from our Lay Leader
“…Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”
I dwell on the Lord’s Prayer almost every day. Jesus’s disciples asked Him how to pray and He gave them a very specific prayer. According to the prayer, the very first thing we pray, after addressing Our Father and praising His name, is “…Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”
What does that mean? Do we just expect God to plop His kingdom down on earth or do we understand this to mean we are to work to help bring about a transformation on earth? Our mission as the United Methodist Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. That means we have a participatory role in the transformation. We are not solely inviting God’s kingdom to come, but we are actively working to help Him bring His kingdom onto the earth.
God has ordained us to be His workers on earth to bring about God’s kingdom on earth. We are endowed and empowered to do this. We are not simply to wait for God to bring it about. Jesus told His listeners over and over again that the kingdom of heaven is near. It is near and it is up to us to bring it into being under His servant leadership.
We are co-creators with God to bring His kingdom into lived reality on earth. We are not passive beings, just waiting, expecting to have the world changed in an instant to be paradise. We have a mission to be the agents of change. It is all about change, and unless that change, that transformation, begins with us, then the kingdom is delayed until there is a generation who fully accepts and fulfills this as their mission.
Are we missing our calling and the fulfillment of the Lord’s prayer — “thy kingdom come” — until we are gone from this earth? Perhaps Jesus’ second coming, which the first disciples expected in their lifetimes, has been delayed more than 2,000 years because Jesus is still waiting for his disciples to take their mission seriously and bring — pull — his kingdom from the “near” into “here.” Are we willing to go beyond saying the prayer and fulfill the prayer?