MetaPhor: Kingdom Comparisons with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaChurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

How are you guys doing?

Hey, y'all make some noise for the band one more time.

They can do it all.

So talented.

It's crazy.

If you're new with us, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

I'm so glad that you joined us.

And the beautiful thing about MetaCurch is we are a movement of ordinary people.

We are jacked up people just like everyone else, but we are pursuing purpose through the movement of Jesus.

And this is a place where you can belong before you believe.

And so a lot of people come to Meta, they join this community, and they don't have a lot of church background or a lot of scriptural background.

And I need you to know that you are in the right place if that is you.

A parable in Scripture, we've defined it for this series, is a simple story with a significant meaning.

A simple story with a significant meaning.

What Jesus would do when he was teaching in parables is he would take something that was common in people's everyday life, something they would understand in the rhythm of their days, and he would use it as a metaphor to really drive home these significant, deep meanings about how our lives should be lived.

Today we're actually looking at three different parables.

They're all very short.

You just heard all of them on the video, and these three very short parables have almost endless application for our lives.

My message today is called kingdom comparisons.

Kingdom comparisons.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you and we thank you for loving us.

We thank you for a place like Meadow where we can come and we can just be real.

Life is hard.

We don't always know how to make the right decisions.

We don't always have clarity.

We're often very confused.

We get hurt.

God, sometimes we are in seasons of the mountaintop where we're rejoicing.

And sometimes, maybe even today, for many people, we find ourselves down low in the valley.

We need to hear from you, God, how to live this life.

And so we're seeking you, and we trust that you will speak to us today.

And God, if we've brought in any preconceived notions, if we have brought in any pride, I just ask that we would lay everything down so nothing would be in the way of us hearing from you today.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to get into the kingdom comparison, say amen.

Last week we learned the truth that Jesus was sharing these parables with his followers in order to teach them not just a significant meaning, but the most significant meaning.

In Matthew 13, it says the disciples came up to Jesus and asked, Why are you speaking to everyone in parables?

And Jesus answered, Because the secrets of the kingdom of heaven have been given for you to know, but it has not been given to those who had rejected him.

The secrets of the kingdom of heaven.

This is deep.

The kingdom of heaven shows us God's original intention for his world and for how our lives operate inside of that world.

The kingdom of heaven kind of life, whether you know it or not, is the life that your soul desires for you to be living, a life of purpose and power and impact and significance.

And this parables that Jesus, these parables that Jesus is teaching in, these are showing us and unlocking for us those secrets.

And today we're gonna really hone in on that because we're looking at three kingdom parables, three kingdom comparisons.

And so it would really serve us since these are starting with the kingdom of heaven is like, all three of them, the kingdom of heaven is like, to do a little bit of background on the phrase, the kingdom of heaven, and make sure that we're on the same page before we go in and start really dissecting these different three parables.

The first time we see this phrase in Matthew's gospel is all the way back in chapter three.

It says, In those days, John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying, Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near.

Other Bible translations will say, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

That means it is happening, folks, right here and right now.

John the Baptist was a prophet that God had sent to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus.

This is the first time that the phrase is used, but it is far from the last.

Just in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus invites people into the kingdom of heaven 28 more times.

Now, it's important for us to understand what the kingdom of heaven means, and there are two big misunderstandings that happen when people see this phrase and try to apply it into their life.

The first is built on the idea that most of us, our only conception of heaven is something that exists in a spiritual realm outside of the world that we know, and that we only have access to heaven on the other side of this life.

That heaven is somewhere that we will go to eventually.

And that is true.

However, over and over again, Jesus was inviting people to participate in the kingdom of heaven right then and there.

And what that tells us is that the kingdom of heaven doesn't just exist locally in a spiritual domain, and it doesn't just exist after this life is over, that the kingdom of heaven is actually something that we have access to right here and right now.

Now, if you've grown up in church and you've grown up with the idea of heaven and it's somewhere that we end up, you're not wrong.

The way we would say this theologically is the kingdom of heaven is both now and it is not yet.

It is happening right now, and you have access to it right now, and yet it isn't fully fulfilled until after this life when we are actually in the presence of God.

And that leads us to the second truth that we have to understand about the offers Jesus makes to be a part of the kingdom of heaven.

So often we read these the same way that we would read Jesus' invitation to receive eternal life.

And what we see in scripture over and over again is Jesus is offering the kingdom of heaven to people who have already put their faith in him.

