Imagine!

After 400 years of silence, God sent His Son to earth with just nine words He proclaimed through John the Baptist to herald Jesus’ coming. These same nine words the Bible tells us were the ones Jesus employed in His first sermons. We believe they are the most important words Christian men can embrace to awaken them from the sleep of modern Christian teachings and methods. Why just nine words after 400 years of silence? They were all we need to know. In “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” we find the most important message of Jesus. “Change your mind, turn around, open your eyes to an entirely new kingdom and reality I have literally brought from heaven to join to earth!” This was not, “Pray a prayer, be saved, and try to somehow survive your time in a wicked world so you can one day die, go to heaven, and see Me.” No, it was a proclamation heaven was here, now, on earth and with us, and we could see and walk with Jesus every day in the Spirit. So important was this kingdom:

• Again, it was the message God used to introduce His Son and His Son’s mission to men.
• It introduced an entirely new concept on earth, the kingdom of God, not found in the Hebrew texts.
• It was the first request in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
• It was what Jesus told us to seek above all else: “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness…” (Matt. 6).
• It was Jesus’ gift to His church, “And upon this rock I will build My church and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16).
• It is the only gospel Jesus was specifically recorded as preaching: “The gospel of the kingdom,” and the one which will be the last one preached to the whole world before His return (Matt. 24).
• It is God’s reward only given to true disciples and no one else. Jesus said to His, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them [even others who followed Him] it has not been granted” (Matthew 13).

At Reconnections, we believe these nine words were indeed the most important ever spoken, for if we seek first their message and the One who embodied them, as Matthew 6 says, “everything else will be added unto us.”

Ah, but there is another kingdom at play on earth, and that is the kingdom of man and religion. It is Satan’s most prized possession and the one he has, since the Garden of Eden, employed to tempt and untrack God’s creation. When Jesus met him in the desert and he tried to tempt Jesus, he used “all the kingdoms of the world” to sway Jesus from His mission of bringing God’s kingdom to earth. It is the same today as the enemy will do anything to rob us of the kingdom of heaven on earth by polluting it with the kingdoms of man. The way he does that is by first bringing us into the love of money and then setting up false religious systems that allow us to think we can live in both kingdoms and it’s acceptable to God. We can live for the world all week but then go to church on the weekend and all is good. No, it’s not.

The church of Laodicea had succumbed to this deception and was the one of the seven Jesus addressed to which He gave His most damning admonishment. He said, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. Oh, that you were cold or hot but because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.  Because you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’ and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked…” (Rev. 3). These people thought because they were rich in the kingdom of man and they were “a church” all was good, while Jesus had an entirely different view of it. If ever there was a church that modeled this one, it has to be America. The polls, without dissention, all tell us over 90% of the men within don’t have a clue what it means to truly follow Jesus and are decidedly “lukewarm” to their faith.

Paul said this of Jesus, and it is our mission, “For He rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son” (Col. 1)! We are here to encourage men to make the critical leap from the kingdom of man and religion into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son: the kingdom of heaven on earth!