Kingdom of Heaven

The great scientist Albert Einstein said that he stood on the shoulders of James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist. Maxwell’s insights into electromagnetism laid the foundation for the communication technologies we enjoy today.

In 1873 Maxwell delivered an essay at Cambridge titled “On Determinism and Free Will.” In that address Maxwell spoke about miracles, which he called “singular points.” A singular point occurs within history, but its occurrence is so infrequent and so relatively small that when it occurs, the finite mind cannot grasp its force for change. For example, in 1809 all the world was looking at Napoleon’s vast military exploits. Yet who noticed that a baby named Abraham was born that same year in northern Kentucky in a tiny log cabin? Retrospectively, of course, the world can now see the significance of that hour, which opened up a chance for this ship of state to be guided through the storms and into safe harbor, thereby preserving the Union and freeing those in the bondage of slavery. A singular point.

According to Maxwell, history is replete with these miracles that have changed the destiny of civilizations. A single person, a small group, an idea, a book—all can be points at which the vital moves the massive. We cannot see singular points of history in their origins. We can only grasp their significance years if not eras later.

“Any assessment of history which does not take into account the possibility of miracles is a false assessment of history,” said Maxwell. H.G. Wells named names: “I am a historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus is easily the most dominant figure in all history.”

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.

Rich Gilson and his wife, Suzanne, purchased a house in Wildwood, New Jersey, about four years ago, and they have been working on additions and renovations to the home during that time. Gilson, who works in home inspections and renovations, was able to start working on the driveway of the house in the area in front of the home’s garage.

Gilson said, “So I start digging. I’m hitting concrete. I'm hitting rock. I'm hitting glass. Then I found these two things, and they look like root balls. I throw them in the soil pile, both of them, thinking they’re just roots.”

As he continued his work outside on Sunday, he came across one of the cylindrical objects again. “I pick it up, and I'm thinking what is this? Why are these things following me, right? I look at the edge, and I think ‘I can see something there.' It looked like paper. So, I started tugging at the edge, and I knew immediately what it was. I thought ‘this is money.’”

The money was wrapped in brown paper. Gilson and his wife began pulling the cylinder apart, and it amounted to rolls of $10 and $20 bills, totaling $1,000. That money would have been worth a lot more at the time: $1,000 in 1934 is the equivalent of more than $22,000 today when accounting for inflation, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Gilson said, “So I start to think, OK, either somebody robbed a bank because all these bills came from the same lot,” or he believes that someone may have taken their money out of a bank during the Great Depression in the U.S.

Gilson added that he’s still curious about the money’s story, where it came from and whether someone simply forgot about it. He also hopes that people who see his discovery don’t come looking for more of the money. Gilson said, “Please don’t come to my house with a shovel. I’m trying to finish the house, not make more work for myself.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This story brings to life Christ's parable of the treasure buried in a field. Like the kingdom of heaven, sometimes the most precious things in the world are hidden from view for a while. God has surprising hidden treasure which only the diligent can find. The kingdom of heaven (Matt. 13:44), godly wisdom (Prov. 2:3-5), and the Word of God (Jer. 15:16) are waiting to be discovered by the earnest seeker.

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).

Shark Bay, Australia, should perhaps consider a name change to Seagrass Bay, since the largest resident isn’t a great white predator, but a single seagrass meadow. After discovering that the whole bay’s worth of seagrass spread from one seed and was all part of the same plant, it instantly became the world’s largest plant—as large as 20,000 football fields. At 77 square miles, it’s three-times the size of Manhattan, and could be 4,500 years old to boot.

Jane Edgeloe and colleagues took samples from several stalks from across Shark Bay. They wanted to find out how many individual plants made up the rich meadow, which spreads 110 miles throughout the giant inlet. Edelgoe said, “The answer blew us away—there was just one! That’s it, just one plant has expanded over 112 miles in Shark Bay, making it the largest known plant on Earth.”

Another of the researchers said, “It appears to be really resilient, experiencing a wide range of temperatures and salinities plus extreme high light conditions, which together would typically be highly stressful for most plants.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Compare this to the Kingdom of God (Matt. 13:31-32) and the church (Acts 2:41). Both had very small beginnings but have grown into huge living resilient organisms (1 Cor. 12:12-27).

The Lion King tells the story of a king's ascent. From the moment the movie begins, Simba is branded as the heir to the throne. He is designated to the office at the start of the movie by the baboon Rafiki, who lifts up Simba before the animals of the kingdom as they bow before him. He is the future king.

The rest of the story describes Simba's exile and his homecoming to Pride Rock. When Simba returns to Pride Rock, he must battle for the throne, which has been seized by his uncle Scar. Simba conquers Scar and the hyenas, but even though he has been designated, appointed, and even conquered, the forces of darkness, his work remains incomplete.

