The Four Essential Foundations for Kingdom Living: Matthew 3:11-17 - Matthew: Kingdom of God Revolution

When we give our horse the Christ and we fully surrender to him, it's a ripping in the heavens.

Some of you have darkness over your life.

Your whole life, what you've done, most of your life, has been darkness.

You've done jealousy, you've done envy, you've seen strife in your family, somebody you grew up with parents who didn't care about you.

When Christ comes in, he wants to win to heaven to bring an open heaven over your life.

He wants you to live in abundance.

At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

For more information on the road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message from pastor teacher Steve Holt.

So we've been talking about the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God were in the book of Matthew.

The kingdom of God is mentioned over a hundred times in the New Testament.

It was the theme of Jesus' ministry.

He's talking about the coming of the kingdom.

Do you know that Jesus did not come to this earth mainly to get you into heaven?

He came to this earth to get heaven into you.

He came to this earth to put heaven on earth through us.

It's a colonization plan.

It's a colonization plan.

He came with his kingdom that through you and me, as citizens of the kingdom, we might colonize this earth.

God's main purpose in sending his son was to show us what the kingdom of God is like, and for his son to model the kingdom of God to us.

And in the book of Matthew, we're looking at this kingdom idea, and we've looked at chapter one, and we've looked at Matthew chapter one, and in Matthew 1, we looked at the royal line of the king.

And then in chapter 2, we looked at the cosmos, how they spoke of the king.

And then in chapter 3, we looked at the presentation of the kingdom.

And today we're looking at this coronation, the baptism of Christ.

But I want to give some definition.

For you that are new, for those that you might have forgotten, we've had Easter.

We've had a number of things that have taken us off from this particular series we're doing through the book of Matthew.

But let me give you a definition of the kingdom of God.

Kingdom of God, kingdom, kingdom, kingdom of God, the king'd domain.

A kingdom is the governing influence of a king over his territory, impacting it with his mind, his will, his purpose, his intention, producing a citizenry of people who express his culture and reflect his nature.

Now I want to give you a new definition.

A kingdom of God revolution.

A kingdom of God revolution.

A kingdom of God revolution is the governing influence of the king, God, over his territory, the earth, through his citizens, that's us, who are expressing the culture and reflecting the nature of the king, heaven, into all spheres of earthly society.

So here's the deal, men and women.

God blessed you the very moment you were conceived in your mother's womb with a unique DNA for you of something that He wanted you and wants you to do with your life.

Some of you are engineers, some of you are mechanics, some of us are teachers, some of us are leaders, some of us are doctors and lawyers, and there's different ways in which God had planted something in you that you would be a kingdom citizen someday in a particular sphere.

And it was Kuyper, who became at one point Prime Minister of the Netherlands back at the turn of the century, that talked about seven mountains of culture, seven mountains of society, things like education and government and church and family and marriage, these seven spheres.

And God's given us a vision at this church to bring a kingdom of God revolution to the Rocky Mountain region.

God's put it on our heart in the days ahead and the weeks ahead to begin to equip and empower each of you in those areas that God has placed you.

That's your mission field.

Very, very few of us will become pastors.

Very, very few of us will become missionaries.

God has already made you a pastor, he's already made you a priest, he's already made you a king, and he's already given you a mission field.

And it's right where you're working right now.

Doug Lamborn is a prophet, priest, and king in Washington, D.C.

because of the calling on his life.

And God has called us here in this region to make an impact.

And God has given us the book of Matthew, this beautiful gospel account to show us what this kingdom revolution is about.

And then when we read the epistles, the rest of the New Testament, it begins to show us actually the boundaries of that and how we might live a kingdom life.

But we start in Matthew, in our case, because we're looking at Jesus.

And what's exciting about today is we're looking at his baptism.

There's so much here.

So look at Matthew chapter 3.

Matthew 3 · chapter mention

If you'd open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 3, we're looking at the baptism of Jesus.

Matthew 3 · chapter mention

How are you guys doing this morning?