What that means is that the kingdom of heaven is not referring to how to get saved, to how to go to heaven someday, or how to be in relationship with God.

The kingdom of heaven is an offer, not about how to get to heaven, but how to live right here and now in light of the future heaven that you already have guaranteed to you.

In other words, it is not about putting your faith in Jesus and waiting to die to see the kingdom of heaven.

It's about out of the security of your relationship with Jesus, beginning to live in a way right here and right now that brings the kingdom of heaven down to earth.

That is what the church is called to do.

And modern Christianity has turned so much of the New Testament into an instruction manual on how to get to heaven.

And while there are some passages that are about that, what you need to know is the majority of the New Testament is written to believers about how to live in light of the salvation they already have.

If you have put your faith in Jesus, the next step is living a kingdom kind of life.

And that is what the parables are trying to teach us.

Three kingdom comparisons.

The kingdom of heaven is like, the kingdom of heaven is like, the kingdom of heaven is like.

And as always, context is so important to really understand how to interpret and how to apply these passages.

And what's happening in these specific parables is there is a massive plot twist.

And if we don't understand the plot twist, we won't understand the parables.

I love movies with plot twists.

I don't know about you.

Probably the best I can think of in my lifetime is the Sixth Sense.

Everyone remember the Sixth Sense?

Now, I don't usually do spoilers for movies, but this came out like 25 years ago.

So it's kind of on you at this point, right?

The whole movie you're going and it's really creepy.

And what happens with the plot twist is throughout the movie, you convince yourself you know what's going on.

Oh man, I understand these characters, I understand the plot, I know how this is gonna resolve, I know where everything is going.

And then the plot twist happens and it makes you rethink everything that you just saw.

In the sixth sense, you're like, oh man, I get it.

Bruce Willis, what a nice guy.

He really likes his kid, he's helping him out.

You get to the end of the movie, Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.

It changes everything that you just watched.

What you have to understand about the parables we're gonna look at today in Matthew 13 is if Jesus' ministry was a movie, we are only halfway through it.

And so the disciples, when they hear this parable, they are hearing it in the only context that they know.

And they believe in Jesus and they have dedicated their life to following after him, and they know something good is going on.

They've seen his power, they've seen his miracles, he speaks words of authority like no one has ever heard before.

They know a little, but they don't know the plot twist.

They don't know that he's more than a teacher, in fact, he's God himself.

They know he's got a mission, but they don't know that it is to die for the sins of the world, and they certainly don't know that the stone will roll away and Jesus will resurrect.

And so, because of the plot twist, our parables today have two different interpretations.

It's how they heard it in the moment, and it's how they understood it after Jesus came back to life.

And here's what's amazing Scripture is so deep and is so dense and it's so rich that both interpretations carry real truth for a kingdom way of life.

And yet, when you neglect one for the other, you miss the heart of what the parable is actually saying.

And so, as a baseline, we must understand how this parable was received before the plot twist, how it was received in the moment that the disciples actually heard it.

Jesus' disciples were young Jewish men.

They had grown up in the area of Israel, and they had in mind that a Messiah was coming to build a kingdom, and they actually believed that Jesus might just be this Messiah, but their idea of a kingdom was very different.

You see, they had a legacy, a history in Israel of having an actual brick and mortar kingdom, of Israel being the kingdom that all others looked up to.

It started with King David, and they actually called it the Davidic kingdom, his line and his legacy.

And their heart's desire was for a Messiah to come and to reinstate the Davidic throne to get their real life kingdom back on track.

And there was a huge problem.

Because when Jesus was on earth, the kingdom of Israel was no longer a kingdom.

In fact, it had been occupied, not by a kingdom, but by an empire.

Rome had come in and they were under Rome's occupation, under Rome's thumb.

They were paying taxes to a Caesar who blasphemously proclaimed that he himself was God.

They were getting desperate.

They wanted relief and they were hoping that Jesus would come, raise up an army, and defeat Rome once and for all.

And Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like.

And he begins to describe something that goes far beyond the bounds of just an earthly kingdom in Israel.

Jesus first compares the kingdom of heaven to a found treasure.

In verse 44, he says, The kingdom of heaven is like treasure, buried in a field that a man found and reburied, then in his joy he goes and sells everything he has and buys that field.

This would have been someone in the working class.

They would have been out working in someone's field or potentially it was property that was owned by the city or by the community.

And this day they weren't looking for treasure, but they happened upon it and they could not believe it.

And the text alludes that this is the treasure of all treasures.

