THE DANGER OF AN INVISIBLE KINGDOM.
I was sitting in the window seat of Starbucks when I saw him. People were walking on the downtown sidewalk, busy and preoccupied. They didn’t see him because he was small and insignificant. I couldn’t see the look in his eyes, but I was sure he was out for blood, his kind always are. He was right outside of the window, tapping on it, trying to make contact without arousing suspicion. He kept tapping the window, confused by his inability to connect, over and over, furiously, but nobody paid attention to him. I watched him until he finally left, following someone on the sidewalk, I knew there would be blood, with his kind there always is.
He was a mosquito. Sorry, I know that must seem so anticlimactic, but it makes a clear illustration. The thing that separated me from the world was invisible, like the kingdom of God. I started looking at the glass, not focusing through it, but focusing on it.
That was what Jesus came to do, to help man stop looking through the kingdom and start seeing it, right in front of their faces.
There is a movement abroad, though, to take the covers off of the kingdom, to make the kingdom clear to everyone, but I have to warn you about the danger of uncovering the kingdom and leaving it clean.
Jesus came proclaiming a kingdom but He didn’t allow it to be so clinical, so sterile and clean that people could look right through it. No, he smeared it with mud (literally in the blind man’s case) and blotched it with prostitutes and tax collectors and dead people and Romans and demoniacs. You can see glass, even clear glass, but only when it’s dirty.
The danger is when the world tries to come to God, they come running, not slowing down, not even a slight pause and hit it at full force. They are wounded when it comes crashing down on them because they think everything is going to be perfect..
Religion is pretending that you can combine Living Water with dust and not get dirty.
He didn’t call us to be perfectly transparent. He called us to be translucent.
