but what we would like to do is eat some fruit from that tree. So they weighed the command of God against their desire and said we choose to say to God we are not going to do what you tell us, we will do what we want. Suddenly the rule of God over the people in the garden was broken. No longer was God the king of Adam and Eve. The kingdom of God built in that place in the world was shattered. No longer could these people live in this place that God set aside to be his kingdom. They were banished from the garden. From that moment on, God began his plan to be able to establish his kingdom as he really intended with Adam and Eve. Every story in the Bible is a story about how God is trying to establish his kingdom. It begins with one thing, the acknowledgement of the supreme authority of God over my life and my behavior. My submission to his authority. It's one thing to say you're in charge, it's another for everyone to act like you're in charge. What God is interested in is establishing his authority so that we will see that the things he tells us are true. So every issue is, is God in charge of my life? Is God in charge of our nation? Is God in charge of our community? That's what you see all the way through the scriptures. The second thing is, once God is in charge, he clearly explains to us exactly what he wants us to do. Adam and Eve, he said, you can do anything here, this is what you can't do. Every time God brings someone into his kingdom, he requires that they acknowledge his supreme authority and then he makes clear to them exactly what he wants them to do. Sometimes it's by means of an angel who visits them, or sometimes it's in a dream, sometimes it's in written words like in the Ten Commandments, sometimes it's in the spoken word like from the prophets or from Jesus, but all the way through the Bible, God is certainly clear about what it means to live under him as the king. Here are the rules. Now the rules of God, called laws, are really not like the laws we would make for a country. They're more like the laws of nature. The law of gravity, for example, if you jump off of a three-story building, you're going to fall, and you're going to hit the ground, and you're going to be hurt. There's not anything in the world you can do to violate that law. What God says is, if you want to find life in all of its fullness, here's the way you treat me, here's the way you treat other people, here's the way you live. You live like this and you'll find life in all of its fullness. That's his principle. The third thing that happens in the kingdom of God is those in the kingdom of God are a great blessing to everyone around them. Adam and Eve were a blessing to each other. They were a blessing to the garden until the day they said, no, we will not do what God has said. And then they were a curse to each other, and they were a curse to the garden, and God had to remove them. After all this happened, God began to set about finding someone with whom he could start building his kingdom. He wanted someone to be able to be that person who would say, I trust you, God, more than anything in all the world. The world turned pretty bad after Adam and Eve's time. In fact, the very next chapter of Genesis in the Old Testament, the Lord saw chapter 6 of Genesis beginning at verse 4, verse 5, the Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. You notice that? Every inclination, all the time. The world had dramatically changed from a garden where two people did everything God wanted to a world where no one did what God wanted them to do. This dramatic transformation of the culture started with one decision from Adam and Eve. The Lord was grieved because it wasn't the way he wanted the world to be. The Lord was grieved that he made man on earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, I will wipe mankind whom I have created from the face of the earth, men, animals, creatures that move along the ground, birds of the air, for I am grieved that I have made them. In this one event, we see the great concern God has for people who live in obedience to him. There are a lot of people who think that because the Bible says God is love, he ignores our rebellion against him. He does not. In this story, his intent was to destroy every human being in the world and all the animals that had been touched by them. To erase this and start over. God's intention was to provide a way by which the people in the world who live in obedience to him would not be surrounded by people who would cause them to turn away from God. Do you know how hard it is to do the right thing when people around you are always doing the wrong things? And so whenever you hear people talk about God and the fact that he wouldn't send anybody to hell, you remember this story. What would it be like to go to heaven and know that nobody around you ever planned to hurt you and nobody would ever steal your stuff and nobody would ever lie to you? Then to discover that there were some people living there who would lie to you, who'd steal from you, and who'd kill you. It wouldn't be like heaven, it would be like living in this sinful world all over again. God does not destroy the evil people in this day. He is protecting his world from them. And when the time for heaven comes, God will protect us from those who would be there who do not acknowledge the authority of God over their lives and behavior. God wants to build a kingdom where there is one person in charge, that's him. He's looking for the person who is willing to say they are willing to trust him. