Amen. You can turn first to Romans chapter 16, verse 20, and then also stick a finger in second Corinthians or I’m sorry, first Corinthians 15. So first Corinthians 15 and then Romans chapter 16. So we’re thinking of the petition from Heidelberg catechism.
What does it mean when we pray thy kingdom come? We thought of Psalm 122, God loves, or we love the city of Zion. We love the church. We love the place where God’s throne is. First Corinthians 15, this should be familiar since we went through it, maybe back in August, verse 20. through 28. Remember, it’s speaking of the resurrection from the dead. And it tells us that God has given Jesus everything under his feet. He’s the ruler. He’s the king. The last thing he will defeat is death. And then once that is defeated, he will hand all authority back to God, the father.
So first Corinthians 15, beginning at 20 says, but in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive, but each in his own order. Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
Then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God and the father after destroying every rule and every authority and every power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For God has put all things in subjection under his feet.
But when it says all things are put in subjection, it is plain that he is accepted who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him that God may be all in all.
And then back to Romans chapter 16, verse 20. This is one of those sneaky little verses that packs a punch and it is so full of meaning. So Paul is giving all his greetings to various folks at Rome. And he’s littering the end of his letter with a lot of truths. And he just simply puts it out there in verse 20. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen. Just a little warning here, here he goes again about praying for big toes, just so you know.
So I was leaving the church Wednesday night and, you know, having a parking lot thoughts, you know, driving out. And I got to thinking. What would the early church have prayed for at their prayer meetings? Now I’m not complaining. This is not a critique. It’s just a thought. I’m always thinking, always writing stuff down. Everything’s a good thought for five minutes. Good idea for five minutes. But I got to thinking, what would the early church have prayed for 2000 years ago when the people did not have doctors to go to five days a week? Just a thought.
What would they have prayed for? So I asked Andre this morning, What would they have prayed for? And he said, well, they would have prayed for salvation. They would have prayed for, uh, people who are living in darkness. They would have prayed through. And he just went on through the, um, kind of the list of biblical things. Now we should pray for big toes. We should pray for physical health. Remember after all, we started the Lord’s prayer with what should we pray for? And it said, pray for spiritual things, God promises and physical things God promises.
But, you know, we live in an era where. there’s a doctor’s office on every corner. And, you know, the saying goes for the last 50 years, prayer meetings are often organ recitals and not this one, right? Not the musical one. It’s spleens and toes and whatnot. And yes, God cares for those things.
But our challenge tonight is to think of what it means when we say your kingdom comes. And really, in fact, what is the worst predicament our loved ones are in. Okay, so maybe they got a bad heart valve. Is that their worst problem? Not if they have a heart that beats for Satan and not King Jesus. That’s a far worse problem. Do we want people to, the other comment I made to Andre is, how come we never pray for routine dental cleanings?
I don’t know. I just think of weird stuff, y’all. Y’all know that. My point is challenge us to take these words tonight of what thy kingdom come means. And perhaps in addition to praying for physical needs, maybe, maybe we prioritize a tad bit more kingdom needs. Uh, we, we have a hierarchy. Yes, we pray for the body, but more importantly, we pray for the soul, which has an everlasting destination. Our earthly tents. which we are very interested in, I’m interested in mine. Our earthly tents will go into the soil and into the ground, but we will have a heavenly tent. And so we want as many folks as we can to be there.
When we become Christians, we have a change of allegiance. When we become Christians, we change our allegiance from the prince of darkness to the king of light. And it is a remarkable change. It is a change that can only be worked by the power of the Holy Spirit through the strength of God’s holy word in the light of the gospel.
Remember that by Adam, because of Adam, we are children of darkness. We are born in sin. We are born in misery. And it doesn’t matter if we’re born into a covenant home with Christian parents. It doesn’t matter if we are Born on a far away land where the gospel has not advanced. We all have within us the sin of Adam, the spoils and destruction of original sin. Now it just so happens that children born into Christian homes have a much higher likelihood of not only hearing the faith, but coming to the faith.
But we are born by nature, rebellious against God. We say like a two-year-old, God, you are not the boss of me. I renounce your kingdom. You know, there was a little movement several years ago. I think it first began in the UK and it has for sure trickled over here.
It was the practice called baptism repudiation. That’s a fancy word for a Sunday night, baptism repudiation. And they even had baptism repudiation certificates. And it basically was something like this. My parents got me baptized and I was too young to protest. And now I protest. Now I renounce it. I do not want to be a child of God. I wish to remain a child, a child of Satan. That’s pretty doggone serious, isn’t it?
That’s an eternal and weighty thing. But by nature, we are born with sin and misery written into us. And when we come to faith in Jesus, that old nature, that old sin nature is crucified. It is put to death. It is left behind at the cross. And our new nature, we’re new creations. Sometime when we get to chapter five of second Corinthians, we’ll come to that famous verse. If anyone is in Christ, he is new creation. The old is gone. The new has come, but we know the new nature still must shed. the old nature.
