Monday Devotional: The Growth of the Kingdom (Mark 4:26-34)
No, we can't build the kingdom of God.
He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”
He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade” (Mark 4:26-32).
With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
We Christians like to talk about “building the kingdom of God,” but this language betrays a misunderstanding of how the kingdom of God rises up. We don’t build the kingdom. God does. We can work ourselves to exhaustion trying to bring about his will on earth as it is in heaven, but Jesus teaches us that this is the wrong approach. It simply isn’t true that “God has no hands but our hands.” He is more powerful than that. We have a role to play in the kingdom, but it involves cooperating with the work God is already doing.
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