The Kingdom

Three Assumptions about the Kingdom

1. At any given moment I am either building the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Darkness. Period.   -God has sometimes called us to ridiculous things: sell your house, quit your job, adopt a child, share the gospel with someone, etc. and one of two choices arise for us. We either obey or disobey. If we obey, we believe in our heart, that the Kingdom of God is being advanced (even if it is to our earthly demise and ridicule, or earthly 'success'). If we disobey (i.e. sin), that antithesis (or opposite) occurs, the Kingdom of Darkness is being advanced. 
-So when we aren't advancing the Kingdom of God, we are advancing the Kingdom of Darkness. We cannot be in neutral on this position. There's no middle ground. Practically, when we aren't obedient the Kingdom of God is not gaining territory. 

2. It is possible to participate in Church expansion and unintentionally be an agent of shrinking the kingdom of God.
-When studies were made about the most churched/christian populated cities, European (note the post-modern bias) researchers asserted that the Church had no social benefit to cities or societies. They went to the most churched/christian populated city and ran up statistics about the societal problems (abortions, rape, murder, etc.) and found that they reflected that their societal problems fell in the lower 15% of the world's problems. That is to say, they looked just as worse (societal health) as the worse cities in the world. And when they looked at other cities, that were predominately unchurched, they found great "societal health". Pastors interviewed from the most churched/christian populated city were asked about what they do about those horrific statistics, in which they replied, "Not my problem, my job is to just shepherd my flock." 
-When we think about the kingdom we often just note how one enters into the kingdom, but we should also note how we ought to live in the kingdom. 

3. It is possible to unknowingly value the Kingdom of God before acknowledging the value of its source; the King.
-Many non-believers may enjoy the self-satisfaction of helping the helpless, mending the broken. We see this in charity work and we see this in people that have no religious affiliation that stun us with their kindness to random people (as seen in some commercials). But what people miss is the eternal destination and purpose of the Kingdom, the glory of God. 

-All adapted from Jeff Christopherson's guest lecture at SEBTS from his book Kingdom Matrix.