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. This simple passage describes for us what it is that God intends to build his kingdom with. People who acknowledge his supreme authority. It's not a matter of being good. You can be very good for a lot of different reasons. You can be good because you want people to like you or acknowledge you or to be friends with you. It's not being good that pleases God. It is saying to God, I'm ready to do whatever you want. Now when you do what he wants, you will be good. But it's the motive behind it that acknowledges the supremacy of the king. Because if it's for any other reason, you could be misled. But if your primary concern is, I am going to obey God with everything in my life, then whatever temptation comes, if your loyalty is to him, you can push it aside. God builds his kingdom of people who have one promise. Lord, I intend to live in obedience and submission to you. In this story, he found one man who was that way. It was enough to rescue that one man and start all over again. All the way through the story of the scriptures, God is looking for some people who are ready to say, take my life, I will live in submission and obedience to you. That is the kingdom of God. It's really not necessarily people who attend church regularly, even though they would. It's not necessarily people who have been baptized also, they would. It's people who say to God, my life is given in submission to you. That is the open door to the kingdom of heaven. In the Bible, with each of the stories that you come to, God is establishing an element of his kingdom. Whenever the story of Abraham is told, God has found again a man who is prepared to be able to live exactly as God wants. In here, he spells out for the first time, verbally, what it means to be a part of the kingdom of God. The Lord said to Abraham, leave your country, your people, your father's household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, whoever curses you, I will curse. And all the people on earth will be blessed through you. You notice he starts with a simple thing, leave your country, leave your people, leave your father's household and follow me to the place I will show you to go. Entrance into the kingdom of God, even with Abraham, in the very beginning required turning away from the things that have been a part of your life before and now saying to God, I will do whatever you ask me to do, wherever you lead me to go, whatever it costs me to do it. Abraham walked away from his family, walked away from his home, walked away from his country for only one reason. The Lord God said, Abraham, come, follow me. This submission to the authority of God marked his entrance into the kingdom of God. You will not find anybody in all the scriptures who enters the kingdom of God who does not say God, here is my life. It's more important to me than my family, more important to me than my country, more important to me than anything that I own. You have absolute authority over my life. That's how you get in the kingdom of God. It was so with Abraham and every other person throughout the scriptures. What God asked of Abraham was a sacrifice. I want you to put aside the things that have been comfortable for you and I want you to trust me that I'm going to guide you where I want you to be and the way I want you to live. So Abraham left everything and he followed him. God's promise was simple. I will guide you to the place I want to take you. So trust me to give you direction for your life. And then he said, when you get there, I will give you this land. Land was the equivalent of an income so that you'll have something to live on. I will be your friend and all of your friends will be my friends and all of your enemies will be my enemies. I will stand beside you and protect you from all the people who would want to hurt you. Now the choice was left to Abraham. He picked up everything and left. This is what the kingdom of God is like. Whenever you get to the New Testament, Jesus comes into the scene and when Jesus starts his ministry, he comes to the people who wanted to be a part of it and he asked them to turn their backs on their home and family and life and follow him. He said to them, if any of you want to be my disciples, you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. He meant by the following me to live as he was living, to follow his directions and instructions. In the very beginning of this, the same with Abraham, the same with the disciples of Jesus, he said to them, I want you to turn your back on the things that are important to you. It's not that you have to leave them, but they must become less important to you than my will for you. I must be the one who controls your life, not your family, not your money, not your business, not your pleasures. You must start out saying, God is controlling me. That's what a king is. A king rules. He tells people what to do, when to do and how to do. He has all authority over them, and no one enters the kingdom of heaven apart from that. There's