Kingdom First Reality
But seek (aim at and strive after/for, be ravenously hungry for) first of all (which is the first thing you do and where you begin, pursue, follow and engage) His kingdom (His System, His Plan, His method) and His righteousness (His way of doing and being, and that will be right/correct), and then all these things taken together will be given to you besides.”
Matthew 6:33, Amplified Bible, Classic Edition (AMPC) paraphrased
These are our instructions for the successful living of our lives in every area. The day
to day mundane, thoughts, actions and desires that we process. Whatever sphere of influence/Mountain you have been creatively designed to serve, this is the method for our successful pursuit. The difference between a Kingdom plan and a planned kingdom is that one is based in eternity and is focused and directed by eternal things that deal in outcomes and results and on our eternalness, while the other’s focus is on things that are temporary and that will expire, like income and things that money can buy. A Kingdom plan teaches you how to become founded and based on a living relationship with the eternal, living God through the kingdom system as the plan that is provided to humanity by our Creator and our Designer. A planned Kingdom focuses on temporary, material things that will not out live time, they will expire.
A Kingdom Church teaches you what the Kingdom is, how it works, how you engage the
Kingdom while on the earth, what the purpose of the Kingdom is for you and for humanity, and how to spread the Good News about His Kingdom. The Kingdom was the central theme and the primary message of God Himself when He was on the earth as Jesus Christ, Emmanuel. If your church is not teaching as its primary message the Kingdom of God and its engagement, it is not a Kingdom Church. A church kingdom bases and measures its success on temporary things that are all revenue generated and produced by revenue; How large is the facility, how much revenue do they generate, how many people attend, what is the size of their staff, how many programs do they have to engage people in the church, what is the size and the cost of their media outreach?
Church is important. This is where we gather together in relationship and where we corporately fellowship with one another. This is where we spend time together in a congregate setting learning about our Creator, our Designer and His forever plan for our lives. His plan begins with our choosing to be in an active and living relationship with Him. His plan for us is then activated and developed by engaging in His Kingdom, His System, His method for our living a successful and meaningful life in our here (our now), and our hereafter, (our forever). Understanding and learning about the Kingdom, how it is designed to operate and how we engage the Kingdom in our lives completely, in every area of our lives, is the primary method, the only method that we are provided by our Creator. To not know, to not understand and to not engage the Kingdom as our primary method of relationship, of fellowship and of communication with our Creator God is to
miss the joy, the peace and the active, living relationship that has been planned for us from the foundations, before the beginnings of the earth and time. His Kingdom is His correct way of doing and being.
Church is primarily where we gather (come together) congregately and fellowship together, where we look deep into who our God is, who we are to Him, and who He is to us. This is the place in our society where we are to spend time together studying our God’s plan, His system, and His method for living a successful and meaningful life on planet earth, for now and forever. If your church does not teach the Kingdom as its primary message and the central theme of all of its efforts as God Himself as Jesus Christ did when He was on the earth, may I suggest that you begin to fast and to pray and to seek an intervention from our Creator while you fellowship and communicate with your leadership asking for a Kingdom focus in all that your church does. You must be able to explain the difference between a Kingdom church and a church kingdom.
The Kingdom experience and a kingdom relationship are what humanity is searching for. Worship and fellowship are to be a continual, lifetime experience, and an all-the-time occurrence, not an experience limited to the congregate fellowship with all of the hip
trappings of smoke, lights, and loud music that orchestrate our emotions, our feelings and our minds into a high pitch frenzy. Our God is Spirit, and those that worship Him must worship Him out of or from their spirit, the eternal component of who we are. This is the worship that our God requires and the only kind that He will accept. A kingdom church will be centered around things that are eternal and that impact our eternalness. Things that change how we think, what we believe and how we act. A Kingdom Church changes you and your culture.
