Lord's Prayer:
Your Kingdom Come

Pastor Phillips' Sermon

 Sunday, June 17, 2007

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today’s message is based on that portion of the Lord’s Prayer that we say every Sunday, “Thy kingdom come.” And in the bible, a number of analogies are used to describe the relationship of God to mankind, God and believers. In some places, we find the church is referred to as the “bride of Christ” or “the body of Christ.” Other places, we find, as in the Lord’s Prayer, God is referred to as the king and we are citizens of that kingdom or the children of the kingdom. That’s the case here in the Lord’s Prayer. God is referred to as the king.

But sometimes it’s difficult for us to relate to that idea. We don’t have kings and kingdoms in our society today, so we have to make a transition to something that really fits into our world. Thy kingdom come. What does that mean? Well, Luther’s Catechism says that God’s kingdom comes when our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit so that, by His grace, we believe His Holy Word and lead godly lives here in time and there in eternity. So the basic meaning of the expression “thy kingdom come” is for people to come to faith in Jesus Christ. And as we hear from Luther, when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re asking for God’s kingdom to come to us, which it has if we believe, and we’re also asking for God’s kingdom to come to others and that happens when God works through us and shares that message of salvation.

The scripture passage I’m basing the meditation on this morning is the Colossians passage and a key phrase says this, “For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves.” This captures the essence of that expression “thy kingdom come.” He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son, people coming to believe. And when we want to fit that into our world and our understanding of things, it makes sense when we talk about rescue. We know about rescuing, searching and rescuing, and that’s basically what the mission of Jesus was, to search and rescue all of us.

The scripture says clearly, though, that He’s rescued us from something terrible, the dominion of darkness, and although discussing eternal punishment is not wonderful table conversation, it’s still something important Christians have to realize. Otherwise, we don’t make the connection for why Jesus had to die and what was the point of that sacrifice. What is the dominion of darkness? Well, first of all, it’s a kingdom just like God’s kingdom but it’s not ruled by Jesus. It’s ruled by the devil and it’s a kingdom of sin and pain and suffering. But if you’re trying to share your faith with someone, those words and those expressions might not make much sense. A theological definition of the dominion of darkness is eternal separation from the love of God. That’s still kind of abstract and hard to comprehend. So when I’m sharing my faith, for instance, in Honduras like we will in the coming week, I refer to it this way. Hell is like this: Consider the worst moment of your life. I know you don’t want to think about that but think about the worst moment, all the feelings and pain involved with that time. Maybe it was when you were diagnosed with a terrible disease. Maybe it was when you lost somebody you dearly loved. Maybe it was when your job was terminated or your marriage ended. Remember that terrible moment. Imagine if that moment was frozen in time and then extended for eternity. That is hell and that’s what Jesus has rescued us from. He’s delivered us from this suffering that never would end, from the absolute worst emotions and feelings and experiences that we could imagine but only for eternity. It would last for eternity. That’s what He has rescued us from.

So in His search and rescue mission, when He died on the cross and offered His body as a sacrifice for our sins, He has delivered us, not just from a temporary moment but from eternal suffering. I’ve always had a high regard for those who work hard and are trained to do that search and rescue operation, all the different skills and equipment they have to use and all the different things they employ in their strategies to find people. And for us, we hear these stories all the time about people who are lost and then being found. In fact, I read one yesterday online about a 5-year-old girl who had been swimming with her grandfather. And the grandfather drowned but she had some sort of life preserver on and she floated to a shore that was in a river. Two days later, she wandered out of the woods.

