Kingdom Come | From the Beginning | Week 1

Teacher: Dave Brown“Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”— Matthew 4:17Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.— Matthew 5The kingdom of heaven is like…Sin may be comprehensively defined as a lack of conformity to the law of God in act, habit, attitude, outlook, disposition, motivation, and mode of existence.— J.I. PackerI reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand. Woe to the sinful nation…— Isaiah 1:2Cross over to the coasts of Cyprus and look, send to Cedar and observe closely; see if there has ever been anything like this: Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols.— Jeremiah 2:10-11Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have been in revolt against me to this very day.— Ezekiel 2:3Community sins are devastating.Sin breaks the created order, which results first in slavery, then in death.When we sin we trade places and powers with something that God created to serve us.Repent means to stop what we are doing, to turn around, and to go the other way.The good news is about the living God overcoming all the powers of the world to establish his rule of justice and peace, on earth as in heaven… And that victory is won not by superior power of the same kind but by a different sort of power altogether… The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love.— N.T. Wright, Simply Good News