Kingdom of God Series - The Upside Down Kingdom

But I wanted to ask a question, is what would you expect a kingdom to look like? Now, I know you've all been around for the last few weeks and you'll know all the real, but the real answer, what do you think a kingdom, like a government or someone in power, What's it going to look like? What does it look like? There we go.

I love these responses.

What would you expect a kingdom, we'll say it this way, the kingdom of God to look like? Yeah.

But strong, eh? Powerful.

you'd expect to be able to notice that.

It's a kingdom of influence.

I'm answering your questions for you because I'm kind of getting, you know, it's a getting ahead, it's strength, it's success, being noticed.

You know, I was watching that on the news last night, like everyone noticed when that politician was walking through the crowd.

Everyone knew where they were.

They knew there was someone there.

We'd expect that when we think of the kingdom.

And then my first slide is a quote from the book from Dallas Willard, The Scandal of the Kingdom, part of the references I've used for this series.

But he says this, that Jesus designed his teachings to point out the common misunderstandings and the errant cultural assumptions in order to realign them to the nature of the kingdom.

See, how we see power, how we see authority, how we see being winning, we have a narrative that we all live in.

It's like fish.

We swim in the water.

And yet Jesus' message was constantly seemed to push up against it.

It's why this morning, the scandal of the kingdom this morning is this upside-down kingdom.

So much of what Jesus said, so much of the example or the pictures that he used, they seem so upside down.

So different from the way we would describe power.

We would describe authority.

We would describe a king and his kingdom.