They were about to potentially be the wealthiest person on planet earth.

This was a treasure so valuable that they could sell every single thing they owned in their life, and it would not be a fraction of the value that that treasure represents.

And so they're not tripping, they rebury it, you know.

We're watching Survivor, you know, Katie and I like Survivor, and they've got these advantages and they're hidden in the ground, and people dig it up, and then they realize I gotta cover my tracks, right?

They start patting the earth down, making sure everything seems normal.

They go and they gladly sell everything that they have.

And scripture has a few parables like this where people sell everything they have.

And we read something like that really quickly, but I want you to imagine selling everything you have.

If you've ever sold a house that you've lived in for any amount of time, there's like a real connection there.

This guy goes to the house that he grew up in, inherited from his parents, married, and moved his wife in, raised his kids in, has a whole lifetime of memories in.

This treasure is so valuable, he doesn't think twice about putting it on the market.

He'll sell it for less than resale value.

He needs out, he gathers all his things, the things he's worked hard for, his collectibles, his things that have nostalgia attached to him.

He is smiling ear to ear, walking them to the market because he knows if he can just move a few things, he might be able to buy the land.

And if he can buy this square of land, he knows there is treasure inside of it.

His homeboys have to keep him from selling the clothes right off of his body.

Like he is ready to make a move, and he will do whatever it takes to access this treasure.

The craziest part is he wasn't even looking for it, he was just doing his job, he was just navigating through life.

He was trying to put food on the table, a roof over their head, and all of a sudden the treasure was found.

In verse 45, it says again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls.

And when he found one priceless pearl, he went and sold everything he had and bought it.

There's a lot of similarities between the two parables.

Two people find a treasure that was really unexpected.

Both of them sell everything that they have, both of them purchase that treasure at the ultimate cost to the buyer.

And yet, these are two very different people.

The first is in the working class, salt of the earth.

Man, they've got their eyes just on providing for their family.

They're not spending their days thinking all about philosophy and theology and morality and the virtue of ethics.

They're just trying to grind through life and they happen to find a treasure.

The merchant is not in the working class.

He's a business owner.

And to be a merchant of pearls meant that you had to have an almost obsessive view of pearls.

You had to become an expert on them to know which ones were valuable and which ones were not.

A merchant of pearls would travel all over the known world in search for pearls of value.

They would hold on to them for a long time, let them appreciate in value.

They would journey somewhere else that they could sell them at a profit.

This was someone who was wise and rich.

And this might represent the person who in their life is always on a search for what the meaning of life actually is.

They're reading all the philosophy, they're listening to all the podcasts and TED Talks about virtues and ethics, and they're following all the different strains of all of the different religions.

They're searching for those pearls of wisdom, something that will make their life of ultimate value and meaning.

As this merchant is searching the world, to his surprise, he finds one pearl.

Scripture calls it priceless.

And what that means is that he found in one pearl more value than all other pearls combined.

He not only sold everything that he personally had, he sold his entire business.

These pearls that he has labored after, been on his grind, traveling the world, building a business, sold all of them to purchase this one.

As a matter of fact, this one pearl, he retired from the pearl game because he knew you could take all the other pearls in existence, and even that would not equate to the value of the one that he was able to find.

How were these first two parables received when the disciples originally heard them?

Before the plot twist, before they really had clarity on who Jesus was and exactly what was going on here.

They would have heard it how you might be hearing it today.

That the kingdom of heaven is something that is so valuable in your life that if you were able to really see it for what it is, there is nothing in your life that you would allow to be put in priority over it.

You would not allow anything in this world to keep you from fully embracing and fully living out your life as a part of the kingdom of God.

And that interpretation is correct.

And maybe you see yourself more in one than the other.

Maybe you see yourself more as the man in the field.

And you might have your AirPods in, but you're not listening to TED Talks.

You're listening to music, you know.

You're just trying to live a good life and provide.

That's a beautiful thing.

You would consider yourself salt of the earth.

You're not out there looking, concerning yourself with the meaning of life and all of these great values, and yet, somewhere along your journey, Jesus presented himself to you.

Maybe you got desperate, maybe you hit a low point, and someone was there to point out that it was their faith that ultimately gave them hope for this life and the life beyond.

Maybe you are someone who concerns yourself with the higher things.

You're listening to the great philosophers of our time, you're reading all of the old theologians, you're really trying to find these pearls of wisdom and pearls of ethics and pearls of morality that you can add to your life so that your life will have some kind of value.