You look a little bit lethargic.

I mean, I have to admit, you do.

You look a little bit like, is it are you just excited about the day?

I am because it's not snowy.

Alright, look at verse 11.

Look at verse 11.

I'm going to read it all first, then we're going to break it down.

I indeed baptize you with water.

This is John unto repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I'm not worthy to carry.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

His winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor, and gather up his wheat into a barn.

But he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him.

And John tried to prevent him, saying, I need to be baptized by you.

Now you coming to me?

But Jesus answered and said to him, Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.

Then he allowed him.

When he had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were open to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon him.

And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I'm well pleased.

Now it's interesting when we look at this idea of the kingly nature of Christ, the fact that the book of Matthew is all about the king and the kingdom of God, the Messiah coming, that Matthew felt one who was, who had been a publican, one who had been a tax collector and worked with the Romans, and he's writing this to Jews to understand the idea that Jesus was the Messiah.

This is a picture of the coronation of the king.

The coronation of the king.

Remember when we studied David, we looked at worshipper warrior in the life of David.

We talked about Samuel coming and anointing him.

Remember that?

He took this flask and he just poured it over David's head and he anointed him.

It says he was changed, it was a transformation.

Same thing that happened to Samuel before, and then all kings that followed.

And so Matthew is giving us this picture of the coronation, the anointing through baptism upon Jesus.

This passage, though, is powerful because it really talks about four essential foundations.

Write down that four essential foundations for kingdom living that we see here that are amazing.

And here's the first one.

Look at verses 11 and 12.

And indeed I baptize you with water unto repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I'm not worthy to carry.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

His winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor and gather his weed into the barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

Foundation cornerstone.

These are cornerstones that I see here of the kingdom of God.

And the first is power.

Write down power.

Power from the Holy Spirit.

Men and women, you cannot do this thing called the Christian life.

It is impossible.

You cannot live the kingdom life without the power of the Holy Spirit.

It's interesting here that Jesus has never done a miracle.

Jesus has never raised the dead.

There's no example of him ever preaching the gospel before this.

Jesus, being fully God and fully man, Son of God, Son of Man, needed to be filled and empowered with the Holy Spirit Himself.

Isn't that radical?

And so when you look at the life of Jesus, you got two ways to look at it.

And here's what's interesting: more liberal leaning churches have tended to look at the look at the human side of Jesus.

Has anybody ever heard of the Jesus Project?

The Jesus Project.

Okay, a few of you.

This was really big in the 60s and 70s.

The Jesus Project was a project bringing together many mainline theologues from around the world to study Jesus.

And basically, what they did is to tear about tear apart the supernatural aspects of the gospels.

So they focused on the humanness of Jesus.

Then evangelicals and conservatives have tend to look at the deity of Christ and would affirm all the supernatural miracles of Christ, but focusing in on that.

Now here's the interesting thing.

The interesting thing is that you need both.

So Jesus being fully man and fully God gets filled with the Holy Spirit here.

The Holy Spirit's going to come upon him, and we're going to see next week and the week after and the weeks to come what the Spirit does through Jesus.

And everybody listen.

If Jesus needed to be filled and empowered with the Holy Spirit, how much do you need it?

How much do you need it?

Because Christ living in you is the hope of glory.

Christ living in you is the power that we need to live the life of Christ.

And guess what?

It's possible, gang.

It's possible to live in the supernatural, miracle-saturated, insight-given work of the spirit that was in Christ is in you.

And to the extent that we surrender fully to him, we have that.

And so Jesus, first of all, is going to get filled with the Spirit.

The Spirit's going to come like a dove upon him.

But then what does John say?

John says here, he will baptize you, verse 11, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

Everybody look at me.

Everybody look at me.

The first reference in the book of Matthew, the first reference here in this gospel of something that Jesus does is right here.

I would challenge some conventional thinking that the first thing that Jesus calls us to is not obedience.

But first of all, get baptized with the Holy Spirit.

