Quotes About Kingdom

This emerges clearly in the gospels, where Jesus's "authority" consists both in healing power and in a different kind of teaching, all of which the gospel writers—and Jesus himself—understood as part of the breaking-in of God's Kingdom.

The New Testament, with the story of Jesus's crucifixion at its center, is about God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven.

The cross stands at the heart of John's kingdom theology, which in this stunning passage is revealed as the heart of John's redemption theology, the vision of the love of God revealed in saving action in the death of his Son, the Lamb, the Messiah.

Right through Israel's history there had been a sense that, strange though it might seem, the one true God would use this small and apparently insignificant nation as his means of transforming the entire world. This great transforming event would be, finally, the coming of the Kingdom of God.

The resurrection isn't just a surprise happy ending for one person; it is instead the turning point for everything else. It is the point at which all the old promises come true at last: the promises of David's unshakable kingdom; the promises of Israel's return from the greatest exile of them all; and behind that again, quite explicit in Matthew, Luke, and John, the promise that all the nations will now be blessed through the seed of Abraham. If

We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale.

Jesus sticks to scripture, which they can hardly fault. But in doing so he demonstrates that he is speaking from a world in which God, becoming king on earth as in heaven, is transforming the very hearts of human beings as part of his project of new creation. Jesus's hearers, thinking from within a world where the legislation for the hard-hearted still applies, cannot even recognize the kingdom when it is breaking in right there in their midst.

My proposal, then, as the way of making sense of all the data before me, is that Jesus believed it was his god-given vocation to identify with the rebel cause, the kingdom-cause, when at last that identification could not be misunderstood as endorsement.

Wherever he went, he was celebrating the arrival of God's kingdom, as often as not by partying with people who would normally be excluded because of their apparently shady moral background. Wherever

Paul declares that 'flesh and blood cannot inherit God's kingdom.' He doesn't mean that physicality will be abolished. 'Flesh and blood' is a technical term for that which is corruptible, transient, heading for death. The contrast is not between what we call physical and what we call nonphysical but between corruptible physicality, on the one hand, and incorruptible physicality, on the other.

The kingdom of God is, at its heart, about God's sovereignty sweeping the world with love and power, so that human beings, each made in God's image and each one loved dearly, may relax in the knowledge that God is in control. Reflecting

The answer is that the kingdom of God has been launched 'on earth as in heaven', and that, by the Messiah and the spirit, the creator God has renewed the original image-bearing vocation.

we should be in no doubt that, for the gospel writers themselves, there was never a kingdom message without a cross

From now on, the summons to repentance, and the announcement of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven, come not through wars, earthquakes, famines or plagues. (Or domestic accidents.) They come through Jesus.

Think of the kingdom agenda of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), which itself points ahead to the cross: Jesus himself loves his enemies, goes where the Roman soldiers force him to go, and turns the other cheek before being set like a city on a hill, like a light on a pole. To

What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things?

As I have written elsewhere, the larger biblical narrative offers us a framework for developing and taking forward a holistic mission which refuses to split apart full-on evangelism, telling people about Jesus with a view to bringing them to faith, and full-on kingdom-of-God work, labouring alongside anyone and everyone with a heart for [154] the common good so that God's sovereign and saving rule may be glimpsed on earth as in heaven.

We do not "build the kingdom" all by ourselves, but we do build for the kingdom. All that we do in faith, hope, and love in the present, in obedience to our ascended Lord and in the power of his Spirit, will be enhanced and transformed at his appearing.13 This too brings a note of judgment, of course, as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 3:10–17. The "day" will disclose what sort of work each builder has done.

the moment when the kingdom of God overcomes the kingdoms of the world. It is the moment when a great old door, locked and barred since our first disobedience, swings open suddenly to reveal not just the garden, opened once more to our delight, but the coming city, the garden city that God had always planned and is now inviting us to go through the door and build with him. The dark power that stood in the way of this kingdom vision has been defeated, overthrown, rendered null and void. Its

to see evangelism in terms of the announcement of God's kingdom, of Jesus's lordship and of the consequent new creation, avoids from the start any suggestion that the main or central thing that has happened is that the new Christian has entered into a private relationship with God or with Jesus and that this relationship is the main or only thing that matters.

An altogether more complicated issue concerns the parousia, or "royal presence" or "manifestation," of Jesus. Clearly it was always part of Paul's message that the kingdom, on earth as in heaven, had already been launched through the events of Jesus's death and resurrection, but it needed to be completed, and that would happen at Jesus's return.

But there is no such thing as a small errand in the kingdom of God.

the principle that God's kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be. God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings.

Somehow, these scenes suggest, the big issues of human life are to be resolved by being put into a quite different frame from the normal one. It is the frame we could summarize in Jesus's own agenda—the coming of God's kingdom—and in his words: "Follow me!