To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

 

The in-between is hard.

This time and space between our first step towards Jesus and coming face-to-face with Him is difficult and often confusing.

Do we buckle down and learn to follow all the rules?

Do we throw rule-following to the wind and learn to live authentically?

How in the world, how in this very world, are we supposed to live out this God life?

Jesus speaks often of the Kingdom of God. It is coming, it is near, it is breaking through.

The Kingdom of God is His rule, His will being done here on earth as it is in heaven.

He taught us to pray for this to happen.

Now.

Paul speaks of living now as though we were already perfected. One habit leads to another which leads to another which suddenly leads to hope and love breaking through into our world.

Perhaps it is a little of both the rule-following and the living authentically.

When we try to obey God’s beautiful law, His law which shows us how life works best, we slowly become the sort of person who naturally and authentically follows after God.

It takes work, it takes choice by painful choice to build these habits, but the more work you put in, the more natural it becomes.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. ~ C. S. Lewis

It is as though we are planning to move to a distant country and are trying to learn the language of that country before we go. It takes work to learn a language, but the more we work at it and the longer we practice, the more that language becomes a part of us.

After awhile, we begin to think in this new language; even, perhaps, to dream in it. If we work steadily on, when we finally move to our new home we may even be mistaken for a native.

Isn’t that our ultimate goal, our telos? To be mistaken for a native of the Kingdom of God?

Suddenly, after years of following the rules, we find that the character of Jesus is becoming authentically our own character. When we do the work, with the power of the Holy Spirit inside of us, we find that love and peace and patience are becoming our natural response.

We also find that as we become more like a native of God’s Kingdom, we are bringing pieces of God’s Kingdom to rest all around us.

We are doing the work that allows God’s Kingdom to break through to our homes, to our workplaces, to our churches, to our relationships.

And so we find that at the same moment we have been praying Christ’s prayer of Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, the Spirit has been working within our very selves to transform us into the answer to that prayer.

God’s ways are as beautiful as they are mysterious.

It is an astounding idea that He would allow a partnership between these frail jars of clay and the Holy Spirit’s death-defeating power.

Yet He does allow it, even command it.

Through us, through our weak and cracked selves, the Kingdom of God is breaking through to heal and restore our broken world.

Let us continue our labor to obey God’s law, to choose His habits, to learn His language,

so that one day we might be mistaken for a native of His kingdom.