Kingdom of God

The world's biggest tree starts small. The seeds of a giant Sequoia look like flakes of oatmeal and are thin and papery. The cones they come out of are only two or 3 inches long – probably smaller than the pine cones you've seen. And of course, when they're new, gangly seedlings, the trees are small, too, but give them a few hundred years, and just one of those seedlings will weigh as much as 300 cars – and be taller than a 20 story building. Even in the world of towering trees, Sequoia's are giants.

The biggest tree in the world, a 270 foot tall Sequoia called the general Sherman, is 36.5 feet wide at ground level – almost the length of a city bus! Sequoia trunks can be so big, a rancher wants carved a one room house out of one, and the tree kept growing.

Kalina and Shane Pavlovsky planned a beautiful wedding reception at the Barn at Scappoose Creek, Oregon, but were met with disappointment when, out of the 40 guests who RSVP'd, only five showed up.

Kalina told a reporter, “It was a feeling I can’t even describe, having to hold my smile and walk through … the biggest punch that I’ve ever felt.” Of the 40 guests who’d originally responded in the affirmative, Kalina said she’d made direct contact with at least 25 who promised they would come.

The couple’s disappointing reception entrance was caught on video, so she posted it onto TikTok, where it was viewed over 12 million times with more than 20,000 comments. Kalina says she posted it during a lonely moment, but she was also motivated to show off the venue itself, which was tastefully decorated with white lights and draping sheer fabric. She said, “It was just so beautiful, I thought someone has to see it.”

Pavlovsky expressed her feelings about the moment in her TikTok video post. “It just makes me think, like, why? What did we do? Am I that bad of a person? What did my husband ever do to deserve any of this? Why couldn’t we matter enough for people to show up?”

Despite the disappointment, the couple made the best of the situation, but had to cancel planned events like dances and cutting the cake. Despite the hurt caused by the no-shows, Pavlovsky said she's also been touched by the outpouring of support from strangers who saw her story and felt empathy.

“My hope is that people understand how important it is to show up,” she concluded.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Faithfulness of God - Unlike some of our flakier friends, God does not ghost us when we need him most. On the contrary, God shows up when we need him most. 2) Promises – When we make a commitment we should keep it. If we have no intention of keeping the commitment, we should be honest to say so.

Many American Christians believe they can achieve Christ's kingdom on earth through political means, by dominating the culture. Author Tim Alberta, in his 2023 book The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory: American Evangelicals In An Age Of Extremism, attempts to get to the core of the issues involved.

He spoke to Pastor Brian Zahnd of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. Zahnd told him:

Christianity is inherently countercultural. That's how it thrives. When it tries to become a dominant culture, it becomes corrupted. This is one major difference between Islam and Christianity. Islam has designs on running the world; it's a system of government. Christianity is nothing like that. The gospels and the epistles have no vision of Christianity being a dominant religion or culture.

Tim Alberta elaborates:

The Bible, as Zahnd pointed out, is written primarily from the perspective of the underdog: Hebrew slaves fleeing Egypt, Jews exiled to Babylon, Christians living under Roman occupation. This is why Paul implored his fellow first-century believers - especially those in Rome who lived under a brutal regime - to both submit to their governing authorities and stay loyal to the kingdom built by Christ. It stands to reason that American evangelicals can't quite relate to Paul and his pleas for humility, or Peter and his enthusiasm for suffering, never mind that poor vagrant preacher from Nazareth. The last shall be first? What kind of socialist indoctrination is that?

Pastor Zahnd considers that the kingdom of God isn't tangible for many Christians: "What's real is this tawdry world of partisan politics, this winner-take-all blood sport. So, they keep charging into the fray, and the temptation to bow down to the devil to gain control over the kingdoms of this world becomes more and more irresistible."

Alberta concludes:

Pastor Zahnd told me he was offended by what the American Church had become. God does not tolerate idols competing for His glory and neither should anyone who claims to worship Him. He said, “You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus. You have to choose.”

A tourist in Las Vegas hit the jackpot on a slot machine, but he was never informed due to a malfunction in the machine, according to gaming officials. Now after an exhaustive search, the Nevada Gaming Control Board says they have identified the winner of the nearly $230,000 prize.

A man, later identified by officials as Robert Taylor, played a slot machine at Treasure Island Hotel and Casino. Due to a communications error, according to gaming officials, the slot machine malfunctioned and didn't notify Taylor or casino personnel that he was a winner. By the time the error was noticed, casino personnel were unable to identify the man, who was from out of state. The gaming board took on an exhaustive search to make sure the man would be awarded his prize.

To identify the winner, gaming officials combed through hours of surveillance videos from several casinos, interviewed witnesses, sifted through electronic purchase records, and even analyzed ride share data provided by the Nevada Transportation Authority and a rideshare company. The jackpot winner was determined to be Taylor, a tourist from Arizona.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We too are the inheritors of a great wealth, the Kingdom of God, but we go through life living unaware. How would it change the way we live today if we truly understand the vast riches of tomorrow?

