Entering the Kingdom of God

I don't know if you saw in the newspaper or on television that the President traveled around the world this last week or so. And when he went to Saudi Arabia with his wife, she had a beautiful, colorful dress on and it came all the way to the ground and down to her sleeves of her hands. And when he looked at the picture, he thought, well, this is just a nice dress. But then I looked the next day and there was a large number of people in Saudi Arabia who were very upset with her. They said that she was a very immodest woman and she had disgraced herself by standing in public without any hair covering over her head. I don't see any woman here with hair covering over her head. You didn't think this morning when you came that you would look immodest or immoral, did you? That way? Every culture has its own idea about what proper behavior really is. In that culture, if a woman comes out without some covering over her head, she has disgraced herself. She has considered herself to be immoral and immodest. Every culture and people in the world have their own ideas about what is right and what is wrong. It is just the same with the Kingdom of God. When you enter the Kingdom of God, it is a whole different world, controlled and ruled by God. He has rules by which he wants his people to live. Living in the Kingdom of God means a change of your mindset, of your lifestyle, of everything that you have. I want to read from 1 Peter chapter 1, if you would like to find that in your Bible. Here Peter is writing a letter to some of the believers to help them understand what God is trying to do for them. In this passage that I have selected, Peter is describing to them what it means to live, a part of what it means to live, in the Kingdom of God. He doesn't deal with all the things that are happening, but he deals with these things because they are critical in our relationships with each other and critical in displaying to the world the nature and character of God. First Peter chapter 1, and I want to begin reading at verse 22. Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth, so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. For all men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers, the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever. And this is the word that was preached to you, therefore, rid yourself of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander of every kind. Like newborn babes, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to him, the living stone, rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Peter begins this description of the kingdom of God and what it is like with the entrance into it. He describes this entrance as being a part of this new birth that God gives. Now you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth, he says. What he means is, entering the kingdom of God is a very special and unique event. It happens because you come face to face with God and you become aware of your own failings to live up to the standards that God has. I think every human being in the world recognizes at some time in their lives that they have failed to be the kind of person God wants them to be. They look at their own thoughts, they look at their actions, and they see there that their life is in contrast with the holy and spiritual nature of God. Now whenever that happens, people can get discouraged and defeated. They can go off into the world in all kinds of activities to say, I'm going to forget ever trying. Or they can come to stop and say, I realize what's wrong with me and I recognize that God can forgive me of everything that I've done, wipe the slate clean, and let me start over again. And people who come to that recognition of God come to him and say, Lord, here is my life, broken, messed up, I give it to you. I ask you to forgive me for everything I've ever done, ever thought I've ever had that is contrary to your will and purpose. And as you ask God for that forgiveness, the amazing thing happens. Suddenly, because of the presence of God's Spirit, you feel and you know that God has said you are forgiven. You start over this day with a brand new beginning. All of your past is forgotten by me. You may remember it. Satan may remind you of it. But I want you to know, as far as I am concerned, everything in your past, every failure, every rebellion against me is wiped clean, and I accept you now as one pure and holy, belonging to me. In this act of submission to the surrender of God and his control over our lives, we are forgiven. This moment of forgiveness that God provides for us is what he's talking about. You have been purified by obeying the truth. The truth is that Jesus Christ is Lord of the world. And when you accept that and recognize it and surrender to it, then he forgives you of your sin and brings you into his kingdom. Now when that happens to you, not only does God give you forgiveness for yourself, but he creates in you a passion to do something that you've never felt before. He brings you into the community of people who are believers or followers of Christ, and you look around that group, and there may be some of them that you've had odds with in the past, or some that you know that you don't like, or some that are here that you really see as friends. But he brings you into a group of people, and he says, these are the people to whom you belong. They also belong to me, as you belong to me, and together you're one here. And so he places within you the deep, passionate, powerful love that God has for you so that you have that for others who are followers of his. He describes it this way. So that you have sincere love for your brothers. Love one another deeply from the heart. What changes about you whenever you enter the kingdom of God is God causes you to see people in a different way than you saw them