Text: Mark 1:14–15
Topic: How the kingdom of God is both now and not yet

• The coming of the kingdom of God was Jesus' central message.
• Everything else in the Gospels is a way of illustrating what that means.

• Biblical scholars and theologians have devoted entire lifetimes to focusing on the kingdom of God, trying to understand what it looks like.
• The kingdom of God is a little harder for us to understand today than it was in Jesus' day, because we don't have a king, and we don't live in a time of kingdoms.
• Because there were kings in the ancient world, Christ uses that analogy to show who God is and what authority God exercises over us.
• God's kingdom is expansive; it includes all of creation.
• God gave us the ability to make choices—to choose to follow God or to reject God.
• God is King, whether you choose to be his subject or not.
• The King we have over us chooses not to force us to follow his commands; instead, he tries to woo us.
• We find the climax of the human story in God, the King of the cosmos, choosing to step into human skin on our planet to show us the way to the kingdom of God.
• There are three senses in which Jesus uses the term "the kingdom of God," and we're going to try to unpack those three senses.

• Illustration: Hamilton shares a story about how a view from a mountaintop reminded him of the nature of the kingdom of God.
• This is the first sense of the kingdom of God: God rules and reigns over everything, whether you acknowledge it or not.
• At this moment, God is all around, and God's kingdom is all around, and everything obeys certain principles that God himself has set in motion.
• You need to wake up in the morning and remind yourself that your world is fleeting, but God's is an eternal kingdom.
• The single most important thing is that you live according to his kingdom.
• When you begin to live according to the rules of God's kingdom, you find that life begins to go differently for you because you're living not according to the rebellious standards of the world, but according to standards of God's kingdom.

• The knowledge that God's kingdom is all around us is not meant to lead us to ignore the world; it's meant to compel us to try to help this world look more like the kingdom of God.
• We are taught to pray for "kingdom come."
  • Illustration: Hamilton looks at the many ways the world would be different if the kingdom were realized on earth.
• Since we live as those who are striving to be a part of that kingdom, we have our feet in two worlds.
• The kingdom of God is what you work toward in your life. It's what you strive for.
  • Illustration: Karl Marx confronted Christians about being too heavenly-minded.
• To the degree that Christians have done that, they have failed Jesus Christ. Jesus cares very much about our world and wants us to live like the kingdom was fully present today.
• The kingdom of God is both a present reality all around us and a vision that we work toward for the future.

• The kingdom of God is the ultimate climax of human history.
• Scripture tells us that the day will come when there will be a new heaven and a new earth, where the kingdom of our God will transplant the kingdoms of this earth.
• The thought of that promise of the kingdom creates joy within us; that's the hope we have as Christians.
  • Illustration: Hamilton describes the hope his family had when his grandfather, a believer, had passed away.
• The kingdom of God is our hope and the place we will be one day, where there's no more sorrow, no more pain, and no more death.

• Jesus ended his message of the kingdom of God with a call for two responses.
• The first response is to repent—choosing to think differently about things in light of the kingdom's reality.
• The second response is to believe the Good News.
• It's good news that you have the hope that, when this life is over, you have an eternal building in heaven not made by human hands; your task is simply to trust that this is so.