One time Jesus came, and you know, for the Jewish people, their pearls of wisdom that guided them, it was the Jewish law, 613 commandments.

This was how you live life.

And one time, Jesus, when he was on earth, he said, I have not come to abolish the law.

I have not come to simply throw out all of the pearls.

I have come to fulfill them.

That all of the truths, the highest truths, the absolutes of how to live the life you were created to live are not found in ideas, they are found in the person of Jesus Christ.

For some of you, that's how you came to Christ.

You were on a search for truth and meaning, and you found in Jesus more truth and meaning than everything else in the world combined could offer you.

And remember, the offer of the kingdom of heaven is not about how to end up in heaven, it's about how to start living a heavenly life right here on earth.

And the question we have to consider in our first interpretation is if you were to truly see the kingdom of heaven, if you were to truly see the way to live it out in your life, would you be willing to do whatever it takes to live it out?

And we live in a world that is constantly vying for our priority.

And the the disciples had a hurdle because they wanted a kingdom, but it wasn't the kingdom of heaven, it was the kingdom in Israel, the kingdom right here on the earth.

And the truth is, in your life, you are building a kingdom.

The question is, is it God's kingdom or is it your own?

We're trying to build our kingdom of our career, our kingdom of our influence, our kingdom of our desires, our kingdom of our addictions.

These are the things that are desperate to get in the way of you actually living out the life that you have been called to live.

Being in a spiritual community is part of living out the kingdom of heaven.

And this isn't gonna be very popular, but I'm telling you, we can predict with incredible accuracy how.

Attendance will drop every time the cowboys play early.

And I just have to think, I like football.

As a matter of fact, I was raised a Cowboys fan.

And you guys have me celebrating when they're out of the playoffs because y'all will come back to church.

And I just have to wonder, I like football.

But if we really saw the opportunity, the treasure that is living as a part of the kingdom of heaven, how would it change our priorities?

Here's a modern day retelling of the parable of the treasure, because the parable of the treasure is kind of crazy.

The guy's in the field and he works in the field, so he's looking in the field and he sees a treasure.

He wasn't out there looking for it, but he found it.

It's so crazy.

Here's a modern day telling of that.

There was a man, he was in a field.

There was a treasure right by him, the treasure of a lifetime, a treasure that would make them richer than any person on earth had ever been rich.

And they didn't see it because they were on Instagram.

That's the whole parable.

And it's kind of a joke, but honestly, we are passing up kingdom opportunities all of the time, not because we're deviants, because we're distracted.

Satan can't actually take away your power.

Do you know that?

He can't actually stop you from building the kingdom of heaven right here on earth.

And so he will settle to distract you.

He will settle to convince you that the treasures of this world are more valuable than the treasure of being a part of the movement of Jesus.

Convince you that you can have more impact in your life by money and things of this world than you can by actually living out as the hands and feet of Jesus in this world.

The kingdom of heaven, to really live it out, to experience it in its fullness, requires a laser focus that you will not allow anything in your life to get in the way of the opportunities that Jesus is calling you to be a part of.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure.

And you might have found that treasure and you might have glimpsed it and you might feel it when you get in the room and we all sing together and lift our hands together and get in the world.

You can kind of feel it.

You get a glimpse of it.

But if you want to own it and you want to live it out and you want to walk it and you want to see it as a part of your everyday life, it requires a focus on that kingdom and it requires an intensity in your life to do whatever it takes to be a part of it.

They're deep truths, and unfortunately, they just get more uncomfortable.

The first two of the three kingdom comparisons is about what's happening right here and right now, the present day, where you have an opportunity to be a part of the kingdom of heaven.

The third parable switches time frames.

It goes to the end of the age or to the end of your life.

It says this again, the kingdom of heaven is like a large net thrown into the sea.

It collected every kind of fish, and when it was full, they dragged it ashore, sat down, and gathered the good fish into containers, and they threw out the worthless ones.

What they're describing is called a dragnet.

And these dragnets back in the day could be massive.

Some of them were as long as a quarter mile.

And often how they would use a dragnet is they would link it between two different boats.

And a dragnet has floats on the top of it, and it has heavy, heavy weights on the bottom that go all the way to the bottom of the sea.

And so as the boats come into shore, the net drags with it everything that is in that water.

They haul the net to shore and they sit down to begin the very painstaking process of dividing out the fish that are good and that they can take to the marketplace and sell, that are actually profitable to them, and then taking all of the other things that are stuck in the net and discarding them.