before. Instead you may have seen them in human eyes, and judged them in human ways. But now he says, I want you to look at that person and say, they're my child, they belong to me as you belong to me, they're your brother or sister in Christ. And he plants within us the same love he had for us that we might have that love for people around us. Now, don't mistake the fact that he plants this love in us to say you're going to like everybody who is a follower of Christ. You won't. Don't say that whenever you have this love in you that you have to see every person as your best friend. You don't. What God plants within us is the same love he has for us. Not the love that causes him to like us all the time. There are times when God does not like us because of our behavior or attitude or whatever we've done. But he still loves us. Now I want you to define love, not in the terms that we use here in this world, but the word that's used here is a word that describes self-denying, sacrificial service to someone else. Self-denying, sacrificial service to someone besides ourselves. What he asks us to do is to look at people and see their need and to place their need above our own comfort. That's the self-denial. The sacrifice is we do whatever it takes to help that person in their circumstances and their need. That's the sacrifice. You can do that for people you don't even know. You can do that for people you don't like. You may be driving down the road, for example, and you come on a vehicle, pull over to the side of the road, and you recognize it immediately. It's someone you've had dealings with in the past and they haven't always been honest with you. In fact, they've cheated you a time or two, not been a good person or a good friend to you. You see the weather outside today, a little snow, 17 degrees, 35 mile an hour wind, and you see them stranded beside the road. You don't like them. You don't really want to be around them. But inside of you, because God is there, he says to you, I want you to help this person. So you stop, you ask him if you can help, you offer to take them somewhere where they can get someone to come and help them, change their tire, or if they have it off, take it with them, get it fixed, bring it back, and you go on your way. You may not like them anymore than you did before, but what you've done is you've found a person who's in need, and you deny yourself what you'd like to do. You'd like to drive by and say, serves you right, buddy, but you don't do that. Instead, God says, stop and help. So you pull over, you do whatever you can, and get them back on the road. You may not like them anymore after all of this is over, and they may not even thank you, but if Christ is in your life, you know that you have done what he's asked you to do. Now when he brings you into the family of God, and surrounds you with people, there are all kinds of people. All of them who have Christ in their lives doesn't mean that they're perfect people. They have all kinds of flaws, just like you do. But what he asks us to do is to look around and say, I will love you with the love of God. The love of God which says, I will do what I can to help you in any circumstance of your life where you need that help. That's what he means. When you join the kingdom of God, every person in the kingdom of God is a person who's your spiritual brother or sister. And so you see them as a person that you love, with the same love that God has inside you. That's the collection of people that God has that belong to him. So when you enter this kingdom, not only are you forgiven, but there's placed inside of you the very love of God that you have to begin to exercise so that you can fit in to what God is trying to accomplish. He says, this happens because you have been born again, not a perishable seed, but imperishable. You see, there's a spiritual birth that takes place. So inside of you, the spirit of God is there, and your inside spiritual nature comes to life just like your physical body when you're born comes to life. But that perishable physical birth that you have means that someday you'll die. It also means that you look at people around you in a human way, and you see them as human beings, and you react to them as sinful human beings do. But then you enter the kingdom of God, and now he says to you, I want you to react to these people who belong to me as if they are your brothers and sisters. I want you to react to them with the love that I had for you when you were so bad off, when you were so far from me. I want you to be kind, I want you to be considerate, but I'm going to fill you with this love that I have. This is love that does not exist in this world. It is imperishable. It is the preparation for what you're going to do in heaven. I don't know if you've thought about this, but when you get to heaven, you're not going to be surrounded with all the people that you were your best buddies with. You will be placed in heaven with all the people in the kingdom of God, some of them here on this earth you may not have liked. Some of them in this world you may have thought badly of, or had bad experiences with. And God there wants you to love them. So you practice here in this world. You're not going to be controlled by what your human body is. You're perishable. It's going to die. It's going to go. You're going to be controlled instead by the Spirit of God, which is always with you throughout your life and even into eternity. So the kingdom of God is filled with people like this who used once to be controlled by their human nature, but no longer they're controlled by that. Instead they're controlled by the Spirit of God. They've been purified of their past, forgiven for their sins, and now placed together with the people who belong to God and filled with the love that God had for them that they now have for others. That's the