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The Kingdom of Heaven
Hey, do you want to see where you can, where you can see heaven?
Luke 17:20-21
Hey, do you want to see where you can, where you can see heaven? Do you want to see what the kingdom of God looks like? All right, here’s what you do. Go, go find a mirror and look into it. Really, look into it and take a look in yourself at yourself. Because that’s where you will see the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven right now.
There’s this really amazing thing that Jesus says in Luke chapter 17. We’re told that the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God would come, and Jesus answered them,
“The kingdom of God is not coming in a way you can observe, nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘Look, there it is!’ because the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20-21)
See, the kingdom of God is wherever God is King, wherever Jesus is King. And if you are a Christian, then Jesus is the King of your heart. Now, naturally, none of us have the kingdom of God in us because naturally our hearts are under the influence of the enemy of the sinful world, our sinful flesh. And naturally, God is not ruling our hearts. But Jesus came into this world, and he laid down his life, and he died on a cross. And when he was on that cross, he had a crown of thorns on his head. And that wasn’t just there as a way of mocking. It was, people put it there to mock him, but in that picture of this crown on his head, it’s a clear reminder that this is how the kingdom of God overcomes the kingdom of darkness.
There Jesus took your sin and mine and defeated it. There Jesus died so that Jesus can then also rise and give us new life, life in the kingdom of God and life with the Kingdom of God in us, now. Through faith in Christ, Christ rules in your heart. He is the ruler of your heart and not only is he just ruling your heart, but actually he is living in your heart. In the Gospel of John in chapter 14, the early part of that chapter talks about this beautiful picture that we often use around funerals, where we talk about how Jesus goes to prepare a place for you with the father and in his father’s house there are many, many rooms, places for you to, to live with him. (John 14:1-3) And there he’s talking about the Kingdom of God that someday we will be in. You will be in the Kingdom of God someday. We call that the Kingdom of glory. You think about heaven. You think about the life in the world to come. But then later in that same chapter, he talks about how for those who obey him, for those who listen to his words, that he and the father will come and make their home in us. And the word that’s used there is actually the same word that’s used to describe the home that we have with God in the future.
So in a similar way to the way that we will live with God and have a home with God, God now also makes his home in us. And we call that God’s kingdom of grace. His kingdom of grace is how he lives in us. The kingdom of glory is how we will someday live with him. You are not yet in heaven, but heaven is already in you. And as we live for that day of living with Christ, we can be empowered today knowing that Christ is living in us. Whenever we realize that we haven’t lived that way or embrace that we again, we go to the cross. We lay our sins before him. We assured that we’re forgiven when we hear that word, that word enters into us. There’s this liturgical phrase about how we inwardly digest it. It comes into us when we take the Lord’s Supper, we take hold not just of bread and wine, but of Christ’s body and blood, taking God Himself into us. And when we remember that we are baptized, we remember we were clothed with Christ himself. We remember, we get to know, we get to embrace that the kingdom of God is in us. Empowering us until we are then living with God in the kingdom of God.