I am not slamming the Church, but Church is not a rock concert, where a hip person comes out and tells you how cool our God is. All of the components of a rock concert can be purchased with money. They are temporary and they have no lasting value. The true worshippers of our God do so from/out of their spirit in a manner that money cannot buy. True worship is fellowship and communication from our spirit to His Spirit. The power of corporate worship offers an unequalled joy that all of humanity longs to
experience. This desire is built into our DNA, it is who we are designed to be.
The Mountain of Religion and its culture has taken over most of our Churches. Religion is the largest and the wealthiest organization on our planet. I do not believe that our God created or organized religion. His greatest challenge when He was on the earth as Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, was with religion and with religious people. This reality remains today. Jesus mentioned the church three times and the Kingdom more than one hundred and twenty times. Never did Jesus refer to an organization with great wealth and vast assets. I do not find a New Testament example or parallel of today’s churches with all of their structures and owned gathering places and a huge payroll. Religion has more income and more assets than any other Mountain of Society. Think about this. If all of the revenue that Churches received was used to serve humanity and not to fund facilities and operations, how would that change society as we know it? If the mission and the purpose of Church became ministry, enlightenment and betterment, and not self-sustaining, how many Government services and global help organizations
would be unnecessary? Was it and is it our God’s plan to establish all of these religious organizations that gather billions of dollars of revenue each year just to support their facilities and their operations where their smallest expenditure is actual ministry and outreach? Does God approve of billionaire televangelists? Have we lost our way? Have we left our Kingdom-First charge and accepted a substitute from the Mountain of Religion that is controlled and that is a development of the kingdom of darkness? Are we building Kingdom Churches or Church Kingdoms?
I am challenged, disappointed and dismayed by the moan and the expressed longings of humanity for a kingdom church experience and their inability to locate a kingdom church. In casual and in serious conversation with humanity from all walks of life, the desire to experience a Kingdom relationship through a Kingdom Church is everywhere. There is a loud cry from our spirits for the Kingdom Church reality. We are tired of the empty and unfulfilling experience that we receive from a church kingdom. We must fast and pray and study and believe our God for Church change, and we must act now. We do not have to settle for the status quo of a religious church experience.
In Part 2 of this blog series, we will discover the way forward into a Kingdom-first reality, not only in our churches, but in every area of our lives.
Great blog, and your Kingdom books (all three) are excellent.
Hello,
Amen to your article on the Elijah List email about going through trials and the coming revival. (and yes, I”m old enough to have been a CCR fan back in the day)
I wanted to contact you, as another intercessor. And boy, have I been through fierce, destructive spiritual battles in the past ten years. It began in 2009 with my husband of 37 years, Ervin Christian Jackson, telling me after our anniversary dinner that he’d never loved me (though he’d told me every day he did), was having an affair, and wanted out of our marriage. When I brought him a suitcase, he begged me not to kick him out, saying, “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know why this happened.” I asked God for His heart for the man that night, and boy, I awoke at 2 a.m. with my heart erupting out of my chest in compassion straight from God! I KNOW who the true enemy is, and it isn’t my ex-husband!
Ervin was born into a family with a father who was schizophrenic and paranoid and an out-patient at a mental hospital, though their mother never told the children this till they were in their 30’s. Ervin grew up misunderstanding their relationship, not knowing his father was on anti-psychotic medication. His mother was invalidated by her father (not allowed to attend college because she was a girl), bitter at her sister for getting some of the family dishes when their parents died, and emotionally cold toward her children. She also had generational curses of FreeMasonry in her family background. I didn’t know any of this when I married Ervin in 1972. He’d also been polluted by pornography by his best friend’s father in high school, made worse by watching porn movies while sitting alert during six years in the Air Force. Ervin volunteered in every church we were members of, told me every day he loved me, but told me in 2010, “Jesus dying on the cross didn’t mean to me what it meant to you, and I knew someday it would come back to bite me on the butt.” Yikes! Words and lies straight from the pit of Hell! Now I know his brain never developed the center for empathy in his childhood (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and he made an inner vow in childhood, “No woman is going to control me the way my mother controlled my father,” all based on his childish misunderstanding of what was happening in their home, or that his father’s behavior was altered by anti-psychotic medications and electro-shock therapy, rendering him practically a “zombie” – yet another baited hook of Satan’s deception and twisting.