entrance into the kingdom of God. Now verse 1 of chapter 2 says, therefore, because all of this is true previously, here is the result of what happens when you enter the kingdom. Rid yourself of all malice and all deceit. The word malice sometimes is translated in other places in the Bible as evil. Get rid of all evil in your life. Since this has happened to you, you've been forgiven, you're to set on a journey to get rid of all the evil in your life, all the trouble in your life, all the things that you do that hurt other people around you. Get rid of all that. For the kingdom of God is filled with people whose aim is to get rid of all evil out of their life, all the things that hurt other people, all the things that trouble people, and get rid of deceit. Deceit is simply being dishonest. It can be moral dishonesty, it can be the worthlessness of having no conscience as you live. These two items, he says, are the foundation stone of what the Christian faith is really about. I want you to notice that his great concern is not going out and finding people that are unsaved and leading them to Christ. His primary concern is the character and nature of the person in the kingdom. I want to remake you to be like Christ. I want to transform you from a person controlled by your human nature to a person controlled by the Spirit of God. If the Spirit of God is in you, then he will do in your life the same thing he did in the life of Jesus. He will help you to get rid of all the evil things in your life. Jesus had a great advantage over us. From the very beginning, he never sinned. We don't have that opportunity to say, I have a life that has never been given to evil things, never been given to hurting other people, never been given to dishonesty. We have the record. That's why we needed to confess it and be forgiven of it, but it's still there. It lurks in our minds. It's controlled our lifestyle and our choices so much that when we get in the kingdom of God, even it's still there. When we're caught in a tight situation, sometimes it's easier to lie than it is to tell the truth because we're so used to it. But I want you to get rid of all that evil in your life. It's not an action that you do one day, but it's a goal that you set for your life one day. Lord, I want to be as pure as you are. I want to live a life that is absent of any kind of evil, just like Jesus lived. I want to get rid of all the deceit in my life, shading things so I don't look so bad, saying things that I know people want to hear, even though that's not true, saying things that make me look better than I really am, saying things that make other people think better of me than they should. I want to live this life. Now he defines for us the three areas, I don't think they're exhaustive or he intends for them to be exhaustive. The first, he says, one of these is hypocrisy. I don't want you to live two lives. I want you to live your life in one piece. Not one life around some people and another life around other people. I want you to live one life. One life controlled by me. So you look around you and you try to make sure that whoever is around you, you act the same with them as you do with church people. You don't have a different category about how you act in one place or another. It's always the same. Hypocrisy is a failure to be who you are and misleading people into thinking you're something that you're not. It's dishonesty to God and dishonesty to those around us. Get rid of envy. Anytime you have a group of people, there's kind of a contest. Some people have received honor, some people have been given jobs that they'd like to have. It's just true around churches too. Some people are jealous, some people are angry, some people are upset. Someone has control over circumstances that they have and I want to have control over it. So many quarrels and fusses happen in the body of Christ just like they do in families. Alan was telling us about meeting some fellow that was in financial difficulty and the fellow sitting there was with him and he was telling about his own family. His dad died and left the land to two brothers. They've been fighting over this land. Two trips to the Supreme Court without settling it. It happens in churches too where there are people who want control, there are people who want recognition, people who want to have their way. God wants us in the church to say, it is only important to me for God to have his way. I don't want anything except what God tells me is my place and my circumstance. There are fights in churches all the time between the pastor and the people, between people in the church and each other. People get mad and they leave the church. Our key ingredient is to say, Jesus Christ is the Lord of my life and I will obey him and him alone. I'm willing to take whatever place he gives me, whether it's a high place, an important place or an insignificant place because I serve the Lord. No envy, no jealousy should be among you. Instead, you should get rid of it. And no slander of any kind. You know, anytime you're around people you hear bad stories about them. The Bible indicates that we're not to tell those stories to anybody. You're not to say things that are evil or bad about another person. In the kingdom of God, this person is controlled by Christ, you're controlled by Christ. It's God's business to pass judgment on anyone. So there's no stories, no slander, no tattling. Do you notice that what he's talking about here is relationships? Because what he's doing is showing us that if you have given your life to Christ, he purifies the way you treat others around you. Now you step outside the kingdom of God and you'll find every place you work, all the places you're around, there's slander and stories, there are people who are jockeying for their best position and trying to get the place of honor and pride, there