On Sunday, we concluded a four-week study on the Kingdom of God. Having already seen that Christ postponed His earthly reign and will be coming again soon, we asked three very important questions:

1. What will you do in the Kingdom? Not only will believers be citizens of Christ’s kingdom (John 3:3), but you will actually reign together with Christ! (2 Tim. 2:12; Rev. 20:6; Dan. 7:27) The Bible indicates you will rule over people, over towns, over nations. There will be learning and building and law-making and innovation. As Randy Alcorn says, “All of us will have some responsibility in which we serve God…We think that faithful work should be rewarded by a vacation for the rest of our lives. But God offers something very different: more work, more responsibilities, increased opportunities, along with greater abilities, resources, wisdom, and empowerment. We will have sharp minds, strong bodies, clear purpose, and unabated joy.” (see Alcorn, Heaven, chs. 20-22)
2. How should you prepare for the Kingdom? In the Parable of Talents (Matt. 25:14-30), Jesus says your faithfulness in this life will directly affect your role in Christ’s Kingdom. To go one step further, your faithfulness in the church will directly affect your role in Christ’s Kingdom. Yes, the church is that important. The church is the beautiful Bride of Christ, the Body of Christ, the temple of God, the protector of the Gospel, the steward of the Great Commission, and the only institution Christ said He would build. To neglect Christ’s church is to fall short of His wonderful plan for your life. It is to abandon your post and go AWOL. In short, it is burying your talent. Perhaps you were involved at one time, but have slowly drifted away from the people of God. Please realize you can never outgrow your need for and stewardship in the church.
3. What has Christ entrusted to you now? First, His Gospel. You must turn from sin and trust in Christ. Once you have done that, then your whole life has been bought and is owned by Him. There are now three areas in the church where He is specifically testing and developing your faithfulness: time, talent, and treasure.

This week, ask the Lord how you are doing in these three areas. Take an honest assessment. Where are you living up to God’s standard? Where do you need to improve? Where do you need to humbly repent, find forgiveness at the cross, and begin to live for Christ’s kingdom instead of your own pleasures?

• Time (Eph. 5:16; 2 Tim. 2:4). Worship is not a spectator sport. Everyone must be an active player. You are called by God to attend and be engaged in worship on the Lord’s Day. Pursue membership if you are not already a member, so that you can achieve God’s fullest for your life. Attend our Sunday School and evening Bible Study. Be on guard against excuses that Satan will use to draw you away from God’s house and His people, and cut off your circulation from the Body of Christ. We all have weeks when we don’t feel like getting up and going to church, when time with friends or projects around the house compete for our attention. But once you arrived at church and enjoyed the rich study, worship, and fellowship, have you ever regretted it?
• Talent (Eph. 4:7; 1 Pet. 4:10). Every single person in the Body of Christ has a spiritual gift, and God calls you to be a good steward for the benefit of others. No one can afford to be idle. Your gift is needed, whether it be serving, mercy, faith, teaching, administration, etc. Only when everyone is actively using their gifts can the Body reach optimum health and maturity. There are many opportunities right now where more members are desperately needed: children’s teachers, nursery helper, choir member, missions, audio/visual team, etc. Are you using your gifts to their fullest?
• Treasure (Phil. 4:18-19; 2 Cor. 9:7). God has blessed you and calls you to give cheerfully and sacrificially to His work. Such an offering is a well-pleasing and acceptable sacrifice to Him. As Donald Whitney says, “The use of your money and how you give it is one of the best ways of evaluating your relationship with Christ and your spiritual trustworthiness. If you love Christ with all your heart, your giving will reflect that” (Spiritual Disciplines, p. 140).

Faithfulness in these three areas will require sacrifice, but they will directly affect your role in Christ’s future Kingdom. Will He be able to entrust you with much in His kingdom?

May each of us hear those words, “Well done, good and faithful slave! You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master” (Matt. 25:21).

(Sunday’s sermon has been uploaded to our podcast site and is available for free download or to listen online.)

I found this photo journal of the war in Afghanistan very interesting. Our troops and allies are facing some unique challenges there. Michael Yon seems to be doing a good job of reporting on a war the mainstream media has largely ignored.

Here’s an excerpt:

RPGs are small, cheap and can defeat most vehicles other than our most heavily armored. In the race between armor and bomb, the bomb eventually always wins. This has been true for centuries and shows no signs of changing. In the Sangin area, we are better on foot wearing only body armor. British citizens today are concerned about the same things that Americans were concerned about during the early phases of the Iraq war: armor. Fact is, we can drive down these roads in the best tanks in the world, and be blown upside-down on and set ablaze. The enemy is increasingly good at blowing vehicles into ditches or rivers to drown the occupants. They did this to the Soviets, too. In many places, such as Sangin, the roads can be a death sentence no matter what you drive, and the enemy can seed IEDs far faster than we can clear the routes.

