What the Kingdom of God Looks Like

For the past few weeks, even months, I find myself being brought back to the Kingdom of God. Through things I hear or read or watch, the phrase keeps popping up.

I think before when someone said the words “the kingdom of God,” it conjured images of pearly gates and streets of gold and the reality of what things will be like after this life is over.

However, I see and hear a lot more discussion about living in the kingdom now, living as a citizen of the kingdom in the present and seeing God’s kingdom as both something that is to come and something that is.  Our students have been a part of events that encourage them to be “kingdom workers.”

Just this week I received a link to a blog post on YouthMinistry.com that talked about what the Kingdom of God looks like when life hurts. The entire article is good, but I like how the authors described the kingdom today.

The Kingdom of God is like . . .

• The middle schooler who makes space for a not-so-cool classmate at her lunch table because she remembers the day when Jesus made space for her in his Kingdom.
• A high schooler who opts out of the “party of the year” because he trusts that Jesus’ plans for his life are better than his friends’ plans.
• One college student who risks getting a lower grade for sharing her worldview in her coursework.
• The young couple who has little money but gives each other small Christmas gifts so they can give presents to children in the foster-care system.
• Divorced parents who choose to co-parent their teenagers from a place of grace and forgiveness because they’ve experienced grace and forgiveness from Jesus.
• A retired couple who finds joy in serving Jesus daily because they understand that no one ever “retires” from following him.

Some good thoughts for us to think about what it looks like to live as a citizen of the kingdom.  Maybe it looks like something from the list above. Maybe it’s totally different. How do we live as citizens of the kingdom now?