are people who are dishonest, there are people who are not telling the truth, that's all the way the world is. God's point is, I place my spirit in you and I want you and your relationships to be different than anybody in the world. So when somebody comes into your group, they don't hear these stories, they don't hear these complaints, they don't hear these criticisms, they're not jockeying for a place of honor and they are exactly in church the way they are on the job. That's what he wants. Now this is absolutely a difficult and big task. So he says, here's the way it works. Like a newborn baby, you should crave spiritual milk. Now when a baby is born into a family, what happens is the baby wants to eat and he wants to eat often. Seems like to me, I never got up and did this, but my wife did every two or three hours. Ladies, you know maybe about what that's like. Every two or three hours, nursing time. The baby craves that nursing milk. When the Holy Spirit comes in you, you will have a craving for the Word of God. It's not that the baby wakes up and says, oh, I've got to crave milk now. It's just inside of him. It's not that you have to sit down and say, oh, I've got to learn to read the Bible. When the Holy Spirit is in you, you will know that's something you need. And you will crave it. Not just once in a while, go to church, but every chance you get. Why? Because there is something inside of you that needs to be fulfilled. And what's needed is to be able to find this process that God wants to bring into your life come to fulfillment. Like newborn babies crave spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up into salvation. The spiritual milk that you're getting is essential for you to grow from a new follower of Christ to a powerful saint of God, which is what God is trying to get you ready for in heaven. And so the spiritual milk is the Word of God. You read it. You listen to it preached. You listen to it taught. God gifts teachers with spiritual gifts to teach a scripture that you don't have, maybe. He gifts a preacher to be able to interpret the scripture, an ability that you don't have because it's a gift of God. And when you listen to that, you will hear God say, this is what I want you to do. Do that. This is what I don't want you to do. Don't do that. So these qualities that he says we should have, that is getting rid of all evil, as we read the Bible, we discover there are things that are evil that we never thought about. We discover there are things we should be longing for that we never thought about. And so little by little, like a child growing up, he begins to see the next step and the next step and the next step. He calls it here, growing up in your salvation. A lot of people think that when they get saved, their salvation is finished. No. Like a baby being born, it's a very critical stage, of course, but there's a lot more future out there. And if a baby stayed the same size all of its life, it would not be considered a successful birth. And if a spiritual person stays right there at the first step of that life, it is a spiritual failure. And you can't grow apart from two things, the Spirit of God in you and the milk of God given to you. For the milk given by the Spirit is taken by the Spirit and he tells you what needs to be cut out of your life and what needs to be replaced. So the spiritual life inside you grows strong and powerful and over this time, evil becomes less and less a controlling factor in your life. Deceitfulness becomes a less and less controlling factor in your life. And you cannot have it apart from the spiritual milk. Now if you have no hunger for the Bible, if you don't feel uncomfortable when you don't read it and you don't come to church to hear it taught and preached, I would stop and look to see if you've really surrendered your life to God. If you haven't done that, then the Spirit is not in you and he's not creating the desire for this spiritual food. How tragic that would be for you to live your whole life thinking that you're in the Kingdom of God only to discover at the time of judgment that he was not there in you. Many will come to that day and will expect that they'll be ushered into heaven, but God will have to say, no, I never really controlled your life. So here's a small test. Do you have a hunger for the Scriptures? To read it, to listen to it, to hear it taught, and to hear it preached. That's not something you can build in yourself for a long period of time. You can do it for a little bit, but after a while you get tired of it. Can you lay the Bible down and not read it for weeks on end? Can you miss church one Sunday after another and not miss it? It's one of the signs that God gives us that he's in control of our lives. It shows that you have tasted that the Lord is good. Now he said, as you come to him, the living stone rejected by men, but chosen by God and precious to him, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. He changes the whole picture instead of now talking about being born spiritually and instead of talking about being transformed by the Spirit of God, he talks by drinking this spiritual milk. He now changes to say, here's another analogy as to what God does for you. When the Holy Spirit comes into you, he makes you sort of like the bricks in a building. Then he brings other bricks around you until you form a spiritual house where God lives. You are one of those spiritual bricks, a living stone. Now this is a very important principle for you to get because you will hear people say, I think you can be a good Christian and you don't have to go to church. Well, do you think those bricks in the wall could be a good building to this building if they were scattered all over the countryside? No. You give your life to God, you have to be a part of a family of faith. It's required. The living stone now has