At the end of the movie, immediately after the battle, an important scene occurs that is sometimes overlooked. The camera suddenly shifts to Rafiki, bringing the story full circle. Rafiki takes his staff and points Simba to Pride Rock. An old era has ended; a new one is about to begin. In order for Simba to claim his kingdom and be installed as the king, he must ascend Pride Rock, the rightful place of the ruler, to ritually demonstrate he has conquered.

Simba dramatically ascends the rock and roars. When he does, the other lions acknowledge his victory, dominion, and authority. Though Simba has been designated as the king from the start of the movie, though he has conquered in battle, he still is not installed as king until he ascends Pride Rock.

In a better way, Jesus is designated as king and Lord from the beginning of the Gospels and from all creation really. But Jesus had to be installed as king; he had to be enthroned; he had to be recognized as king; he had to ascend to the right hand of the father, sit on the throne, and receive from God the Father all dominion and authority. The Ascension is about the triumph of Jesus the king.

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, later set to music. It was written over the Christmas of either 1863 or 1864, in the middle of the bloodiest war in American history.

The carol’s first verse is familiar and peaceful:

I heard the bells on Christmas day

Their old familiar carols play;

In music sweet the tones repeat,

“There’s peace on earth, good will to men.”

But the carol is not cotton candy; it is a beating heart, laid bare. It’s a carol that still rings true today. By the third stanza we sing:

And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said;

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Longfellow wrote to his friend Henry Ingersoll Bowditch in 1866, “The death of the young men in the war . . . makes my heart bleed whenever I think of it. How much I have felt for you. Particularly on that cold December night when I came back with my son, and saw you at the station and knew that yours would come back to you no more.”

This is the landscape in which Longfellow wrote “Christmas Bells.” We aren’t currently entrenched in a literal civil war, but the cracks in our country’s foundation are splitting wider. People with power abuse it; people without it suffer. Day after day, the news cycles through horrors. Many days, it feels a little bit like the end of the world—like an apocalypse.

But then Longfellow brings the gospel to bear in the final triumphant stanza:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is bringing his kingdom to us. The last thing we see in the Bible is an image of “a new heaven and a new earth,” with “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Rev. 21:1, 4). The world is always ending, but one day, it will end. Justice is never done, but one day, it will roll down like a river.

Courtney Wilson and Shenita Jones had lavish plans for their pending nuptials. The venue they selected had it all: a swimming pool with a waterfall, a hot tub, sauna, tennis courts, gazebos, even a bowling alley. They were scheduled to have the ceremony on Saturday, and a catered brunch on Sunday. The one thing they didn’t have? Permission.

Property owner Nathan Finkel had met with the couple months prior when they posed as potential buyers of the property, which was listed for sale with a $5 million price tag. When they later asked Finkel if they could stage their wedding there, he declined.

But that didn’t stop Wilson and Jones from sending out invitations to guests to gather at the property. According to attorney Keith Poliakoff, who represented the upscale suburban locale, the couple made a critical miscalculation.

“The guy figured it was a vacant house and didn’t realize Nathan lived on the property in a different home. This guy had no idea he lived there. You know the shock that must have been on his face when he showed up at the gate and the owner was home?”

Indeed, once Nathan saw that Wilson had arrived to begin setting up for the wedding, he called police to compel them to vacate the property. Nathan told the 911 dispatcher, “I have people trespassing on my property. And they keep harassing me, calling me. They say they’re having a wedding here. I don’t know what’s going on. All I want is it to stop.” When police arrived, Wilson left without incident. No charges were filed.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Law; Rules; Obedience – We can’t ignore laws just because they are inconvenient to our plans. If we attempt to ignore them, God will use the consequences of our actions to inform our behavior. 2) Kingdom of God; Parable; Salvation – This reminds us of the uninvited wedding guest in Jesus’ parable. All who come into the wedding banquet of the kingdom must come according to God’s rules. No “party-crashers” are allowed.

Pastor J.D. Greear says, “If you are not generous, you’ve never really experienced the Gospel. If you feel guilty about how little generosity you show, you don’t understand the Gospel.” He goes on to explain his reasoning. Basically, the idea is this: It is impossible to really experience Jesus and not be radically generous in response.

First, a major component of what it means to be truly “converted” is that you realize His Kingdom is the most beautiful and lasting reality in the universe. You begin to find your significance in it, not in what you possess. So, you don’t have to spend lots of money to add beauty and significance in your life.

Second, you recognize Jesus, not money, is your security for the future. So, you don’t have to save extravagant amounts of money to feel secure.