Get filled with the Holy Spirit.

Because you can't walk in obedience if you don't have the power to walk in the obedience.

And so the work of the Holy Spirit is first and foremost as a foundation for essential Christian living in our lives to be filled and powered by the Holy Spirit.

Andrew Murray, the great writer and missionary, said this.

Now we have here a solemn discovery of the great want that is in the church of Christ.

God has called the church of Christ to live in the power of the Holy Spirit.

And the church is living for the most part in the power of human flesh.

Do you know that?

In most of our churches today, if the Holy Spirit left, nothing would change.

Because most of it is run through the marketing, the advertising, and the ingenuity of man.

I doubt not that that is the energy and effort apart from the Spirit of God.

I doubt not that it is the case with many individual believers also.

And oh, if God will use me to give you a message from Him, my one message would be this.

If the church will return to acknowledge that the Holy Spirit is her strength and her help, and if the church will return to give up everything and wait upon God to be filled with the Spirit, her days of beauty and gladness will return, and we shall see the glory of God revealed among us.

This is my message to every individual believer.

Nothing will help you unless you come to understand that you must live every day under the power of the Holy Spirit.

Number of months ago, the call was to those to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And this whole section here was packed with people.

Because I know in this church there's a longing to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

There's a passion to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

As many of you know, 168 of you here in this church have signed up for that watchman on the wall, kingdom revolutionary prayer, to take one hour, just one hour a week, to begin to pray for a kingdom of God revolution.

I would say to you today, start with that.

Start with that being your prayer.

God, baptize me with power from your Holy Spirit.

I can't do it.

Lord, I'm gonna seek you until I find you.

I'm gonna search for you with all of my heart.

God, baptize me with your Holy Spirit.

And you know, you know, gang, God does so many different things in our lives.

He does it in so many different ways.

God came upon me in Okinawa, Japan, when I'd been crying out for months for a baptism of the Holy Spirit, and He came upon me.

And in my case, I began to speak in tongues, a language I'd never learned.

And it wasn't somebody laying hands on me.

It was just me crying out, and God began to change things.

God began to move in a mighty way.

If you feel like you need his power in a greater way, call out for it, cry out for that.

If you know people here in the road that are walking in that power, ask them to lay hands on you and to pray for you.

And Spirit moves through the laying on of hands.

He does.

Paul said to Timothy that he said to fan into a flame the gift within you that you receive through the laying on of hands.

Isn't that interesting?

That actually, through the laying on of hands, a gift from God can be imparted to you.

Are you filled with the Holy Spirit?

Here's what's interesting: Acts 1.8.

So Jesus has resurrected, he comes to his disciples, and for some 40 days, he says, it says in Acts chapter 1 that he taught on the kingdom of God.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

And then he said this but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, even to the remotest parts of the earth.

He says, wait on that power to come.

Now, church, that makes no sense.

Logically.

They've been with Jesus for three and a half years every day.

I mean, literally, we could probably say almost in every case, 24-7 with the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and He says, You still don't have what it takes.

You still don't have what it takes.

Wait on me, seek me until you're filled with power.

And you know, ten days later at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit fell, and these cowardly upper room men and women were transformed into Kingdom of God revolutionaries.

Transformed.

There's been no history of any other movement of such global impact as the Kingdom of God revolutionary that started with this group of 120 and soon cascaded across the globe.

Look at verse 13.

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him.

And John tried to prevent him, saying, I need to be baptized by you.

And are you coming to me?

But Jesus answered and said to him, Permit it to be so, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.

Then he allowed him.

When he had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him.

Power, secondly, perspective.

Perspective.

A perspective of open heavens.

Now the word used here in the Greek for this opening of the heavens over Jesus has the idea of Isaiah 64.

It's actually the same Greek for the Hebrew, rend the heavens and come down.

If you've read Isaiah 64, rend the heavens.

It means to rip.

It's the same word used for the ripping of the veil when Christ died on the cross.

