“The Kingdom of God is God’s total answer to humanity’s total need. . . If Jesus made the kingdom of God the center of his message and the center of his endeavor, the greatest need of man, as I see it, is to rediscover the kingdom of God. Man needs nothing so much as he needs something to bring life together into total meaning and total goal. Life for the modern man in East and West needs something to give total meaning to an otherwise fragmented life. He needs an absolute from which he can work down to the relativisms of the day, a master light of all his seeing. He is being pushed and pulled and beckoned to, enticed and bludgeoned from all directions. He is being pushed from relativism to relativism. He is confused-the most confused and yet the most intelligent person that ever existed. He knows everything about life, except how to live it.” From E. Stanley Jones' book The Unshakeable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person.The phrase 'Kingdom of God' appears 65x in the New Testament and 'Kingdom of Heaven' 31x (all in Matthew's Gospel); and yet we don't tend to think of Jesus' message in this way. Individualism and the focus on the afterlife has reduced and altered the message to 'accept Jesus and you get to go to heaven with him when you die.' Jesus certainly is the way to the Father, but this reduction and alteration of the central theme of his teaching tames the revolutionary message of complete allegiance to this King and complete participation in bringing this Kingdom of God, of heaven to the earth: ". . . your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven" Matthew 6:10.