And this is an important parable, and you know that because Jesus actually gives us the interpretation.

In 49, Jesus says, So it will be at the end of the age.

The angels will go out, separate the evil people from the righteous, and throw them into the blazing furnace where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Remember our context.

A Jewish audience hearing from a Jewish teacher.

This third parable, it switches dramatically.

It takes us to the end of the age and it confronts us with a very uncomfortable truth.

You see, right now the kingdom of heaven is here on the earth, which means it is intermixed and it is intermingled with the unbelieving world.

That we're all out here together.

And there's a reason for that.

Because you are called as a part of the kingdom to proclaim that kingdom to those who are not yet apart.

That's our whole job.

Now, how you do it and how you use your different talents and your gifts and your skill sets and your personality, that comes down to the individual purpose.

But our high-level purpose is to proclaim the kingdom to those who are not yet a part of it.

The kingdom of heaven is right now, but its fulfillment is not yet.

And before it is fulfilled, there will be the great sort.

And Jesus says it will be those who are righteous and those who are evil.

And it's talking about heaven and it's talking about hell.

It's an uncomfortable truth.

It's a truth of scripture, it's something we can't shy away from because it's there, it's right in front of us.

And it's interesting because we're in interpretation one.

And how the disciples would have heard this, they would have had no doubt.

The righteous are those who follow the Jewish law.

613 rules, regulations, and commandments, and the evil are those who live their life apart from that law.

We get uncomfortable when we talk about hell and it's a reality.

And some of us get uncomfortable because we grew up in churches that were like turn or burn, you know?

Hellfire and brimstone.

And that's what they lead with.

They lead with the fear of hell.

And here's a truth that's just kind of universal across your life.

If the sales pitch starts with and is predicated by fear, you probably shouldn't trust the product.

I've never bought a new car, to be honest.

But if I go to buy a car, you can't try to scare me out of my old car.

My car's 20 years old, it's got bald tires, my my emergency brake lights on all the time.

If I was gonna be scared of my truck, I'd already be scared, okay?

A good salesperson doesn't start with fear, they start by presenting the opportunity that you are missing out on.

Scripture is not gonna hide the truth that those who end up at the end out of relationship with God will have made their decision and spend forever outside of relationship with God.

And yet it goes, treasure.

Treasure.

It is a treasure that is worth you pursuing with all that you have and all that you are.

We're still in interpretation A.

And the disciples knew a lot of it and had a lot of it right, but they were dead wrong on quite a few aspects.

It's interesting when the plot twist occurs.

It's interesting how in your life, your lived experience, somebody can say words to you in one season and you receive them one way, and in a different season, you receive them in a completely different way.

Like you know, when you were a kid and you were about to get whooped, and your parent would say, This is gonna hurt me a lot more than it's gonna hurt you.

And as a kid, you're like, Oh, really?

If that's the case, probably the worst punishment would be for me to spank you then, right?

And then you become an adult, you couldn't understand it as a kid, but you have kids of your own, and you understand how devastating it is to hold them to consequences, how bad it hurts your heart.

How much you worry about them.

Things change.

This constantly happened to Jesus.

In his ministry, he would say words that really didn't resonate, that really didn't make sense until after the plot twist.

Because when the stone rolled away and a dead man came to life, everything changed when Jesus was on earth.

He said, I am the resurrection and the life.

And the disciples were like, What does that mean?

You know what that means?

I don't know what that means.

They knew what it meant when the stone rolled away.

Plot twist, and now all that he has said begins to make sense.

The first interpretation isn't wrong.

That if you don't know Jesus, you don't have a relationship with him, it is the ultimate treasure.

It is worth pursuing with everything that you have, that if you don't know him, that Jesus is the priceless pearl that contains all and more than every other value that exists in this world.

Yet, after the plot twist, when they could see the parable through the lens of resurrection, they realize that these parables are not just about us.

That first and foremost, these parables are about Jesus.

That Jesus is the one who saw the treasure buried in the field.

And the truth is, you are that treasure.

That human beings, broken, jacked up, covered up with the things of this world, buried beneath the filth and corruption and deceit of the world around us, that he saw us and he saw us as his treasure, and as his treasure, we were worth Jesus leaving behind the riches of glory and selling everything he had, even giving his own life on our behalf.

The pearl of great price is the church of Jesus Christ.

There were a lot of other great pearls, and you know, you see even throughout scripture, it's like there was Adam and there was Noah and there was Abraham and there was Israel, but you know that the church is the pearl of great price because it was the church that Jesus gave his life for.