Third, to be truly saved means you have some sense of how gracious God has been to you. The Bible repeatedly says that the sign that you have tasted God’s grace is you become gracious

Thus, if you have tasted of the Gospel, you will be gracious. Instinctively.

Dr. Emily McGowin, assistant professor of theology, at Wheaton College writes:

When I taught high school, one of my favorite assignments was having my ninth-graders write their own Beatitudes. I asked them to speak to people the world might consider "unblessable." Here are a few:

-Blessed are drug addicts and felons, people who try everything but still buckle under the pressure of their past lives and can never get back on their feet, for even they belong in the Kingdom of God.

-Blessed are the orphans and foster children of the world because they are exactly who God wants in his Kingdom.

-Blessed are the homeless because the Kingdom of God belongs to them too.

-Blessed are the abusers who take out their anger on the weak, for even they can repent and receive the Kingdom of God." (This particular student was abused by a parent and removed from the home because of it.)

Pastor Eduardo Davila tells this story:

I have here an extremely important document. We all have important documents: a marriage certificate, the title to your car, your birth certificate. This one is my naturalization certificate.

My family and I came to the United States as political asylees, leaving the remnants of a country ravaged by war and destructive socialism that did not deliver on its promises. When we came, we had Nicaraguan passports. We were able to come to the US, but we were not given full citizenship. We were not protected by the US. We were not allowed to vote.

But all that changed in 2008, when we walked into an office in Miami, took a few tests, and swore an oath of allegiance to the United States. We were granted full permanent citizenship status. We were fully in.

During the whole process, one aspect that stuck with me was realizing the seriousness of a statement that then-President Bush wrote: “We are united not by race or culture but the ideals of democracy, justice, and liberty.” Beautiful.

Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:19 that "Now you are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family." Praise God! When you come to Christ, you are no longer a stranger or foreigner. You have the full blessing and protection of the kingdom of Christ. You are no longer undocumented. You no longer need to fret over where you belong or how to survive.

At baptism, you renounced your old citizenship and swore allegiance to Jesus, and you were given a naturalization certificate. You are now part of the new humanity: you are no longer strangers and foreigners. Once a citizen of a different kingdom, your ruler was your vices, addictions, and fears. Your ruler was the prince of this world. That is what you left behind when you were baptized and chose to submit yourself to Jesus as your new King.

Dallas Willard writes:

As a child I lived in an area of southern Missouri where electricity was available only in the form of lightning. We had more of that than we could use. But in my senior year of high school the Rural Electrification Administration extended its lines into the area where we lived, and electrical power became available to households and farms.

When those lines came by our farm, a very different way of living presented itself. Our relationships to fundamental aspects of life—daylight and dark, clean and dirty, work and leisure, preparing food and preserving it—could then be vastly changed for the better. But we still had to believe in the electricity and its arrangements, understand them, and take the practical steps involved in relying on it.

You may think the comparison rather crude, and in some respects it is. But it will help us to understand Jesus’ basic message about the kingdom of the heavens if we pause to reflect on those farmers who, in effect, heard the message: “Repent, for electricity is at hand.” Repent, or turn from their kerosene lamps and lanterns, their iceboxes and cellars, their scrubboards and rug beaters, their woman-powered sewing machines and their radios with dry-cell batteries.

The power that could make their lives far better was right there near them where, by making relatively simple arrangements, they could utilize it. Strangely, a few did not accept it. They did not “enter the kingdom of electricity.” Some just didn’t want to change. Others could not afford it, or so they thought.

The PBS series Civilizations surveys the role art has played in forging humanity. Art can tell us much about where a culture has been and where it is going. Near the end of episode 1, viewers are taken to the Mayan city of Calakmul in Mexico. The city was once one of the most influential metropolitan areas in a vast empire, known as the Kingdom of the Snake. Entombed beneath a canopy of trees rests the remains of more than 6,500 buildings. The tallest is a massive ornately decorated temple whose steps climb to 180 feet (the height of a 15-story building).

Standing at the foot of a massive ziggurat, abandoned now for more than 1,000 years, an unnamed archeologist explains the cultural rationale for such ornate, expansive building:

Ultimately, all civilizations want exactly what they can’t have; the conquest of time. So they build bigger, and higher, and grander, as if they could build their way out of mortality. It never works. There always comes a moment when the most populous of cities with their markets and temples and palaces and funeral tombs are simply abandoned. And that most indefatigable leveler of all, mother nature, closes in, covering the place with desert sand or strangling it with vegetation. And then civilization dies the death of deaths, invisibility.

All nations come to an end. But there is a government which will stand the test of time. Isaiah writes, “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end. . . The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this” (Isa. 9:7).