That’s why we have Galatians chapter five, the fruit of the spirit. Now I say, Paul says, live by the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. There is a continual and perpetual war in every believer, the spirit versus the flesh, the flesh versus the spirit. And our confession of faith says it is a lifelong, perpetual and irreconcilable war. We come to Jesus, we have forgiveness of sins, but we fight against sin. We fight against our old nature for the rest of our lives. And it’s not until glorification that that fight ends.
Remember sometime back, maybe around question 30 of the Heidelberg Catechism, it says, if the wages of sin is death and Jesus paid for our sins, then why do we still die? And remember that, twofold answer. One is death as an entrance to heaven. And second, death is an end to our sin. You will sin until you die and you will fight to be sanctified. You will fight to put to death, therefore, what is earthly.
And we want to avoid two ditches. We want to avoid the ditch of legalism that says, I’ll try hard. I’ll do better. I’ll be good. I’ll measure up to a standard. I said, you’ll fall flat on your face because it won’t work. And if somebody else sets that standard, you’ll fall flat on your face because you’ll never please them.
So while we rest in the finished work of Jesus, we rest in his obedience, and that God sees us as if we’ve never sinned, and he sees us as if we’ve always obeyed, we want to avoid the ditch of antinomianism. And you know, they have the famous song, which I can’t remember at the moment. Free from the law, O blessed condition, I can sin all I want and still get remission. We do not want to view our standing in Jesus as a license to sin because we can simply be forgiven.
Our growth and grace should be progressive. And I’m getting ahead of myself here, so I better quit because then I’ll double up and talk about all this twice. I just get so excited about it. But what I’m trying to tell you is when we become Christians, our new nature is slow and painfully slow at shedding our old nature. Our old allegiances die really hard.
So when we come to the prayer, thy kingdom come, it is a big prayer. And it’s not simply, Lord, make our church bigger than the one down the street or the one my friend pastors or the ones we’re pretty sure doing it wrong. We have many friends in churches that we probably wouldn’t go to, but they love Jesus and preach Jesus. Uh, we would just have to hold our ears probably if we went, uh, cause it’d be so noisy. I chatted with a little fella, a friend last night who who’s gone off to college and I asked him about where, where, where have you been to church?
And he was telling me about all his experiences. And he said, finally, I went to the Presbyterian church and it was normal. I thought that was wonderful. But anyway, okay. So thy kingdom come as a really big prayer. So what does the second petition mean? Well, it means a couple things.
We want God to rule us. We want him to preserve and increase his church. We want him to destroy the devil’s work. And then we want him to rinse and repeat until the kingdom is fully made manifest at the end of time. So your kingdom come means first rule us. Rule us by your word and spirit in such a way that more and more we submit to you. There’s a statement, I think it’s in the maybe the Westminster Confession. It says the outward ministry of the old covenant people of God was more glorious. It was, you could say, more complex. It had more sights and sounds and bells and smells. And you come to the new covenant church, which I think is what we’ll speak of next week in second Corinthians, where Paul says, we’re ministers of the new covenant.
The new covenant preaching and sacraments is pretty boring in comparison. And one of the things, one of the blessings I think our church has found is we’re comfortable with boring. We’re comfortable with just preaching and sacraments. We’re comfortable with worship. We’re comfortable with the word. We’re comfortable with the sacraments. We do not feel obligated to build a gymnasium. We do not feel obligated to put in a reformed bowling alley or become a reformed voting caucus or whatever. We’re just happy with dispensing the means of grace.
And sometimes you’ll get people say, Don’t you want to do more? No, not really. Remember several years ago, a kid from Liberty University drove all the way down from Lynchburg. This is like in 2015. He says, I want to interview you in your office for a paper. And I don’t know why he picked me, but he came.
And the first question he asked is, what do other churches have that you don’t have, but you wish you had? And I thought about it for a minute. And back in 2015, I thought, He should have asked me, what have I got that I don’t want here? Because that would have been a better question, right? But I thought about it for a minute, the real question, and I said, you know what? I’m happy with what we have.
You give us a communion table, you give us a baptismal font, and you give us a pulpit and something to sing from, we got all we need. We have everything we need, it’s all Christ has commanded, it’s all Christ has given. So when we come to this question, what does it mean, your kingdom come? And it says, rule us by your word and spirit. That’s as simple as it gets, but as powerful as it gets. Rule us King Jesus, rule us Christ, rule us anointed one whose name is hallowed by the preaching of your word, by the teaching of your word, by the reading of my study Bible. by the listening to podcasts that maybe have preaching, maybe through daily doctrine on Wednesday or a confession of faith study, Lord rule in me by your word. It’s just that simple. The more we’re exposed to the word, the more the word will shape us. It will cut us up. It will put us back together. It will do divine surgery. It will change our mind. It will shed our allegiances to the world and the flesh and the devil. And so we ask the Lord, rule us by your word. How does the king rule? He rules by edict. Where has he given us his edict? It’s in the holy scripture.
