Seek first the Kingdom

There’s a beautiful verse in Isaiah 26:8 that says, "Yes, Lord, walking in the way of Your truth we wait eagerly for You, for Your name and Your renown are the desire of our souls." It got me thinking that what our souls desire our souls pursue. So, in the core of your being, what do you desire right now, because that is the thing you will be pursuing.

Psychologists tell us that for emotional health (and we can add spiritual health), there are 3 basic needs that need to be satisfied: the need to be loved, the need to feel secure, and the need to feel significant. It’s not difficult to see how we spend most of our lives trying to satisfy these basic needs. We’ll do whatever it takes to win peoples love and affection. We’ll also do whatever it takes to build a safe and secure life. And finally, we want to be significant. We want to feel worth something. We want to be noticed, recognised and highly thought of. And unfortunately fifteen minutes of fame won’t satisfy this basic need. Why? Because feeling significant isn’t something we earn, it is something we possess when we know our lives count for something or someone.

So when Jesus showed up on the scene 2000 years ago he found a group of people with those exact same longings and needs – they wanted to feel loved, secure and significant. So what did Jesus say to them? He said, ‘SEEK FIRST THE KINGDOM’, and all that other stuff, all those other needs, they will be satisfied as well. And you can imagine these unschooled fisherman doing the maths, and asking the question, ‘How will seeking first YOUR kingdom satisfy OUR needs?’ In other words, ‘what’s in it for us?’ But the answer is pretty simple: in seeking first God’s kingdom you can’t help but encounter the King - the one who is the source of all love, the one who holds us securely in his hands and the one who gives meaning and purpose to our lives.

And because this is what the King is like, when we are in his presence (at home with him) all these needs and desires are satisfied. The problem is that we all have a strange tendency to wander off from ‘home’, and as soon as we wander away we have to find alternative ways to satisfying those basic needs. So we unconsciously bring those needs to other people and places asking them to love us, to make us feel safe, and to make us feel significant. We turn to sex, work, people and all sorts of other addictions in a desperate attempt to satisfy these needs that drive us. But all along, there is a place called home (where God lives) where all those needs will be fully met in the perfect love of a perfect Father.

And this is what I feel God has been saying to me in the last few days: “Come home. Stop looking to everyone else to tell you that you are ok. Start listening to me, and tune in to the voice of a proud Father saying ‘This is my Son, whom I love, with him I’m well pleased.’” And in stilling myself to hear those words, I know I’ll feel the love, security and significance that my soul desires.

It’s one of the beautiful paradoxes in the Christian life, that as soon as we begin to live for sake of another (Jesus), our own needs are met. It’s only when our souls desire his name and fame (or renown) above our own that we find peace and contentment. Jesus put it this way: ‘Whoever wants to find his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’

Augustine once said: 'Our souls are restless until they rest in God.' So here’s to seeking first God’s kingdom, and finding the rest that our souls have been craving our whole lives.

Trust: follow the leader

Here's my third and final thought on the subject of trust. Last week I closed with the idea that growing in faith is not only about learning to trust God more, but also about living in the knowledge that God has put his trust in us. To briefly recap: at the very beginning (in the Garden of Eden), God entrusts Adam and Eve with his creation, and entrusts them with the purpose of filling the earth with his blessing - a task that can only be accomplished in partnership with God, trusting in the one who had put his trust in them. But instead of dependence, Adam and Eve chose independence, and trust was therefore broken.

So with the coming of Jesus we see the beginning of recreation (or restoration). And as Jesus goes about his ministry of building God's kingdom (ie. extending God's blessing to the world), in complete dependence on the Father, we are reminded of how things were always meant to be. And not only that, we are invited in to this divine work.

To explain this more you need to get your head around how rabbinic schools operated in first century Judaism. A Rabbi would show up in town and hunt down pupils that displayed real potential. Rabbis chose these pupils with the belief that, in time, they could do what he did. Therefore, the very process of choosing was a demonstration of the Rabbi's belief (and trust) in the students. The students would then become the Rabbi's disciples, learning all that Rabbi knew in order to do all that the Rabbi did.

So, with that in mind, Jesus shows up in Galilee and finds some unschooled fishermen and says 'Follow me'. Implicit in the invite is Jesus' belief (and trust) that these disciples could do what he does. So as they begin to follow and watch their master, they are initiated into the things of the kingdom. They witness Jesus heal the sick, cast out demons and proclaim the kingdom. And then comes the defining moment where Jesus, as the ultimate demonstration of his trust in them, sends them out to carry on this work of building the kingdom.

Rob Bell beautifully describes how this understanding of discipleship and trust is the background to Jesus' invite to Peter to walk on the water. We've tended to focus on Peter's trust in Jesus as the key to Peter's success or failure to walk on the water (which is definitely part of the equation). But this is also about Jesus' trust in Peter. Peter's question (Lord, if it's you, tell me to come to you on the water?) points to Peter's inner struggle to believe that as a disciple of Jesus he should be able to do what his master does. Jesus' invite therefore carries a significant message to Peter: "I believe that you can do what I do, so come and walk to me on the water."

Most of us really struggle to believe that God might dare to believe in us. But in the Great Commission we see God yet again saying to his people "I'm empowering you by my Spirit to continue the work of my Son, and I believe that you can do it." In the same way that Jesus called his first disciples, he now whispers to us, "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last." The choosing implies his belief that by his Spirit we can and will be what we were always created to be - workers in his kingdom.

Trust: the language of intimacy

Last week I mentioned that trust is the language of intimacy. Here's how Mary Pytches speaks of trust in the context of relationships: ‘Trust puts oneself in a place of great vulnerability, and the potential for hurt is then built into the relationship. This possibility of pain – which could be the outcome of trust – causes some people to forgo true friendships. Their failure to trust forces them to sacrifice the very intimacy they long for.'

Choosing to trust God is a demonstration of love. And the more we fall in love, the more we trust. But here's the amazing thing - for intimacy to develop in any normal relationship, trust has to flow in two directions. It has to be reciprocated. Therefore in the same way that we love because God first loved us (our love is always a response to his), we also trust because he first trusted in us.

This sounds dangerously close to heresy, but I think it very much reflects what we read in Genesis. God creates mankind in his image and likeness, and then entrusts them with the world that he has created and loves. Specifically, he entrusts them to extend the life of Eden beyond the boundaries of the garden until it fills the whole earth. In this context, the Abrahamic covenant in which God promises that ‘all the people on the earth will be blessed through you' is really just a restatement of God's original call to Adam and Eve.

So how were Adam and Eve expected to fulfill this call? By trusting in the one who had put his trust in them. It was always meant to be done in partnership with God and through dependence on him. The fall represents a breaking of this trust. Instead of dependence they choose independence, and the tragedy is that the 'God-likeness' they pursue was the very thing they already possessed through dependence on God (for they were already made in the image and LIKENESS of God). But by choosing independence (and pursuing something they already had!) they lost the intimacy of being alone with God in the garden, and therefore settled for less than they were made for.

However, the point of mentioning the above is that Christ (the true IMAGE of the invisible God), came to restore in us the image and likeness of God. Athanasius' famous quote that 'God became man so that man might become God' is surely all about this journey of restoration. And through this restoration, not only is intimacy restored, but so is trust. Once again we are entrusted (and empowered by the Spirit) to bring God's blessing to the world and establish his kingdom.

All of the above was a very long-winded way of me trying to explain something incredibly simple that I think is unbelievably profound. It's this: not only is God asking us to trust him, he's reminding us that he puts his trust in us. Why? Because he loves us, and that's what people in love do.