Search and rescue is something we can relate to. We hear stories about children wandering off from a campsite or hikers getting lost up on a mountain and needing to be rescued, but I have a personal experience with search and rescue that has left a permanent imprint on my life. At the time, my family and I were living in northern Minnesota on the north shore of Lake Superior. I was the pastor of two small congregations and they were set in a rugged wilderness setting in the north woods. Being an outdoorsman, that was a great place for me. I loved to wander the Saw Tooth Mountains and explore the trails and things like that. And one cold November day, I decided to go hunting in that area. I decided I’d go deer hunting in the area that was rugged wilderness where friends of mine had some success. My plan was to drive to the end of a road, park my vehicle and hunt for the day. The only problem is I didn’t tell anyone my plan. I didn’t tell my wife. I didn’t tell my friends. Nobody knew where I was. But I was pretty confident in my abilities so I didn’t worry about it. I drove to the end of the road, parked, and got out of my car early in the morning. My plan was that I would hike out into the wilderness for about half the day and then kind of return in the afternoon. So I hiked along the base of this high ridge and I followed it as I went several miles. I came to a lone peak called Round Mountain and I hiked to the top of that and I walked around it watching the valleys below for game. Finally, I sat down and from where I sat, I could see my car in the distance probably two to three miles away. And I was thinking, “Now what will I do this afternoon? Will I go back the same trail I came in on?” That didn’t sound interesting. “I could hunt through the deep cedar swamp. That’s pretty tough going.” Over here to my right were the high peaks of that ridge. I thought, “That looks interesting.” So that was my plan. I would hike back along the top of that ridge until I got about where I could drop down to my car. So I set about doing that. I hunted all afternoon. Finally, it was getting dark so I sat down near a game trail and watched for awhile and when it got dark, I dropped down the ridge to where I thought my car would be. Well, there was no car. There was no road. And I thought, “I must not have come far enough.” So I went a little further. It was dark. And I’m walking through the snow, about knee deep snow, and pushing my way through the brush and crossing the stream and getting wet and thinking, “Where is the road? Where’s the car?” I couldn’t find it and it was dark. I was getting kind of scared and panicky. And I finally came out on this snowmobile trail and if you know about northern Minnesota, snowmobile trails are like highways in the snow and I thought, “This is good. I’m going to stay on this trail.” But I could not figure out which way to go on it. I pulled out my compass and it didn’t agree with my internal compass. When you have that problem, you’re in trouble. The true compass was right but I was all confused. So I thought, “Well, I have to calm myself down.” My heart’s pounding and I’m overheating. “Oh my gosh, I’m not going to get out of the woods tonight.” I took off my pack, did a quick inventory, found my matches, and I figured, “Okay, I have to figure out how I’m going to make it through the night.” Because it was cold, low teen temperatures. It was cold. So I searched around and I found all the materials to start a fire, birch bark, small twigs, and things like that. But it took me 45 minutes and many matches to get the fire going because we’d had freezing rain a couple of days earlier. Finally, we got the fire started. Then my intent was to keep it going. So I constantly searched for wood and sticks and branches to keep it going. Then I took a tarp out of my little pack. I had a safety blanket. It’s like a tarp. I made a shelter and prepared to spend the night. I determined I had to stay awake because if I fell asleep and the fire went out, I would probably freeze to death. So I thought about that, my own death. Kind of got choked up. And then I thought, “Well, I’m going to heaven.” Then I thought about my wife and my girls. And that was hard to think about leaving them behind and causing them pain. That was hard. So I just tried to stay awake and keep my fire going and I had a lot of heavy thoughts that night. It got dark about 4:30. About 11:00, I was looking through the flames of my fire and I saw a light in the distance. I jumped up and I could see it was somebody coming towards me. I thought, “If it’s a snowmobiler, I’m going to tackle him off his snowmobile. He’s not getting past me.” And it was people who were searching for me. And they picked me up and gave me a ride back to my vehicle. And what a relief! All the thoughts of my death gone. All my concerns for my family gone. What a great comfort. And when we got back to my vehicle, there must have been 30 guys there who had been searching. There was a fire engine. There were snowmobiles and four-wheelers. There were guys who were hiking every trail in the area. There were two people hiking every step I made in the snow and it was miles and miles of steps. I couldn’t believe how hard they’d worked and how organized they were in their search. And it made me think about how God has searched and rescued each one of us, how He’s gone after us. He sent us His Son. It made me think about all the people in my life He sent to rescue me, my parents, grandparents, my pastors, my Sunday School teachers. All those people God had sent on His search and rescue team to find me and bring me into the kingdom.

I came away with three powerful thoughts: 1) How awful it feels to be lost; 2) How wonderful it feels to be found; and 3) How little I was doing and our church was doing to reach the lost, to search and rescue the lost. If a search and rescue team looking for a human being to save their temporary life goes to such extremes, we should be going to even greater extremes because we are rescuing people for eternity. So it challenged me as a pastor.

Every week, we pray “thy kingdom come” and when we’re praying that, I’m not sure we really understand what we’re talking about. Thy kingdom come. And then when the light dawns on us and we say, “Oh, that’s when people come to believe in Christ. Oh, I’m all for that. Yeah, thy kingdom come. Let’s pray that.” But what we don’t realize is God uses us to make His kingdom come for the people around us and that’s where we need to step up. That’s where we need to realize this scripture passage is so wonderful. He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves. There’s an important Greek word here, the word translated here as “brought us into” is a special word. In Greek, it’s “metatheson.” You might recognize that word. It’s the root for a medical term, metastasized. And we know when our doctor uses that word, it’s not a good one. It’s not a good thing to hear because our disease has spread from its site of origin to another location. But in scripture, it’s a wonderful word. It’s a wonderful word that describes how God has rescued us from something terrible and brought us into His wonderful kingdom, the kingdom of His beloved Son. But the Greek word carries more weight than that. It carries with it this idea, the deportation of a body of men or the removal of them to form a colony. So, in effect, you and I have been rescued so that we might form a colony wherever we are, where we work, where we play, where we live. God has brought us into His kingdom with an important task, to spread His kingdom.

Now I think we need to have a strategy. I think as individuals we need to have a strategy. Also, as a congregation. And I know there is a strategy about what we do. Pastor Burcham is great at leading that strategy. But as individuals, we have to figure out what our strategy is. What are we going to do as part of God’s search and rescue team to bring in the lost? It’s a big challenge and it might make you a little bit uncomfortable but it shouldn’t because you’re on the best team there is and you have the power of God Almighty, the Holy Spirit, working in you. As you struggle with that, what your strategy may be and how you’re going to reach the people around you, I want you to be guided by those three thoughts: 1) How awful it feels to be lost; 2) How wonderful it feels to be found; and then 3) All the people God has sent. Think about all the people God has sent to rescue you. And finally, you be one of those people for someone else. Amen? Amen.

Copyright 2007 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church