But rule us also by your spirit, which is, third part of the Trinity, third person who convinces us of our sin and misery, who leads us to embrace Jesus as he’s offered in the gospel, who drives us to live by the Holy Spirit and not by the flesh, who conforms us into the image of God’s dear son, our savior Jesus. And so by God’s word, by God’s spirit, we are able to say, have thine, Own way, Lord.
I am the clay, you are the potter. Have your own way. We understand that our growth in grace is progressive. Lord willing, we are not the same person we were a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. By God’s grace, we hopefully, by the word and spirit, are aging like fine wine. We are getting sweeter, we are getting more fragrant, more appealing in that sense, if you will. We are becoming more and more like Jesus and it’s progressive. And it’s why we should be patient with one another.
Remember when Billy Graham’s wife passed away, I think sometime before him, and her grave was put at the new Billy Graham library, it was new at the time, and her headstone, I remember standing there and it said, End of construction, thank you for your patience.
And that’s, in a sense, the motto that we ought to hold by within the covenant community. People within the covenant community will do things that show they are being progressively sanctified, but are lacking. And that’s part of living in the covenant community. We’re like, dad used to say, we’re like a bunch of rocks tumbling together. All our rough edges are coming off and we’ve got to be willing to live in that kind of community. where our rough edges are knocked off or people’s rough edges are knocked off against us.
That’s just the life of the church. And so your kingdom come Lord, rule us by your word and spirit in such a way that more and more we submit to you, have your own way, capture my heart, uh, progressively work in me, sanctify me so that I am transformed by the renewal of my mind. I’m a reasonable creature, and I want to live a reasonable life for you. Change my heart, change my desires. We have a life of faith, believing what God says, repenting where we fall short, and obeying. It’s a rinse and repeat, faith and repentance and obedience.
That’s the first thing God’s prayer here, thy kingdom come, means. Second, preserve and increase your church. We sang a little bit ago, Shout for the Blessed Jesus Reigns. And one whole stanza was about growing the church. We sing sometimes at communion, how sweet and awful is the place where Christ has entered in. And there’s that final verse that says, grow your church, Lord. We long to see your churches full. So preserve and increase your church, Lord. We want the seed to fall on good soil. We want the seed to fall on good soil and there to be God-given growth. Maybe some of you have reseeded your lawns. Usually September, October is the time to do it.
I think you should do it about three days before a hurricane is off the coast, because then you don’t have to run your sprinkler. But you put your seed down, you spend your money, and you don’t run your sprinkler, no hurricane comes off the coast. So you’ve got to have a high water bill plus the saturating rain of a hurricane. That’s the mix.
But it’s so wonderful when you have emptied your wallet of some green to see those little bitty green sprouts. And when you’ve had a drought like we have had this summer, yards did not fare well. Even my neighbor who’s got a sprinkler system, their yard did not look good at the end of summer. It was heat damaged. It was drought damaged.
And so when the little green grass comes up in that dark dirt, that’s just been kind of nasty looking. And you know, you’re not going to win a yard of the month award from the city. It gets a little depressing, but then you see those little green things come up and they’re small, but they are perceptible. And we want to see the church grow. We want to see grass sprout up in a barren land.
Our landscape culturally is really bad. We live in a death culture, abortion. We live in a death culture, murder. We live in a death culture, cut off relationships. We live in a death culture. We’ll euthanize people that we don’t believe have a life worth living.
And it goes on, the sexual immorality, it goes on. The ground is shifting. Truth is stranger than it used to be, we say. And so we want God to preserve and increase the church. In the midst of all this, we want to see the seed of the gospel fall on good soil.
Now I’ll put my grass in and it’ll sprout up. I’ll got my, my redneck sprinkler system going and my water bill will go up and I’ll have green grass, but guess what will happen next June? About the end of June, it will get hot and I’ll get cheap. And my redneck sprinkler system will probably trip somebody that runs, because it goes across the sidewalk, and I have a cone there, and that cone just classes up the neighborhood sitting there. And so I’ll have to pull in my redneck sprinkler system, and I’ll have to have fond dreams of a real sprinkler system. But what will happen over time? This grass I’ve worked really hard for this fall, and it made it through the winter, it made it through spring. What happens by next summer? Drought hits it.
And what happens when the church, when the seed, the soil is not preserved, perhaps when the church quits preaching the word, or perhaps when people absent themselves from the Christian community, how does God preserve his church by his word and spirit?