So when Christ died on the cross, it says that 18-inch thick veil between the holy place and the holy of holies in the temple of that time was ripped from top to bottom.

That ripping, that tearing is exactly the word used here.

Everybody look at me.

This is important.

When you got some of you got baptized last week.

Some of you have given your hearts to Christ recently.

Some of you have gotten filled with the Holy Spirit recently.

Listen, this is important.

When we give our hearts to Christ and we fully surrender to Him, it's a ripping in the heavens.

Some of you have darkness over your life.

Your whole life, what you've known, most of your life, has been darkness.

You've known jealousy, you've known envy, you've seen strife in your family.

Some of you grew up with parents who didn't care about you, said things to you that were that were evil and were wrong.

You still have the scripting running through your head with that stuff.

When Christ comes in, he wants to rend the heavens and bring an open heaven over your life.

He wants you to live in abundance.

I mean, I look at this.

This is so fun.

This is one of the fun things I get to do.

I like to write in my Bible a lot.

And recently I wrote here in the front.

Because I needed to be reminded.

These are all the passages, it's like 200 here, just off the top of my head, about the abundance of Christ.

How much he wants abundance, how much he wants an open heaven over our lives.

God wants an open heaven over your life.

You don't have to pray for an open heaven.

You have an open heaven.

You have to start believing you have an open heaven.

You have to believe it in your heart.

God, you have already given me an open heaven.

And God, I'm going to walk in it.

I'm going to trust you for victory.

I'm going to believe you for victory in my marriage, and I'm going to take a stand against the enemy.

And folks, you've got to do that.

If you do not do that, you'll keep getting faked out, lied to, and you'll believe the scripting from your childhood, which is oftentimes a bunch of lies.

Righteousness, peace, and joy is the fruit of the kingdom.

Write that down.

Righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit is the fruit of the kingdom.

That's what Paul says in Romans.

Righteousness, peace, and joy.

So think of it this way: the opposite of that is the fruit of the kingdom of Satan.

Unrighteousness, lack of peace, and no joy.

How many have lived a lot of your life with unrighteousness, lack of peace, and not much joy?

Raise your hand.

The rest of you need to maybe figure out reality a little bit.

Because we've all struggled with it, right?

There's demonic powers all around us in righteousness, peace, and joy, God has given us, you have an open heaven.

Say to the person next to you, I have an open heaven.

You do.

You have the power of the Holy Spirit if you seek it, if you don't have it, and you have an open heaven over your life.

Look at the rest of verse 16.

And he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon him.

This is so important.

So foundation cornerstone one, power of the Holy Spirit.

Foundation cornerstone two, perspective of open heavens.

Foundation cornerstone number three, the presence of the Holy Spirit.

The presence of God over your life.

And he came like a dove.

So it's interesting, isn't it, that John says to Jesus when he sees him coming, he says, in Mark, he says, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Lamb of God.

Here we say, the Spirit of God came down like a dove.

A lamb and a dove.

I heard someone say, if you want the presence like a dove, you have to have the nature and the character of a lamb.

A dove coming and sitting on one's shoulder.

How do we walk in that?

How do we walk with the presence of the Holy Spirit?

I'm not sure it's that different than if a dove was literally on our shoulder.

You walk circumspectly, don't you?

You walk carefully, you walk gently.

There's no other in the animal kingdom quite like a dove.

It represents purity and gentleness.

Men.

Men.

Men.

That's hard for us.

That's hard for us with our spouse to walk in the presence of the Holy Spirit with purity and gentleness.

That's why when God was speaking to me from the life of David, God was speaking during those days in my journey with shame and some of the brokenness that I went through in that transition from mountain springs to starting the road during the 40 days and in the four months there, and really for the next two years.

God began to show me, and he always continues to show us stuff like this.

But at that time it was it was revelatory that when we walk in the Spirit with gentleness and purity, we're a worshiper first and a warrior second.

