Wraight Kingdom Come

In My Life, In The Church, In The World
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9724616-6-5
Verlag: YFCIM Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 218 Seiten

In the Lord's Prayer Jesus asks us to pray that God's Kingdom come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Kingdom Come explores what happens- or what should happen-when the Kingdom of God truly comes in us, in the church, in our local community, and in the world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wraight, David

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

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The music throbbed. The band could be felt as much as heard as the huge subs on the edge of the stage transmitted a deep bass resonance that felt like it was rearranging the organs in your body. Screaming guitars, clouds of CO2 “smoke” and spinning multicolored lights added to the experience. The young people loved it!

It was the first night of our Live Band Coffee Shop. I was a young pastor serving in a church in the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne. The young people of the church were keen to reach their friends and had come up with the idea that to do this effectively they needed to create an environment that would be attractive and culturally relevant. They figured that getting their friends to come to church was a pretty challenging proposition, as many of their peers had never been in a church before and largely viewed Christians as an insular and out-of-touch bunch of weirdoes. So we rented a local community hall and set up the venue with candlelit tables, subdued lighting, a dance area and a stage for the bands.

The invitations went out, sound equipment and lighting were bought or hired, Christian bands were booked, advertising was placed in local newspapers, and the first night had arrived.

Ministry Dilemmas

The evening started off slowly with only a few extra young people turning up besides the youth of the church. I started to worry if this whole venture was going to work. But as the night progressed more and more young people arrived. It wasn’t long before the place was packed.

The idea was that the youth of the church would mix with the young people attending the event, engage in conversations over soda and coffee and build relationships that would eventually provide opportunity to share Jesus and connect unchurched young people to the church community. As the band started up, I enthusiastically mixed with the crowd, endeavoring to strike up meaningful conversations with young people on the dance floor or at the tables.

It wasn’t long before I realized that we had a significant flaw in our strategy. With the band belting out their numbers at exceptionally high but culturally mandated decibels, the only possible way of verbally communicating with anyone was to yell at the top of your voice a couple of inches from their ear! I persisted, yelling at people for about an hour, but eventually gave up, realizing that all I was achieving was significant damage to my voice and my hearing.

Thinking this relational building strategy was a dismal failure, I decided I needed to get free of the noise for a while to try to work out what could be done to rescue the whole venture. With ears ringing and hissing I exited the building, only to find a crowd of young people congregated around the entrance to the hall, many of them freely chatting with members of our youth outreach team. It was there that I met Julie. She was standing on the edge of the crowd by herself. I walked over to her and introduced myself, asked her name and started chatting to her about her school, where she lived and what music she liked. After a while Julie broke off the conversation and drifted back into the hall.

For the rest of the evening I spent most of my time outside the building, meeting and conversing with young people, reevaluating my earlier conclusion that this live band concept was a really bad idea. I got to know—at least by first name—many of the young people who had come to the event. Most were there because of a personal invitation and relationship with a member of the youth group. Few had turned up just because they had seen the flyer we had produced and distributed at the local high school. The success or otherwise of this outreach venture was clearly dependent on our capacity to build upon existing relationships.

Around midnight most of the young people had left and we started packing up. By the time we had finished packing the equipment in the van and cars it was the early hours of the morning. I was just about to leave when I noticed Julie sitting on the curb near the entrance of the hall. I walked over and offered to give her a ride home. Her reply was, “I can’t go home.” As I sat beside her on the curb she explained to me that she lived with her father and her father got drunk on the weekends and often beat her up. He had physically thrown her out of the house a number of times and told her he didn’t want her living with him anymore. Julie had lost all contact with her mother. Her father had been drinking that night and she had come to our event because she really didn’t have anywhere else to go. Her plan was to hang out on the streets until morning and then try to find a friend who would let her crash at their place for the day.

So here I was confronted with a dilemma. It was late, I was exhausted, and to be honest, I just wanted to go home and not have to deal with a teenage girl in a difficult situation. The Live Band Coffee Shop ministry plan was that young people would come to the program, get connected to young people in the church, come to Jesus and become part of the local church community. The event was meant to start at 7 p.m. and finish at midnight, at which time the young people would all go home and I would go home. It was not supposed to invade my personal space or time.

As I sat on the curb with Julie I was desperately trying to come up with a solution for her that didn’t involve me. It was at that moment of indecision and inaction that the words I had recently read in James jumped into my head:

Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

The conviction of the Holy Spirit to do something for this girl was undeniable. But surely the Lord didn’t expect me to take her home with me. We had a very small house and no room to accommodate her. What would my wife Jenny think if I turned up with a teenage girl in the middle of the night? I only had one day off a week, and if I took Julie home my day off would be spent trying to deal with her problems.

But no excuse was sufficient in the context of the clear direction I was getting from God. Did I have a living faith or a dead faith? I knew what I had to do. I asked Julie if she would like to stay at our home that night. I told her I would help her find a long-term solution to her living situation, and that she could stay with us until we did. As I offered these things to Julie, I could see the look of relief in her eyes. She was very close to tears. I took her home. Jenny found a mattress and made up a bed on the floor of our living room. Julie stayed with us until we found more permanent accommodation.

I kept in contact with Julie and after a while she started attending our church youth programs. Eventually Julie gave her life to Jesus and became an active member of the church. She started reaching out to her friends and a number of them also became believers.

Kingdom Impact

When Jesus was asked by his disciples how they should pray, he provided them with a model of prayer that has become known by his followers throughout history as “The Lord’s Prayer.”

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one.

In this simple but profound prayer Jesus provides guidelines for our petitions and requests to God, but it is far more than a catalogue of subjects we should address in prayer; it is a list of imperatives for those who follow Jesus. After acknowledging and worshipping our Father in heaven, the first thing Jesus instructs us to ask for in our prayers is that God’s Kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:33 to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.” Establishing God’s Kingdom and working to see his will done on earth is an essential part of following and serving Jesus.

In 2 Corinthians 5:20 we are told we are “Christ’s ambassadors.” An ambassador is an authorized messenger or representative sent by a sovereign or state to speak and act on behalf of the sending authority. As followers of Jesus we are emissaries of the Kingdom of God, commissioned with the task of representing Jesus and establishing and advancing his rule on earth.

How does belonging to the Kingdom of God make a difference to the people around you? We all have a “circle of influence,” people we encounter on a daily or weekly basis—relatives and friends, acquaintances, fellow students, work colleagues. How does our relationship with Jesus impact their lives? In Luke 17:21 Jesus states “the kingdom of God is within you.” If we are authentic followers of Jesus the Kingdom of God should infuse our lives, and when people encounter us they should encounter the Kingdom.

Despite my reluctance, through the grace of God and the prompting of the Holy Spirit, a needy and essentially homeless girl encountered the Kingdom of God, and it radically changed her life. The little seed of the Kingdom that I sowed in Julie’s life grew and...