This is a re-post from a blog post I did in January 2015. I later adapted this material for a discipleship course called Kingdom Culture at ROCKHARBOR Church. I thought I’d post it again here. Enjoy.

I am reading through Center Church by Tim Keller. I really appreciate how he brings different streams of gospel thought together, simply by seeking to be faithful to the whole of the bible witness. In thinking through the gospel, he points to three aspects of how we are transformed by it. Let’s take a look at each of them briefly and then observe how each of them play out in the story of a wealthy guy who meets Jesus but has a hard time embracing the sort of Kingdom that God is bringing.

Incarnation / The Upside-Down Kingdom
When the Kingdom comes it flips the world order- the way things work day in and day out- on its head. The God over all-creation humbles himself and becomes a baby. The King of the world dies between two thieves. A nobody from Nazareth heals all sorts of diseases, restores sight, speech and hearing, and even raises the dead (we should take note that his followers do the same sort of stuff). He claims that the lowly people of the world are blessed. He spends time with society’s disregarded, sinful, rejected, and marginalized (we should also note that his followers do the same- and that it is precisely these outcast sort of people who make up a large chunk of them!) He chooses high school dropouts to be his apprentices, sinners as friends, and those rejected by religion to be His Kingdom people. And this is only a fraction of it. Wherever Jesus is, the world is being flipped upside down.

Atonement / The Inside-Out Kingdom
When the Kingdom comes, lives are transformed- but not from the outside in (as is the way of religion) but from the inside out. Jesus transforms the human heart. This is why He seems to up, rather than diminish, the call to righteousness. He moves from speaking to outward murder to inward anger, from outward sexual affairs to inward lust, from loving our neighbor to loving our enemy. His call to righteousness goes deeper than religion because it requires a deeper transformation than religion can bring. Jesus transforms our hearts, and will settle for nothing less. The cross covers our broken, alienated, and rebellious reality at the core of who we are. God’s love is like a geyser that bursts out of us. We can’t work our way into God’s love, but when we receive Jesus by grace through faith, his love works its way out of us.

Resurrection / The Forward-Back Kingdom
When the Kingdom comes our future hope is realized in our present circumstance. The Kingdom has already come, but it is not yet here in full. Jesus brought the Kingdom, is bringing the Kingdom, and will bring the Kingdom. Wherever Jesus is, His Kingdom is too. The Holy Spirit is our guarantee that this is so- our down payment, and the first fruits of what’s to come. In other words, The Holy Spirit is securing the spot of the new life in the midst of the old. He is the evidence that Jesus is on the move, reconciling all things to himself in the here and now. We don’t just look forward to the future, but get to live out of its fullness now, regardless of what we see in the present! This reality fills us with faith to see signs and wonders and is our hope when the presence of God seems absent. Whether by faith or by sight, we trust that the future reality is breaking in to the present one.

Mark 10:17-30 / The Kingdom Comes
Let’s look at how these three aspects of the Gospel are extended to and rejected by a first century man of wealth.

The wealthy man refuses to flip the order of things in his life. He cannot give up the things that give him worth to receive the wealth of God’s Kingdom. Jesus calls him into a radical reorientation in which he releases what the world counts as valuable to receive what it considers to be foolish. He can’t fit through the door marked “Kingdom of God” because he wants to bring the whole world with him. Jesus offers Kingdom treasure but the young man won’t let his world be flipped upside down to receive it.

The wealthy man has worked hard to be good, and so he comes to Jesus as one good guy to another. But Jesus strips the outward qualifications for goodness and gives a set that require a transformation of the heart. All but one, the man has managed to keep by gritting his teeth and working hard- but not this one. Not the one, that requires him to lose his wealth, his identity, and more than likely, the surplus from which his goodness is flowing. His heart is tied to his stuff, and his good behavior is dependent on keeping it. Jesus wants to give life from the inside out, but the man wants to live life from the outside in. The grown man wants to stride big and tall through the tiny door marked “Kingdom of God”, rather than by crawling through like a little child.

And so the man goes away sad because he had great wealth. He is trying to enter the Kingdom through his present resources, rather than through the resources of the new Kingdom that Jesus himself brings. His present life has no room for God’s future. For him, the new way is impossible, but for God it is the only way possible. In God’s kingdom, it’s not just that the first are the last, but that the first must become the last. We can only receive the Kingdom by embracing the humility of the cross. It is at the cross that we receive what is possible for God in place of what is impossible for us, and walk through the door marked “Kingdom of God”.