Monday, May 1, 2017
546 - Thy Kingdom Come...
Spirituality
Column No. 546
May 2, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
May 2, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Thy Kingdom Come …
By
Bob Walters
I’ve always had it sort of stuck in my head – errantly, as
it turns out – that the line in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” is about the future, not
right now.
How rich it
would be, I’d muse, if the Kingdom were here now when in our fallen state we
need comfort and assurance the most. And
come to find out, it is. Who knew?
The Bible
ends with the famous entreaty, “Come,
Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20), suggesting a future day of the Lord’s
salvation and deliverance. But we are
asking for something we already have. See
the Bible’s actual last verse, Revelation 22:21, which says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s
people. Amen.”
Do you see
the shift? In verse 20 is the future
implication of something that we might think hasn’t yet happened, “Come, Lord Jesus,” where verse 21 is
very “now” oriented in its verb structure, “be
with.” In other words the Apostle
John is saying, “Help us understand that God’s grace is with us now.”
It is not an expectation for the future; it is God helping us now in
grace through the Holy Spirit.
We don’t have to wait, we just have
to be smart.
God gives
us the freedom to accept or ignore that grace; to act on it with joy, faith and
humility, or with pride, contempt and disbelief. It is up to us what we do with it, but foolish
to put it off and inaccurate to think it hasn’t already happened. Read Acts 1; the Holy Spirit comes on us in
the present. Jesus promised. Use it or lose it.
One of the
things I miss during summers is our weekly Wednesday evening Bible study at our
church with Dr. George Bebawi, who just concluded a series on the book of Colossians that was rich with hope and truth
about the real nature of God’s presence in each of our lives. This “Kingdom of God” thing, George pointed
out last week, is a very real and currently available gift as well as a
bankable promise for our future.
We recite “Thy Kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10, Luke 11:2) in modern English but,
as George noted, the deeper intention of the original language in Jesus’s Aramaic
and the Bible’s Greek was probably best stated by third-century church father
Tertullian, in Latin, saying that Jesus is instructing us to ask of God, “May your Holy Spirit come and dwell in our
hearts.” That’s a great and
encouraging prayer. The Holy Spirit’s grace
tells us of our adoption into God’s Kingdom as sons and daughters through Jesus
Christ in a spirit of love, not as slaves in a spirit of fear.
Sometimes prayers are funny
things. We pray for the second coming,
but it will happen anyway. We pray for
God’s will, but Satan trips us up. We
pray not to be condemned but we already are.
We pray to be forgiven but … we already are.
Better to pray to let the Holy
Spirit rule in our lives every day with God’s love.
Let His Kingdom come and His will
be done. And do it now.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) needs either daily reminders of God’s
eternal glory or a longer attention span.
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