A Confession

I have to confess something. For most of my life, I have silently dismissed part of the Lord’s prayer, even though we say it in church every week.

It’s the phrase, “Your kingdom come.” Honestly, I think that most of the time as my mouth says those words, my brain follows it with “yeah, right—as if that’s going to happen.”

Oh, I firmly believe that at some eschatological point in the future, Christ will return, and at that point His kingdom will be here in the fullest sense. But now? With the rampant wickedness of slavery and bondage and oppression and cruelty and too many other bad things to list?

Still, it doesn’t seem to me that Jesus was thinking about the end of the world when He taught us to pray this phrase. It seems like He really means for us to pray with all our hearts for His kingdom to come here and now, and that the following phrase, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” will be the result of His kingdom coming—now. The Bible is clear that God’s will won’t be done in every way or every heart until He comes again. But I think this prayer means more than merely “Please come again someday.”

I think it is supposed to be more immediate than that, and I think one reason is that when we invest ourselves in earnest prayer, God changes us and often begins to use us to do the things we’ve been praying about. Look at Nehemiah: he prayed and wept for four months about the fact that Jerusalem was in ruins, and then God sent him to rebuild the walls. So if we take this phrase seriously, maybe God will move in us to strengthen His kingdom today.

There is a kind of theology called “kingdom theology” that some people disagree with. I don’t want to get into an argument about that. But I do think that George Eldon Ladd, who some consider the first proponent of kingdom theology, had the most serviceable definition I’ve heard of the kingdom of God: The rule of God in the hearts of people.

With that in mind, I had a really neat “kingdom” day yesterday. I won’t go into the details here, but I felt as if God (the King) told me to do something and I (the subject) obeyed. That shouldn’t be an unusual occurrence, but something about this day was really cool. And at the same time I was hearing about other people—friends of friends, a student in our youth group at church—who, like me, seem to feel called by God to do something about slavery.

It’s like I got a glimpse of how God has been working in all our hearts, and as we obey, the kingdom comes just a bit more strongly. A Sara Groves song called “Kingdom Comes” basically says that when we live out God’s love even in trying circumstances, “That’s a little stone, that’s a little mortar, that’s a little seed, that’s a little water in the hearts of the sons and daughters. This kingdom is coming.”

In small ways, I can see it happening. And I’m not going to dismiss that phrase in the Lord’s prayer anymore.

Your kingdom come, Lord.