There's a lot of those in the political realm, and there's a lot of us even in the religious realm that are warriors, but we're not worshipers.

What happens when you're a warrior and you're not a worshiper is you become mean-spirited, you become judgmental.

But when you're a worshiper first, the warrior side of us takes on the nature of the king.

And that's love and kindness.

It's been so exciting for Pam, Hiler, and Liz and some others to be in relationship with people, particular person up in Denver who is involved in political legislation, building a loving relationship.

We need loving relationships across the aisle.

We need loving relationships in situations where we have disagreements, right?

He came like a dove.

It's the presence of the Holy Spirit.

That we'd have the presence of the Holy Spirit in our marriages and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our personal lives first.

So David, and I won't belabor the point because we've talked about it so much in the past, but David, as a worshiper on the hills of Bethlehem, had a God-shaped imagination because of the presence of God over his life that prepared him to go into the valley of Eli with Goliath.

He came as a worshiper and became a warrior there, because his heart was inflamed as he saw what was before him, and God mightily used him.

So look now at verse 17.

And suddenly a voice came from heaven saying, This is my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased.

Cornerstone for personhood of being beloved.

Jesus settled right here who he was and whose he was in his relationship with his father.

And the father said to the Son, through the filling of the Holy Spirit, probably one of the greatest Trinitarian episodes in all of the Gospels of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working together here.

Says, You are my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.

Before he's done a miracle, before he's walked on water, before he's multiplied bread, before he's done anything, the father says to the son, You're my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.

Not in what he had done, but his identity in who he was.

Church, the father says to you, You're my beloved son.

You're my beloved daughter, in whom I'm well pleased.

Renew your mind that you're beloved.

We're going to go into communion in a few minutes.

When we go into communion, we're going to talk about the belovedness of who you are.

Because here's the struggle we all have.

We struggle because our world defines us by our achievements and by our outward success or the lack thereof.

It's called shame.

And for most of the women in this room, your shame revolves around how you look, your beauty, how you judge, and the voices you heard about your beauty.

For a lot of women, it's about motherhood, issues related to motherhood.

For men, it's related to strength and power.

Everybody has shame, and the reason we have shame is because we were wired for connection.

We're wired for connecting.

And these things have happened to us, and these thoughts that roll around in our mind and heart about our own failings, the things we don't want anyone to know about.

That if people knew about that, they would condemn us, they would not want to have a relationship with us, it would break connection.

And only in our faith in Christ, as he said, You're beloved, just for who I made you to be.

You've been beloved since the day you were conceived.

Men and women, you are beloved.

Even Jesus needed to hear these words or they wouldn't have been said.

You are my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.

The Father says to each of you in this room, you're but my beloved son and daughter, in whom I'm well pleased.

That's your identity.

You have a new identity.

The old heart has been taken away.

The old heart of anger has been taken away.

The old heart of envy has been taken away.

The old heart of jealousy has been taken away.

That's why Ezekiel says this.

Then I will give them one heart and I will put a new spirit within them and take the stony heart out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.

Let me give you a definition of beloved.

Beloved means you're prized, you're much loved, you're cherished, you're treasured, you're highly regarded, you're admired, you're esteemed, you're revered, and you're venerated.

That's the new identity.

That's the new identity.

When you gave your heart to Christ, you received a new heart and a new spirit.

If you haven't been a part of the Whole Heart Advance coming up in September, our third one here in Colorado, and the one we just did in Georgia.

That's a key message of Whole Heart Advance for men is that you are loved, you are revered, you are venerated, you have a new heart, and you have a new spirit within you.

You do not have to live in that anger anymore.

The only reason you do is because you're still living in the old identity.

The old nature.

You have a new identity and you have a new heart.

And that heart says you're beloved.

Men and women, you're beloved.

That's why it's so foundational to kingdom living, is that we know the power of the Spirit, the perspective of open heavens, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and the personhood of being beloved, that new identity of Christ.

You've been listening to the road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's pastor.

To connect with us further, visit the road.org.