made you a living stone and he plants you with other living stones to form his church. That's what he does. He doesn't make you a living stone and then throw you out on the ground by yourself. If you're out there by yourself, what difference would it make if you're deceitful and evil? You can't affect anybody else's life. You see, the whole purpose of God redeeming us is bringing us together to teach us how to relate to each other. He wants to teach you how to love those that are around you, how to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and how do you love your neighbors, yourself. He said all the law and the prophets are wrapped up in that. If you were to come to Christ and give your life to him and go off and live in the mountains and never see another human being the rest of your life, you would miss the essence of what Christianity is, teaching us to love others as God has loved us. If you take that part off, then you've taken out the whole law and the prophets, he said. The whole scriptures can't be fulfilled. It can only be fulfilled when God makes you a part of a community of faith. You're a living stone, like the living stone Christ, who the foundation is built on. That's an important thing. He's the capstone or the foundation stone or the cornerstone. His life is there and we build our lives on him. Everything depends on him, and so our lives are placed on his life. And without him, we can't even have a church because he is the cornerstone to it. It holds everything up. Now when we don't have cornerstones now like they did in the Bible times, in the temple when they were building it, they built huge slabs of cement, of rock, hewed out. They would be like 15 feet long and like 5 feet wide and 4 feet tall. And they would lay those out and the whole building would be built on those stones. They didn't drill down and pour cement deep into the ground, they got these huge blocks of rock. And everything was built on that. That's what he's talking about. Jesus Christ is the foundation for us and all of our lives are placed on that in order. And we become like him so that the whole building becomes like him. And Christ then is centered on this. And everything focuses on him. This is what the kingdom of God is like. A country has citizens, they don't all agree with each other, they don't even get along. Even people that love our country and care for it get in Congress and call each other names, say bad things about each other. So God takes Democrats and he takes Republicans and he takes meat eaters and vegetarians and he brings his spirit in them and he gathers us together. And Democrats love Republicans and even socialists. And the world says, what is this? And Jesus says, this is my church. This is what I can do to people who belong to me. Would you like to have a life filled with good relationships or bad ones? Would you like to have a life filled with good relationships or hard ones? Give me your life and I will change you to be like this group of people. So if we're not that group of people to whom he can point, he cannot use us to draw people to himself. Okay. Are you a citizen in the kingdom of God? Can you point to a time in your life in which you said to God, I give my life to you and from this moment on I'll try to live my life in obedience to you as best I can. As a result of that, is your life being changed so that evil is less and less control? Is a deceit beginning to move out of your life? Do you find yourself filled with love for other people, even those you don't like, self-denying sacrificial service to them? Do you find yourself an integral part of the body of Christ, a living stone built on the stone? Then you can say to God, I have the life you promised. If somewhere in there you found you don't fit, it's God's way of saying, this is your alarm. Get it straight now or forever you'll be outside of the kingdom of God. Would you bow your heads please? Of course the Holy Spirit has already spoken to you during this hour. Do you know something that he wants you to do differently? The kingdom of God is built of people who say, okay God, you just tell me what to do and I'll do it. So this is the time. If you've never received Jesus Christ as the Lord of your life, that's a starting point. If you know you haven't, I want to ask you today to say to God, as hard as it is, I'm going to give my life to you. If you've given your life to the Lord, near as you know how, and there's a spiritual hunger inside of you for his word, and you consistently don't read it, not faithful in coming to preaching and Bible teaching, then God should be saying to you, you've got to change. Just tell him, okay God, I'll put aside everything in the world and your work is first. Do you find yourself constantly in conflict with other people? God has a remedy for that. Quit it. Do you need the power to do that? Ask him for it. When I ask the pianist to play, so in the middle of this music you can reflect on what God wants from you, I'll be here at the front, Deb, you'll be here with me. If God has something that he's told you and you want to come and publicly say to God and to the world, I've heard God speak and today I promise to do this, we will pray with you. But it's God who's talking to you. You've had enough time to settle the matters between you and God. If you want to talk about it, you can always give me a call, and then we can talk about it personally. Would you stand please for a moment of prayer, a moment together? Lord, we hear you today. We know what you've said to us. If there are any of us that have turned aside from what we know you want, we ask that as we leave here your Holy Spirit would not leave, but continue to tell us the steps we need to take to find life in all of its fullness. In the name of Christ we ask this, amen. Let's be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.