Making Room for Thy Kingdom Come

A great quote on making room for the Kingdom from “Missional Small Groups.”

“It is okay to talk about spiritual things in church. We can talk about prayer, living morally upright, ‘getting saved,’ God’s love for us, and other topics that fit nicely into sixty to niney-minute spiritual escape on Sunday morning. But it is not okay to tlak about the spiritual implications related to how we spend our money or our time. Those are private matters that should be left to individual choices.

But the Bible actually speaks quite a lot about these very practical, mundane matters of life. Things like greed, anxiety, self-promotion, and priorities in life fill the pages of God’s Word. To limit God to a box labeled ‘spiritual’ is to miss the point of biblical spirituality. The way we do life in mundane things – like how we handle our money and manage our time – directly impacts our life with God. We often fail to realize how the little decisions we make every day about seemingly insignificant things can actually undermine the rhythms that God has called us to play in the world.

Simplicity is something that results from having what Richard Foster calls a ‘divine Center.’ When we ‘seek first God’s Kingdom and his righteousness’ (Matthew 6:33), God beings to reorient our lives so that we have space in our lives to love him and others more. Jesus becomes our vision and focus and then the Spirit of God begins to order our life, our commitments, our priorities, and our spending. If we start by establishing a specific list of acceptable ways to spend our time and money, we only have anxiety about whether we are doing it right. And we don’t need any more anxiety in this age. But if we understand that simplicity is a way to allow the love of God to move through us more freely, then it becomes a choice of love, not an act of legalism.

To seek first the Kingdom means that we must make room for the Kingdom of God in our lives. If we expect to develop a divine Center without making some hard choices about how we do life, then we are sorely mistaken. Making room in our lives so we can love more freely will require us to make hard choices – choices that go against the flow of culture.”