You are the treasure.

You are the pearl of great price.

And if we're honest, our worst ways, our coping mechanisms, our addictions, our pride, our anger, if we could trace them back in our life, almost all of them end at a point where we as humans don't feel treasured.

We often make this a feminine thing, like women want to be treasured and men want to be respected, and that's fine, and that's true.

But everyone desires to be treasured.

Men who are just overwhelmed with arrogance or overwhelmed with anger, you can almost put money on it.

There is some point in their life where an authority figure did not treasure them appropriately.

And you need to know if you've never heard it that you have been treasured by the God of the universe, that he loved you enough to give it all up, to come down.

In 2 Corinthians, we see this.

This is after the plot twist.

They finally had some clarity.

They said, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, though he was rich, for you he became poorer, so that by his poverty you might become rich.

We pursue the treasure of the kingdom because the kingdom first pursued us as its treasure.

We set aside all of the other values of this world to pursue the value that is found in Christ, because Christ first came and gave his life for us.

We were the pearl of great price, we were his treasure, and because he came after us, for that reason, it is worth us giving our lives to him.

And so, what about the net?

It's an uncomfortable truth.

And you know, we say hell and we talk about fire and brimstone and burning and lava and you know, horns and pitchfork, and we've got a we've got a lot of symbols.

And it can be kind of difficult sometimes because you know, hell is described as complete darkness and as fire.

And the truth is, all of these are trying their best to paint a picture with words that words cannot do justice to.

Hell is being separated from God forever.

And you can live in hell on earth when that is happening.

It is the separation of us from God now.

You just have to multiply it by forever.

But the disciples had a key part wrong.

It will be a division of the righteous and the evil, and they thought, as good Jews following the law, we of course are the righteous.

And the truth is, the truth is, we are all the evil.

We have all sinned against the most high God.

And on earth, Jesus said, To see the kingdom of heaven, your righteousness must surpass that of even the Pharisees and the scribes, the righteous of the righteous.

He set a standard that everyone listening was like, then I guess we're just all in trouble.

That was before the plot twist.

You see, when the stone rolled away, what became evident is that we do not obtain salvation through our own righteousness, we never could.

That we are secure in our position because the righteousness of Jesus that is given to us when we put our faith in him.

You don't have to live a perfect life, you can't.

You don't have to check all the right boxes, you won't.

You have to put your faith in the one who has.

The kingdom of heaven is for all people in all places, and we are called to live a kingdom kind of a life.

And if we can live a kingdom kind of life, prioritizing it above everything else, and we will be the people who attract others into that kingdom.

So at the end of the age, they will be counted among those who have the righteousness of Christ.

Would you pray with me?

When Jesus was teaching, one day the disciples asked him how to pray.

And Jesus gave for them what is called the model prayer.

This is the model, the template for how we should pray, which means it is the model or template for how we should live.

And in this prayer, he said, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, and your will be done on this earth, just as it is in heaven, the kingdom of heaven right here and right now on this earth.

And that kingdom is made up of you and me.

And so if you have never put your faith in Jesus, then you have not taken the first step to being able to live the kingdom of heaven kind of life.

And what you need to understand is you could never be good enough, you could never be right enough, your righteousness cannot earn you heaven.

That if you want a relationship with Jesus, and if you want security of your eternal life, it starts by simply believing in Jesus, putting your faith that he is who he says he is, and that he has done what he says that he has done.

And if you put your faith in him, you are now in relationship with him.

The option of living as a part of the kingdom of heaven is now yours for the taking.

For those who have already believed in Jesus, but you're just struggling through this life.

If you're honest, you're really trying to build your own kingdom.

You're trying to build your own status, your own influence.

Your life is about you.

It is time to begin to live for something so much bigger than yourself.

It is time to finally tap into the deepest longings of your soul for a life of purpose and power and significance and impact, the life you've been created to live, the life that Jesus Christ gave his life for you to live.

It is time to realize that you are his treasure and that he is yours.

That we love him because he first loved us.

And so, God, as the band begins to play, I pray that as we worship, that we would work.

If there's any who do not know you here online, if there's any who do not know you, they would begin to realize that they don't have an answer to life's biggest question, what comes after this life?

You would show yourself to them.

I pray that they would put their faith in you.

For those who already know you, Jesus, that we would see your kingdom as the treasure that it is, and that we would pursue it at all costs.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast, you can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps, you can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.