So perhaps when we pray this prayer, we’re saying more people come to church, more people come to prayer, more people read their Bibles, more people sit under Sherman’s. So your kingdom come as a rule. Your kingdom come as preserving creature church. The third thing is it’s destroyed the devil’s work.
From time to time when we say our creed on Sunday, I’ll say something like this. The creed is a way for each of us individually, but also together corporately for us to say what we believe so that we hear it in our heart so that one another hears it and says, I’m in a church of believers. In a sense, we’re saying it to the world, hey, we believe this. It’s what our steeple means.
As it rises into the sky as a witness, that’s what this cross means. But we’re also, in a sense, saying to Satan, buzz off, I left your world. Get away, I’m not coming back. Your Turkish delight nearly killed me, right, to put a Narnia little phrase there. Destroy the devil’s work. Every force that revolts against you and every conspiracy against your holy word.
Isn’t it interesting that the church, and we can’t use the word church a la Jay Gresham Machen, right? It’s either Christianity or liberalism, but let’s just use the word church. The church is eating itself alive with its own attack on its own Bible.
We had a visitor today who said she was from a Lutheran tradition, and she said it was very liberal. And so when I moved here to town, I looked up a church, I found this one, and I can tell you are conservative. And I said, why, yes, we are. We believe the Bible. We talk about the Bible. We preach the Bible. We hold fast to the Bible. We’re not perfect about it, but we don’t attack the Bible. We attempt to uphold it.
And so we’re asking that God would destroy the devil’s work, which includes a conspiracy against the Holy word. But, but you think of maybe the school saying we can’t have the Bible there anymore. You think of our brother John from the Gideons who told us that there are some hotels that just will not let them put Bibles in the drawer of the nightstand any longer. Uh, we think of other public. entities that have said no to God’s word.
And so there is a systematic attack. Maybe some of you have listened in recent weeks to our Secretary of State’s address that he gave overseas in Italy. He gave it in Rome, I think it was, with all the architecture of Western civilization behind him. And he said, there is a battle for the soul of our nation, America, but for the other nations. I mean, you got protest in Paris burning the city, but he said, it’s a battle between the East and West.
It’s a battle between Christianity and Islamism. And so there are those who would love to snuff out God’s word. There are those who would love to snuff out the church. And so we’ve got to pray, Lord, you have to preserve your church and destroy every bit of the devil’s work, every force which revolts against you. You’ve got to thwart it, stop it. Don’t let the gates of hell prevail, but you’ve also got to crush it. And what do we know? God in the end will destroy Satan. I love that little phrase in Romans 16, 20, the God of peace will come soon and crush Satan underfoot.
That is the promise of Genesis three. That is the promise God gave uh, to Eve, there is hope, but the mess is going to last a bit. It’s going to last a while. And so we asked finally God to do, do this until the kingdom fully comes. Jesus kingdom has been inaugurated. And there’s people that’ll say they know when it was inaugurated and when it’s complete and all the rest, they’ve got all that. And I dangerously read Daniel nine this morning too, didn’t I? That probably got a few going. We jump often in the kingdom stuff to, what do you call it? Dispensational stuff. And simply put, when we want God’s kingdom to continue to come, to continually be realized, we want his glory to be spread across the earth.
Remember John Piper said, missions exist because worship does not. When we Preach the gospel and people become Christians. They need to worship God. And so we need to spread the glory of God in the lives of our families. It’s so wonderful. We have families with children presenting their children to the Lord. But we want God’s name to be made famous. We want the redemption of Jesus to be made known. We want the life and death and obedience and suffering of Jesus to be made known. sinners convinced and converted to faith. We want them comforted and built up in the most holy faith. And we will pray that God does this and we will work to see that it happens until the day when the last enemy death is conquered by Jesus and he hands the kingdom over to God and God is fully glorified in the heavenly place.
And so, uh, maybe back to our little challenge from the beginning, what should be the priority, or maybe even the bulk of our prayers? Of course, we want people to be healthy and whole physically, but we really ought to pray much, much more about the spiritual reality of the darkness of this culture and the lost, the lostness of many around us. And so perhaps our emphasis could shift a bit. We pray for both, but we pray more and more for the kingdom of God to come. Let’s go to him now and ask for his help and blessing. Pray with me.
Our God, we thank you that you have not left us to ourselves, not left us dead in sin and trespasses, but you have come into the strong man’s house and you have cut the ropes You have burst the bonds. You have opened the prison doors. You have set the captives free. You have put our feet on firm ground.
And as we stand on firm ground, may we pray for those whose souls are still captive. And may you, through us, rescue the perishing and save the lost. We ask all this in the name of Christ our Savior. Amen. Let’s sing to the Lord. I love thy kingdom, Lord.