Quotes about Kingdom

No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence... Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

Our productivity in the kingdom of God is directly related to our character and our Christ-likeness.

The question that wins the world is not, how can we get our "morally superior" way enforced in the world? The question that wins the world, and the question that must define the individual and collective life of kingdom-of-God citizens is, how do we take up the cross for the world? How do we best communicate to others their unsurpassable worth before God? How do we serve and wash the feet of the oppressed and despised?

The reason God now calls kingdom people to remain separate from the ways of the kingdom-of-the-world is not to isolate them from their culture but to empower them to authentically serve their culture and ultimately win it over to allegiance to Jesus Christ. The reason we are not to be of the world is so we may be for the world.

Any suggestion that God has returned to his Old Testament theocratic mode of operation—as in raising up America as a uniquely favored nation—is not only unwarranted, it is a direct assault on the distinct holiness of Jesus Christ and the kingdom he died to establish.

This is what the kingdom of God looks like. It looks like humility. It looks like grace. It looks like service. It looks like Jesus.

We are to engage in this behavior not out of duty to an abstract ethic, but because the life of the one who came under all humanity on Calvary is pumping kingdom life through our veins. We are part of the growing revolutionary kingdom he began and is continuing to grow. It is a kingdom that looks like him, a kingdom in which the greatest is the one who serves others (Matt. 20:26; Luke 22:26—27).

The kingdom of God is not a Christian version of the kingdom of the world. It is, rather, a holy alternative to all versions of the kingdom of the world, and everything hangs on kingdom people appreciating this uniqueness and preserving this holiness.

Love is the all-or-nothing of the kingdom of God. Above all we are to love (Col. 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8). Everything we do is to be done in love and, thus, communicate love (1 Cor. 16:14). We are to imitate God by living in Christlike love (Eph. 5:1—2), and if we do this, we fulfill the whole law (Matt. 22:37—40; Rom. 13:8—10). If we lack this, everything else we do is devoid of kingdom value, however impressive it might otherwise be (1 Cor. 13:1—3).

In the kingdom that Jesus inaugurated it is precisely a person's love for their enemies and their pledge to never retaliate that is the ultimate sign of their loyalty to God.

He came to ultimately put the kingdom of the world out of business by establishing a counterkingdom of radical love that would eventually render it obsolete.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that God, now, is about to establish a kingdom on this earth, based upon brotherhood and peace. And the white man is against brotherhood, and the white man is against peace.