First, I appreciated his brief definition of God's kingdom as: "God's redemptive rule, reign, and authority over those redeemed by Jesus" (p. 88). Just listen to what these verses have to say about the salvation leading Christians into the kingdom of God:
He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1:13-14)
Second, Gilbert's statement about inclusion in the kingdom of God is piercing:
Therefore, being a citizen of Christ's kingdom is not a matter of just "living a kingdom life" or "following Jesus' example" or "living like Jesus lived." The fact is, a person can be a self-professed "Jesus-follower" or "kingdom-life liver" and still be outside the kingdom. You can live like Jesus lived all you want, but unless you've come to the crucified King in repentance and faith, relying on him alone as the perfect sacrifice for your sin and your only hope for salvation, you're neither a Christian nor a citizen of his kingdom. (p. 95-96)
And last, I also thought he did a good job explaining the "already but not yet" aspect of the kingdom. This is a phrase that I hadn't heard of until a few years ago. It refers to the fact that as believers, we have been given some tastes of the completed kingdom of God {already} but we are not yet able to fully savor it. For instance, we've already been given the Holy Spirit to guide and comfort us, and we have already been perfectly reconciled to the Father. BUT we still live in a fallen world, and as a result, sin is still a constant battle for us, and it will continue to be until the kingdom is ushered in {not yet}.
So then, how ought we to live? I'll let the Word speak for itself...
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. (Romans 6:12-13)
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. (1 Peter 2:9-11)
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guardedthrough faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Peter 1:3-5)
With promises like these, we push through the here and now with the grace that has already been given to us as we long for what has not yet been revealed. Gilbert sums it up like this:
"It's not at all that living the life of the kingdom brings us into the kingdom. It's that once we have been brought into the kingdom through faith in the King, we find ourselves with a new master, a new law, a new charter, a new life -- and therefore we begin to want to live the life of the kingdom." (p. 97)
Believe it or not, we only have two more chapters left in this book!! Chapter 7 (Keeping the Cross at the Center) will be next week and then Chapter 8 (The Power of the Gospel) will follow it up a week later. {I realize that I haven't been great at doing these posts every week. I have good intentions though to follow through with these last two chapters by having them done on time.}
I think that after we finish this book, we'll take a week or two break before starting the next one. And, speaking of the next book I plan to blog through, I think I've settled on a good one... I'm going to keep it a secret for a few more days til I have time to write up a post about it, but for now I'll tell you that it has a great {female} author, and it's a compilation of a few excellent biographies of stellar women of the faith. Intrigued yet, ladies? I hope so! I'll announce it soon... :)
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