Paul’s letter to the Philippians 1
To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons: Grace to you and peace from God and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ…And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best…live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.
NT (Tom) Wright on the Kingdom of God
The kingdom of God means today what it always meant. According to Jesus, God is now in charge of the world in a whole new way. God is redemptively in charge. Wasn’t God always in charge? Yes, but things had to happen through which God’s sovereignty over the world could be exercised in a new way – and that came about by way of Jesus dying on the cross.
People will still say, as they said to Jesus, “What do you mean God’s in charge? Look out of the window, read the newspaper – it’s obvious God isn’t in charge! Why is all this bad stuff happening?” The Gospels are devoted in large part to Jesus going around doing and saying things, which reinterpreted the whole question of what it would mean for God to be in charge. This is what it looks like when God is in charge: people who are meek, merciful, peacemakers, justice-hungry. They’re the ones through whom God’s kingdom is happening.
Why doesn’t God send in the tanks and sort out these idiots who are messing the world up? The answer is “Sorry, that’s not what the Kingdom of God looks like; it looks like somebody planting seed in a field; it looks like a father welcoming back a son…” This is how it happens; this is how the world is changed.
We’ve been so bombarded with the idea that Christianity is part of the problem, not part of the solution, that we tend to back off from confidence in this idea. We think “Really? The church messes so many things up! We can’t possibly say that God becomes king through the work of His followers, because they’re such stupid people – myself included!” Yet, actually, in the last two thousand years, the world has changed radically and a fair amount of that positive change, radical change, has been through the gospel.
Just one obvious example: in the ancient world, and in many parts of the modern world, forgiveness was not a virtue. Forgiveness is a sign of weakness, it’s a sign for being stupid, that you’re not standing up for your rights, you’re letting your family down and so on. But today? Right across the world, even if sometimes it’s only lip service, people regard forgiveness as something we ought to do. Other examples: schools, hospitals, hospices – nobody dreamt of doing things like that for the population at large. Medicine and education were for the elite in the ancient world. The idea that we had a responsibility to care for one another was a totally new thing, which the Christians introduced – and which is now almost universally accepted.
This doesn’t mean that we are steadily building the Kingdom of God by our own efforts. God builds God’s kingdom in God’s time. In the meantime it won’t be an idle existence. There’s a lovely line in Chariots of Fire when Eric Liddell says, “God made me, and he made me fast, and when I run I feel his pleasure.” That captures something of this, I think. Doing the thing you are made for, a sense of “Yes, this is who I am.” And somebody else, someone totally different, will be saying about something different, “Yes, this is who I am”. That sense of fulfilled vocation is what it will all be about.