When Shafiqullah walked into his wedding celebration in Kabul, Afghanistan, he was surprised to find 600 extra people in the room, none of whom he recognized. His original guest list had numbered about 700 people. Besides the guests on his bride’s side, he invited “my cousins; my neighbors, people from my village, and 100 to 150 colleagues.”

But among the 1,300 gathered, he strained to pick them out from the strangers. He said, “It was amazing, but also disturbing as these were people I had never seen before in my entire life.” Still, he knew his obligations. He said, “If I didn’t serve them, it would have caused me dishonor and taken away all happiness from my wedding day.”

So, he told the caterers at the wedding hall to double the food order, bringing the cost of his wedding to nearly $30,000—a small fortune in this impoverished country. It is a familiar tale in Afghanistan, where weddings are vital demonstrations of two tightly held values: commitment to hospitality and devotion to family and community.

But the strain of having to host a party the size of a small village is proving ruinous for many young Afghan men, who find themselves taking out loans to get married that will take years to pay back.

The crowds that stream into Kabul’s wedding halls each night have given rise to a subculture of “toi paal”—wedding crashers who show up in droves. They are uninvited men who hang around the stretch of the airport road that has been nicknamed “Las Vegas,” for the bright neon lights and mirrored glass of the wedding halls.

Because weddings are generally segregated by gender, usually by huge partitions, the draw is not the opportunity to meet women so much as it is the banquet fare of lamb, chicken, lamb pilaf, yogurt, fruit, and pudding. Most young men in Kabul seem to know the expression, “With a wedding every night, there is no need to go hungry.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Uninvited wedding guests were also mentioned in a parable of Jesus. Only invited guests are welcome at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. All who come into the wedding banquet must come according to God’s rules. No “wedding-crashers” are allowed.

Taylor Swift was quite the romantic when she burst on the scene in 2006. She sang about the ecstasies of young love and the heartbreak of it. But her mood has hardened as her star has risen. Her new album, Midnights, plays upon a string of negative emotions—anxiety, restlessness, exhaustion, and occasionally anger.

It turns out Swift is part of a larger trend. Researchers analyzed more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved. Meanwhile, the number of times such songs contained negative emotion words, like “hate,” rose sharply.

Pop music isn’t the only thing that has gotten a lot harsher. Other researchers analyzed 23 million headlines published between 2000 and 2019 in the United States. The headlines, too, grew significantly more negative, with a greater proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust, and sadness.

If misery levels keep rising, what can we expect in the future? According to the Global Peace Index, civic discontent—riots, strikes, anti-government demonstrations—increased by 244 percent from 2011 to 2019. We live in a world of widening emotional inequality. The emotional health of the world is shattering.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The only hope for our sad, harsh, and divided world is Jesus, the Prince of peace (Isa. 9:6). “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10).

The podcast, “The Agent,” tells the story of Jack Barsky, a Soviet-era KGB secret agent embedded in the US, beginning in the 1970s. Gradually, his loyalties shifted and in a remarkable turn of events, the FBI actually eventually helped him to secure US citizenship.

Near the end of the podcast he says,

I had a home again, an official home. … I’d put East Germany out of my mind. I stopped thinking about the folks back there. ... I put it away and put it in a part of my brain that I didn’t want to access anymore. You always want to belong to something. This is one of the basic things that make us human. … Now I had a country again. That felt really good.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Christian's change of citizenship is far more dramatic, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, thanks to Christ Jesus, our King.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that it had confirmed two new mind-blowing lightning “megaflash” records. These findings came after careful data-checking and rigorous certification processes.

On April 29, 2020, a sprawling mass of strong to severe thunderstorms produced a 477.2-mile-long lightning strike over the southern United States. It stretched from near Houston to southeast Mississippi. The record beats out a 440-mile-long megaflash that occurred over southern Brazil on Halloween of 2018.

Megaflashes dwarf ordinary lightning strikes. As Earth dwellers, we’re accustomed to seeing what’s going on near the ground, including conventional cloud to ground lightning bolts. Hundreds or thousands such strikes might accompany a run-of-the-mill thunderstorm on a summer’s afternoon.

Megaflashes are different. They’re enormous. They snake through regions of high electric field and can travel for hundreds of miles while lasting more than 10 seconds. Since most storm clouds are fewer than 10 miles high, lightning can’t grow terribly long in the vertical direction. But megaflashes have plenty of space to sprawl in the horizontal.

All megaflashes accompany clusters of thunderstorms that often rage overnight and can occupy an area the size of several states, last for hours, and stretch hundreds of miles or more end-to-end. They’re a staple of the spring and early summer across the southern and central United States, and are also common in South America.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This, and other, record-breaking lightning flashes will shrink into insignificance compared to the most significant lightning display seen by the whole world. It will happen on the Day of Judgment prophesied in Scripture. “For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day” (Matt. 24:27, Luke 17:24).