a kind of misunderstanding with many people about religion and about the Christian faith. If you talk to people about what it means to go to heaven, many of them think if I'm a good person and do good things, I will go to heaven. But you know, a criminal can do good things, a murderer can do good things, but it doesn't mean that they obey the law. What God is looking for is not people who are good, but people who are submissive and obedient to him. Now if you're submissive and obedient to him, you will, of course, do good, but doing the good without being submissive and obedient to God keeps you outside of his kingdom. God wants us to acknowledge his supreme authority over everything in our life, to place it before him to say, this is me, take it, it's yours. When Jesus comes to select his disciples, he made it clear what they had to do. Some people came to him and said, we'd like to follow you, and he said, okay, here's what I want you to do, I have a mission for you. One of them said, well, I'll be glad to follow your mission, but first I want to go back home to my family and explain what I'm going to do. Jesus said, when I ask you to do this mission, and you turn around and say, I put it second, but I'm going to go back and do something I think is important to me, you have said to me, I'm not in charge of your life, but you're in charge of your life. You're not worthy for the kingdom of God. When God asks for the ties that we have in family, in relationships, to be second to our relationship to him, it is a powerful demand. One man came to him and said, I've been doing good all my life, I keep all the Ten Commandments, but I know there's something missing, what is it? And Jesus said to him, I want you to sell what you have and give it away, and then you come and learn from me how to live. The man had a lot of money, and he had to weigh between the money that he had and the promise that Jesus made to him, and he said, no, I can't do that, turned and walked away. Sad. What the Bible is telling us is, your job, your assets, cannot become more important to you than God. You must place his will above everything in your life. All human relationships and all the assets that you have must be in God's hands. He will tell you what to do, and when you believe him and you trust him and you do what he asks, you won't end up worse, but you will end up different. Being entering the kingdom of God is a sacrifice. Deny yourself, Jesus said. He didn't mean simply deny the evil things that you do in the world, or the bad things that you're accustomed to doing, he meant deny your own wishes and will. So many people start out in the kingdom of God, they make a profession of their trust in Christ, but then they begin to live doing the things that they like, and not doing the things they don't like, doing the things that are comfortable and convenient, and not doing the things that are uncomfortable and inconvenient. In other words, they acknowledge the supreme authority of God, but when they make their choices, they allow themselves to make only the choices they really want to make, or are beneficial to them, or satisfactory to them. This is not what it means to enter the kingdom of heaven. When you say to God, I give my life to you, you're saying you're in control, not me. One of the problems that we often say, or hear, is when people ask another person, would you like to be saved? Do you ever know anybody who's drowning who didn't want to be saved? You never ever know of anybody in a fire, where they were getting ready to be burned up that didn't want to be saved? Everyone wants to be saved from hell, but not everyone wants to surrender to the authority of God. Being saved is the result of surrendering to the supreme authority of God. Our question has to be to people, do you want God to control your life? Do you want to surrender your will to the will of God? If people do that, the result is their salvation. But many people are prepared to say, yes, I'd like to be saved, I'll come to the front of the church, I'll be baptized in the water, I will do some of the things that God wants me to do, but there's some of the things I'm going to do for my own. It's not going to work that way, not at all. What God asks is complete surrender of ourselves, even at the expense of having to do some things that we really don't want to do. You must deny yourself. And then the next thing that Jesus said, and that denying yourself means you accept the supreme authority of God but with your own. The next thing he said is, once you do that, you must be prepared when you obey me to suffer for me. Take up your own cross. Now the cross of Jesus, for us, is simply kind of a word. It's a big board that you have with decorated things on it. I don't know what the word meant to the people who had that, but we knew what a cross was. Someone was on a cross nailed with their hands plumbed, not their palms, but their wrists with nails driven in those cross bars that are held that way. The bar that comes down the feet would be struck in it, and the nail would be driven in each hand into that beam. This cross has no seat on it. Oftentimes they put a seat on there so you can kind of sit there. Because hanging with the nails like that would cause you to die quicker. But sitting would allow you even longer. When you look across at the outside of the city where everybody had to go out every day to look at that person, you realize what the price was for disobeying the law. They wanted the suffering to be visible. Jesus knew that he was going to face the cost. He didn't have a seat. He was hanging with the nails. He was hanging there. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. But I was surprised to find out that there were a lot of people who were like that in New York City. I was surprised to find out that it was a different language, a different language. I didn't know what it was like to live in a place where you just lived there. I was always confused. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, and they were trying to get away so they could be able to breathe and not just die. I've been to New York City and I've been to New York and the like. People were crushed like they were being laid down on nails to offer them asphyxiation. They were hanging there so long that they were losing their mind, They weren't born in the cradle of missionaries. Many of them had careers of their own, successful careers. One day God said, I don't want you to be a doctor in the United States. I want you to be a doctor in Asia. I don't want you to be a school teacher here in this country. I want you to be a teacher in Africa. And they left their homes and their lives and they did what God told them. That's what the Kingdom of God is about. People are prepared to do whatever God asks. And the final thing about the Kingdom of God is He said there will be a blessing to many people. Wouldn't you say Jesus' life had been a blessing to many people? So when he said to his disciples, deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me, he was saying to them, if you live what I tell you, your life will be a great blessing to everyone around you. That's the end result. God intends to bless people through your life, just as he blessed people through his. All the way through the Bible, the story of God's Kingdom is described. Sometimes it rains but it looks like it's going to disappear and sometimes it arrives. But at every point, God is saying to people, here's my deal. Trust me with your life. Do what I tell you and you will find life. Everybody thought of that as a disaster. Now the disaster that comes from ignoring God is not necessarily obvious to people. But the problem is the fact that if you don't go to church in the morning, you're not going to get the good results at the end and you don't have a good time. There are those who are. But they may not have a good relationship with their family. There may be a financial disaster. There may be a relationship disaster. They may not be able to live the life that they would like to have and have the person beside they'd like to have. But for all the things that come outside the kingdom of God, these are disasters. If you would not take up your cross and follow him, you will find life in all the kingdoms. That's what the story of the kingdom of God is all about. In the beginning, God raised his people, and he gave them the precepts and the scriptures that were written. And he said to them, if the people have found Jesus, he will give them the virtues of Jesus. Jesus was a very good shepherd. He was a very good shepherd and a very good father to his children. But in history, from that time onward in history, none of the people of Israel have done that. But in the 13th century, there was a man named Ishmael. He was a very good shepherd and a very good father to his children. You will see in a couple of moments that there is a man that taught the people of Israel and of Abraham and of Jacob. And the man who taught them the scriptures, he taught them to be good to their children, and to be good to their family. So he taught them to be good to their children. And in the 12th century, there was a man named Abraham. He was a very good shepherd and a very good father to his children. And the man who taught them the scriptures, he taught them to be good to their children. And in the 12th century, there was a man named Isaac. He was a very good shepherd and a very good father to his children. And the man who taught them the scriptures, he taught them to be good to their children. And in the 13th century, there is a man named Abraham. He was a very good shepherd and a very good father to his children. And in the 12th century, there is a man named Isaac. And in the 15th century, there is a man named Jeroboam. And in the 16th century, there is a man named Isaac. And in the 20th century, there is a man named Abraham. And in the 22nd century, there is a man named Isaac. And in the 34th century, there is a man named Judas. And in the 35th century, there is a man named Isaac. In the 35th century, there is a man named Abraham. And in the 38th century, there is a man named Jacob. And in the 39th century, there is a man named God. And in the 40th century, there is a man named Isaac. And in the 40th century, there is a man named Elias. And in the 40th century, there is a man named Joseph. And in the 40th century, there is a man named Isaac. And in the 40th century, there is a man named Isaac. And in the 40th century, there is a man named Sam. 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