Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What the Kingdom of God Looks Like | Mark | Mark 4.1-33

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. As a kid, the only kingdom I knew about was the Disney kingdoms, princes and princesses. That never intrigued me much. So my next encounter with a kingdom was the stories of King Arthur, with his knights-errant, the round table, the royal court. Now, as an adult, the Bible is really the only place I consistently see the word kingdom. well, maybe the one exception to that is Chiefs Football. Go Chief's Kingdom, by the way.

Starting point is 00:00:38 And while that's awesome that there is a Chief's Kingdom, it's not very helpful when I'm reading my Bible because the Kingdom of God has nothing to do with that. The problem is that for most of us, like it or not, our imaginative framework for a kingdom hasn't been shaped by the Bible. It's been shaped by Disney or medieval stories or maybe the Chiefs. To me, a kingdom has national boundary lines. A kingdom has a monarch, errands, lords, knights. maids and maybe some magic and fairy godmothers depending on your genre. And so when I picture the kingdom of God, I don't tend to picture something that's very close to what the Bible was saying. To be honest, for the longest time, I kind of thought about it like this magical place with angels and clouds and

Starting point is 00:01:20 harps. I was never quite sure where its boundary lines were or where they began, where they ended, but I figured that it was basically the place I would go when I died. That's what the kingdom of God is. And so every time I read Jesus talking about the kingdom of God, I accidentally replaced it in my head with the place that the angels live where I go when I die. That meant that all of Jesus's kingdom talk was basically about how to get out of hell and get to the good place when I finally kick it. Maybe you thought similar things too. If that's the case, Mark 4 is going to be disappointing. It's the single longest discourse in the entire book of Mark about what the kingdom of God is. and in classic Jesus fashion, it comes in the form of parables.

Starting point is 00:02:02 The most famous one of these parables is the parable of the sower. Jesus compares the kingdom to a seed that's sown on the ground, and the results of that seed varied depending on the kind of soil that it lands on. The soil is the hearts of the people who are hearing Jesus. Some people can't even hear Jesus, and so they reject it altogether. Other people, they hear it joyfully, but quickly move on to the next shiny thing. Still other people. They buy into it, and then they,

Starting point is 00:02:28 sell out when things get tough. And yet, there's still another group of people who receive his kingdom message, and they produce results. Jesus says they have a harvest of results that's 10, 30, or 60 times bigger than it should be. Like a good harvest, they end up feeding their entire community. They become a blessing to the world. That's what the kingdom does in your heart. Now, after that, Jesus compares the kingdom to a number of other things that start out small or start slow and become quite great. So let's pick up those stories specifically. Mark 4, 23. And he said, The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows. He knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the

Starting point is 00:03:12 blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear, but when the grain is ripe at once he puts in the sickle because the harvest has come. And he said, with what shall we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It's like a grain of mustard seed, which sewn on the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on earth. Yet, when it is sown, it becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches so that the birds of the air can make their nests in its shade. Now, this is a very different vision of the kingdom of God from what people in Jesus' day would have expected. It's also very different than what we in our day would expect. Back then, they expected God's kingdom to come on earth all at once. But what do we think today? Well, again, we think it's

Starting point is 00:03:56 the place that you go when you die. But nothing Jesus says here says much of anything about where we go when we die. And so we ought to ask the question, what's this kingdom all about? If Jesus is going around announcing the good news of the kingdom, what is the kingdom that he's proclaiming? Well, the Bible's kingdom language doesn't come from Disney. It doesn't come from King Arthur. It's not about going to heaven.

Starting point is 00:04:18 No, the Bible's kingdom language is about the rule of God coming to earth. It comes from the Old Testament, which looked forward to a day when God would clean up the mess humans have made and put the world back into joint. In a prophecy from Isaiah, we read one of the very earliest uses of the phrase gospel or good news. This is what He writes in Isaiah 52. How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news or the gospel, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, which is Jerusalem, this is the message of good news. This is the gospel message. Your God reigns. That is the gospel according to, to Isaiah. It's not that you're going to go to heaven when you die. The good news is that your God

Starting point is 00:05:02 reigns. Indeed, that's precisely what Jesus meant by the phrase, the gospel of the kingdom in Mark 115. God has returned in Jesus to reestablish his reign on earth as in heaven. So now we're finally prepared to wrestle with what the gospel and the kingdom really mean in Mark. And it means that the ancient story of Israel is finally coming to its grand conclusion. God has actually returned to rain, not by pulling the escape hatch and sucking all the Christians up to heaven. No, he's returned to rain by becoming a human. But this rain, it's not a blitzkrieg. It doesn't happen all at once. It grows slowly out of small things, and it starts in the hearts of humans. The kingdom of God is when we see how Jesus loves his enemies, which is you and me, by the way, and how he loved them

Starting point is 00:05:49 enough to die for them and to forgive them. And when that love sinks so deep into your heart, that you begin to love your enemies and forgive those people who've hurt you. That's the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God grows in small, tiny ways through small acts that blossom out of Jesus' love for us. When we're gracious and patient with a spouse who has some frustrating habits, that's the kingdom of God. When we show kindness to a coworker whose words are usually poisonous, that's the kingdom of God. when we assume the best about someone who deserves the worst, that's the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is when we serve those who are weak and small. The kingdom of God is changing diapers with joy, cleaning your roommate's dishes, serving at the local food bank, inviting a single mom to eat dinner.

Starting point is 00:06:38 The kingdom of God is what happens when God's reign comes on earth, and it comes when his followers submit themselves to Jesus, to the king with joy and gratitude. How is Jesus calling you to be the soil that hears his word, perseveres through difficulty, and allows that word to sink deep into your heart and produce a harvest that is 10, 30, 60 times bigger than it should be that actually blesses the people around you? How is Jesus calling you to be the mustard seed whose small acts of love turn into a house for the needy? Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating.

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Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What the Kingdom of God Looks Like | Mark | Mark 4.1-33

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