Use ME for the Extension of Your Kingdom

A lot of times we tend to pray, “Use this money for the extension of your kingdom.” But maybe the correct way is to pray, “Use ME for the extension of your kingdom.”

One thing I have begun wonder about is what the “Kingdom of God” really means. I have always sung about it (Your Kingdom shall reign over all the earth…), read it in the Bible (The Kingdom of God is like this...), heard it being used over the pulpit and heard people pray it (Let Your Kingdom come and Your will be done...). But one day as I stopped to think about it, I realised I did not know what it really meant. All I knew was that it had something to do with God and so it was probably something good.

For my devotions recently, I had been reading the book of Luke. In this gospel, Jesus often speaks of the Kingdom of God and he also gives many illustrations to describe it to the people. I began to see that this kingdom had something to do with the rule of God or the power of God.

Luke 17: 20 – 21 says “Some Pharisees asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come. His answer was, “The Kingdom of God does not come in such a way as to be seen. No one will say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’; because the Kingdom of God is within you.”

During that time, the Jews were waiting expectantly for the Kingdom of God to come. But they had a different idea of what the Kingdom of God should be like. They were expecting a king with an army to overthrow the Romans which were the enemies of the Jews at that time. 

However, from the verses above, we see that the kingdom that Jesus was referring to was very different from what was expected by the Jews; Jesus talked about a kingdom or a rule that was on the inside of us.

Then in Luke 19: 11 – 27, Jesus told the Parable of the Gold Coins. The reason he told this parable was because he was nearing Jerusalem and so the people’s expectations for God’s kingdom to appear was building up.

As I read this parable over and over, trying to understand it, I began to see that as the man in the parable left a gold coin to each of the ten servants and instructed them to see what they could earn out of it while he was gone; Jesus left the extension of his kingdom to us, people who believe in him. Perhaps, Jesus did intend to build an army, not a physical one, but a spiritual one.

So maybe when we choose to die to self and to allow God to completely take over our lives, God’s rule is established in our lives and he is able to use us for the extension of his kingdom. 

-Jasmine