This Beautiful Mess – Chapter Three

November 3, 2007

books / spirituality

Chapter three of This Beautiful Mess starts off like this:

“When I became a Christ follower, the sad truth is that I transferred Christ into my kingdom, into the context of my life.”

In this chapter, Rick McKinley talks about our tendency to create our own kingdom for Jesus to rule, or to simply leave him out of our kingdoms. Either we create our own kingdoms and expect Jesus to drive out or enemies and give us money and power and whatever else we want, or we allow him to be our Saviour but not our King. He can be King of the afterlife. Or King of something else that doesn’t matter, because we can take care of the things that do matter. In doing either of these, we miss the entire message of the kingdom of God: it is at hand. It is not of this world. It turns the world upside down.

The chapter finishes like this:

“From personal experience, I can tell you that he will let you live in your own construct if you choose. But He’ll never bow down to you or adapt Himself to your beliefs.

I believe that creating our own kingdom for Jesus to rule, or leaving him out of ruling anything important to us, is one of the easiest struggles for us in Western Christianity. We have it easy in this respect. If we want to baptize our preference of something, or our dislike of something, all we have to do is put Jesus into it. If we don’t want to deal with what he might think about something, we can just take care of it ourselves. But he doesn’t fit. People see right through our smokescreens.