In 2010 he moved out, and I prayed for three hours with my good friend Rev. Bjorn Pedersen (founder of Prayer Watch International) against every curse of every level of FreeMasonry. Praise God, our two sons are both solid Christians, the older one with Wycliffe since 2005. Ervin evidently married a “Catholic” woman around 2013, and tried for five years, through three petitions, to “annul” our marriage through the Catholic Church, even though he’d divorced me in 2011. I stood on the truth of the covenant we’d made and what we’d told and done for each other, and all three petitions failed. Last fall at a Healing Room, an intercessor I’d never met told me I was the product of a generational line of pastors and teachers (true) and God chose me for this battle, and it would be won by God’s peace reigning in all of my life. Four weeks ago, I awoke to the Holy Spirit telling me, “Run silent, run deep,” so I’ve asked other deliverance, prophetic, and prayer ministries to lift up Ervin for deliverance, cleansing, healing, rebuilding his brain according to God’s original design, accountability, conviction, contrition, godly sorrow, holy fear, and true repentance, to lead him, and frankly, his twin brother Earle and all their nieces and nephews, at last to salvation in Jesus.
I know I can’t save or deliver Ervin; ONLY Jesus can! IF you or any in your ministry sense God’s call to intercede for Ervin Christian Jackson, I am most grateful. I know we can’t be married anymore, and God did bring me to a wonderful, God-fearing, Jesus-loving man (both of us Hoosiers by birth, me in Warsaw and Daniel in Greenwood) three years ago, yet I still would rather see Ervin saved and in Heaven than go down to Satan’s deception into Hell. And I know the time is short, as we all pray Maranatha!
God bless you and cover you with His love and favor as with a shield,
Rose M. Hunter
ramblingroseblog.wordpress.com
Move Your “…BUT…” – A Journey Into God’s Heart, Rose M.Vieira, Xulon Press 2016
Noble Woman, God is Good All The Time, Precious Jewels, Blessed Is She,Believe, Rose Hunter, Christian Brands/Living Grace/Autom websitesose M. Hunter
ramblingroseblog.wordpress.com
Move Your “…BUT…” – A Journey Into God’s Heart, Rose M.Vieira, Xulon Press 2016
Noble Woman, God is Good All The Time, Precious Jewels, Blessed Is She,Believe, RoseHunter, Christian Brands/Living Grace/Autom websites
Wow!!
Thank you man of God.
Iam so glad to know that man like you have been raised by God for such a time as this.
Indeed i share your thoughts and burden on the role and position the church is.
We will keep on praying forvthe Kingdom church to be established.
Many thanks for sharing.
This truely blessed my heart.
The Kingdom church, rather than the church Kingdom, is at the very core of my heart.
We pray for all our Pastors, Teachers, and Leaders at all times, to cover them spiritually, and in every other way to do God’s will in His way, and shine forth His Word through all they say and do.
I find it far easier, and way more efficient, to reach more people and minister to them more effectively, with the help of a well-organized, responsibly-run, Christ-centered, Heavenly Father- directed, church fellowship that: seeks God first, relys on the Holy Spirit, uses common sense (Proverbs), sets Godly guidelines, and applys tested and proven ways to reach, teach, grow, and help people with the limited time on Earth we have been given, in this mortal shell of our human spirit.
My desire is to reach the most people’s hearts and souls, to help multiply God’s Kingdom, adding more souls to His Forever Family, Making the most of my time on this Earth.
A Kingdom church provides more help in reaching and ministering to more people in the world than does a solo stand-alone believer without the spiritual life-enhancing factors of group worship, praise testimonies, prayer, teaching, training, growth, and outreach activities.