We keep making the same mistakes… Because we want to.

I’ve got into the habit of listening to podcasts while I shower and this afternoon after cutting a trailer load of wood, I was listening to N.T. Wright explaining the historical context of the Kingdom of God.

He pointed out how all Jews believed that the Kingdom of God was a divine, political Kingdom.

He also explained the three main ways the Jewish people responded to the occupying Roman Empire, which as it turns out is exactly the same three ways the Christian church has adapted to the Western World.

The first group of people he called “quietists“. They escaped the world into a super spirituality.
The second group, the zealots, wanted to fight power with power and worked for political power.
The third group, the compromisers, lived their lives according to Roman rules, looking to stay safe and grow rich according to the rules of that world.

Wright pointed out that Jesus came with a radical fourth approach. He saw God’s Kingdom not as some far off thing, but a present reality. He saw His life being the starting point of that Kingdom. He saw His Kingdom as a way of living in the world by a different set of rules to the previous three groups.

After two thousand years, the church still falls into the same traps and loses sight of Jesus’s different way.

John Stott wrote:

The followers of Jesus are to be different. Different from both the nominal church and the secular world, different from both the religious and the irreligious. The Sermon on the Mount is the most complete delineation anywhere in the New Testament of the Christian value-system, ethical standard, religious devotion, attitude to money, ambition, life-style and network of relationships all of which are totally at variance with those of the non-Christian world. And this Christian Counterculture is the life of the kingdom of God, a fully human life indeed but lived out under the divine rule.

Part of me gets excited at the prospect of life lived to the beat of a different drum, but not all of me does.

I can fully understand the attraction of quietism, the seduction of compromise or the power of zealotry. That’s the problem with Jesus’s Kingdom, the territory he needs to conquer is actually me.