Dear Lord, let justice prevail and may our soldiers come home safely.

“It’s frightening to think about how many people have not tasted the goodness of God and his salvation, not because Christians have not had opportunity to share, but because we have been so shallow in what we did share.”

– Thabiti Anyabwile, What Is a Healthy Church Member?, chapter 5.

Two weeks ago, I preached a survey of the entire Old Testament and showed that its unifying theme is the Mediatorial Kingdom of God. But does this theme also appear in the New Testament? Indeed it does, as we saw together on Sunday.

I believe the New Testament reveals three stages to the kingdom:

1. The Kingdom is Presented (Matt. 3:2; 4:23-24; 10:5-8). With the arrival of the promised Messiah, the establishment of His Kingdom was immanent. John, the disciples, and Jesus Himself all announced that the King had come, and called the people to repent and embrace their Messiah. Throughout His teaching and miracles, Jesus affirmed the exact same aspects of the Kingdom foretold in the Old Testament: spiritual, moral, social, religious, political, and physical. In sections like the Sermon on the Mount, He certainly emphasized the spiritual realities of His kingdom, but He never redefined the kingdom as something exclusively spiritual. He was building on all the Old Testament had already revealed about it.
2. The Kingdom is Rejected (Matt. 12:22-32; 13:10-13). From the very outset of His public ministry, Jesus aroused the suspicion and hatred of Jewish leaders. They challenged His authority, denied His claims, grew jealous of His following, resented His association with sinners, and rejected His call to humility and repentance. Tragically, God’s people rejected His appointed Mediator, even going so far as to call Him a collaborator with Satan! Hence, Christ declared judgment on Israel, and the fulfillment of the Kingdom was postponed. At this point, Jesus began using parables to teach previously unrevealed mysteries of the Kingdom.
3. The Kingdom is Postponed (Matt. 24:15-16, 21-23, 29-30; 25:31-34). As he approached His death, Christ laid out a clear timeline of future events. He said His second coming will be preceded by a time of unprecedented tribulation. Then, Christ will return in glory, judge the nations, and reign as the final fulfillment of the Mediatorial Kingdom. We still await this glorious promise! Only the timing of these events remains a mystery (Ac. 1:3, 6-8).

What does this mean for us today? How do we, the Church, fit into God’s glorious Mediatorial Kingdom if it has been postponed? I will teach next Sunday on some very specific applications to this doctrine, but for now, here are some general truths for meditation and discussion…

• We must study the Gospels, because the conditions to enter His Church and His future Kingdom are the same: faith, repentance, rebirth, poverty of spirit, meekness, etc.
• We must live with urgency in holiness and evangelism because of the immanence of Christ’s return, judgment, and reign.
• We can celebrate our new birth into the royal family of God. We are children of the King and heirs to all His glorious promises!
• We should realize that Christ is preparing us to rule together with Him. This should drive us to great stewardship and faithfulness. We will look at this more in depth next Sunday.
• We can thank God that we are already recipients of some of the blessings of the coming Kingdom. We already have forgiveness, eternal life, peace with God, the indwelling Holy Spirit, and God’s law in our hearts. These are the firstfruits of much more blessing to come.

(Sunday’s sermon has been uploaded to our podcast site and is available for free download or to listen online.)

May God help us apply His Word this week in our hearts, in our words, and in our actions.

You may not have heard about this, but a group of Jews called the Temple Institute have been diligently working for the last three decades to reconstruct all the furniture for the Temple. (I actually got to see the menorah when I visited Israel ten years ago.) Their hope is to one day rebuild the temple and reestablish sacrifices. Hmmm. Sounds like something I read in Revelation.

The Temple Institute will begin building the sacrificial altar on Thursday, Tisha B’av, a fast day when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple some 2,000 years ago.

The sacrificial altar was located in the center of the Temple, and upon it the Kohanim (priests) offered the numerous voluntary and obligatory sacrifices commanded in the Bible.

The Temple Institute, which has already built many of the vessels for the Holy Temple, such as the ark and the menorah, has now embarked on a project to build the altar. Construction begins Thursday in Mitzpe Yericho (east of Jerusalem) at 5:30 p.m.

“Unfortunately, we cannot currently build the altar in its proper place, on the Temple Mount,” Temple Institute director Yehudah Glick said. “We are building an altar of the minimum possible size so that we will be able to transport it to the Temple when it is rebuilt.”

Even a minimum size altar will work out to be approximately 2 meters tall, 3 meters long, and 3 meters wide. Workers have collected around 10 cubic meters of rocks weighing several tons already.

The rocks were gathered from the Dead Sea area and wrapped individually to assure they remain whole and are not touched by metal, as the Bible requires.

“The Torah says that no iron tools should be used on the altar’s stones,” Glick explained. “The altar represents a connection to life and to the creation of the world. Iron is the opposite – it is used to build tools of war, death, and destruction.”

HT: Todd Bolen