Introduction

      When Thy Kingdom Comes, I Will Go

      My father was a sergeant in the army. He entered the army when he was 18 years old. He did it because my mother was pregnant with me and my twin brother. As teenagers, we would ask him how he liked being in the military. He would tell us that he hated it. There were several things about the military that he didn’t like. One of the main things was reveille. Reveille is the general term that most military branches use for getting up in the morning. It comes from a French word that means “to wake up” or “to rise.”

      In the military, reveille is usually not a fun experience. The point is to get soldiers to wake up and come to attention in the quickest manner possible. My father would tell me and my twin brother that it can be hard to get young military cadets out of bed and up and ready to face the world early in the morning. So, the personnel responsible for reveille would have to be very creative in the ways that they tried to wake up my father and other soldiers.

      The wake-up call could come by someone playing a bugle or banging on drums outside the barracks or near the flag posts. If a certain group of cadets was extremely hard to wake up, commanders would bang on the barrack walls, or walk into the actual barracks and bang pots together. This usually included someone yelling at the top of their lungs and using multiple expletives and other colorful words. Most of the language used would not be fit for general conversation, but hopefully you get the point.

      Our father hated his experiences in the military. But there was something funny about him. He kept some of those unfortunate practices from his military life and used them to try to motivate me and my twin brother while we were in high school. As much as he hated reveille as the way to wake him up, he seemed to love using it to wake us up in the morning. If we stayed in bed one minute after our alarm clock went off, he would slap our bedroom door, and throw it open so the door hit the wall.

      He scared us awake every single morning. Sometimes he would change it up and add some variety. Some days he would slap the door loudly, run into our room, and yell “Get up!” Sometimes he would bang things together. If I didn’t know better, I would think that he got up early every morning and stood outside our bedroom door just to see if we would oversleep so he could scare us. For someone who hated having it done to him, he sure seemed to get a lot of joy out of doing it to us. Derrell and I couldn’t wait for the day that we moved out so we could wake up like normal human beings.

      But, there’s something else that’s funny about all of this. When my son Malik was a teenager, I did to him what my dad did to us. Malik was proof that there’s something within teenagers that requires them to sleep through the sweet soft voice of their parents urging them to awake and see the beauty of a new day. When Malik slept through his alarm or was having a hard time getting up in the morning, I would bang on the first-floor hallway door and yell up to his bedroom on the second floor “Get up, boy!” If he was having an extra difficult morning, I would throw something up the stairs into his room so it would hit his wall and wake him up.

      As an adult, I understand my father’s intentions now. There was work that needed to be done. The sooner we got to doing it, the sooner we would be done. We couldn’t sleep all day and miss school, or work, or whatever responsibilities we had that day. There were important things that needed to be done. Sometimes, I think my relationship with God is a little like my relationship with my father. Sometimes, I have the tendency to try to sleep my way through life. Sometimes, I want to take it easy and remain in bed where I am comfortable and warm. Inevitably, God, like my father, may use creative means to get my attention by banging on the wall or door, and yell “It’s time to get up! There’s work to do!”

      I come to this conclusion from reading multiple passages that seem unrelated. Those passages are Jonah 3, 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, and Mark 1:14-20. Jonah 3 shares the story of how God’s prophet preached repentance to the inhabitants of Nineveh, and in response, those people did repent, offering themselves to God. In 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, Paul delivered a word of challenge to the Corinthian church for them to reconsider their personal values and future expectations. In Mark 1:14-20, we see a strange case of “call and response” between Jesus and a group of menial laborers.

      I think these seemingly unrelated passages have a common theme, or better yet, a common question that must be answered. The question underlying these passages is how do the characters in the stories respond when God calls them into action for the Kingdom? When the calling of God, or the plan of God, interrupts their lives, when it wakes them from their sleep, how would they respond? Would they willingly participate in the work of the Kingdom of God, or would they try to remain asleep?

      I realize that I just used a big theological term. The Kingdom of God is a phrase that we sometimes shy away from. The Kingdom of God, sometimes called the Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew’s gospel (as we will see in the next chapter), is spoken of in many places in the Bible. Christ talks about it in multiple parables. He said, “The Kingdom of God is like…” He compares it to farmers planting a garden. In other places, he compares it to a camel trying to go through the eye of a needle. He also compares its growth to that of a mustard seed.

      In simple terms, the Kingdom of God refers to a time that is both present and future, where the world, and all that is in it, will be changed for the glory of God. It’s presently occurring and will occur in the future. In a sense, it’s the fact that God is working through fallen people to transform a fallen world back into what God originally intended. This was part of the pronouncement that Jesus gave to the world when he said that the Kingdom of God had come. He was announcing His intention to change the world. The question that his hearers had to answer was would anyone be ready to follow him as he fulfilled God’s plans?

      This idea of responding to the opportunity to participate in the coming Kingdom of God plays out in different ways in the biblical passages I listed earlier. In1 Corinthians, Paul was writing to a group of believers who were sleepwalking through life. They were experiencing several