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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The Gospel of the kingdom 9: Thy Will Be Done

All of us can be channels of the life-saving good news to others. If we open our hearts to the Savior and our eyes to those who are drowning, we can be used to do some incredible things. God will do the work through us, and He will use us if we are willing to lay ourselves down for others.

The announcement of God’s kingdom had a common response: repentance and belief. This was the response John called for (Matt. 3:2), and it was also what Jesus compelled people to do when the kingdom had arrived (Matt. 4:17). Like two sides of the same coin, repent and believe go together and cannot be separated. To repent is to turn away from the path that we were following. To believe is to turn to the new path of Jesus’ kingdom. It is one move, away from the old and to the new.

All kingdom life begins with this same response of faith. When the only response is to intellectually accept two or three facts about the historic person of Jesus without any change in direction, we end up with “Christians” who are self-absorbed rather than kingdom agents. When we start with the foundation of what is best for “me,” we end up self-centered. But when the foundation is about surrendering to the King of kings, we end up with an entirely different result.

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