Preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Matthew
{10:6} But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. {10:7} And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.


The Apostles were charged to 'Go, preach.' Preach what? 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand.'


The message is salvation through Jesus Christ, because only through salvation do we find the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven being ours is amazing! The promise of eternal life, amazing! The message being brought to the 'lost sheep of the house of Israel', at that time only the house of Israel was to be preached to- God's chosen was to get the message first. God's people who were entrenched in the rituals given to Moses so that they might have a way of being forgiven for their sins, a way to be reconciled to God. The outcome of being reconciled with God is to be made right with Him. To be His and His alone, nothing between the two, nothing separating us from God. The sacrificial system they'd been given represented daily the need to be reconciled with God, to have nothing, not a single sin standing between a person and God. The Israelites were blessed with this marvelous life, this chance and the out come of the reconciling was supposed to result in a permanently fixed relationship with God once the Messiah came to save the people from all their enemies, from all the hardships. The Messiah was to come and set the captive frees, heal the people, bring new life, new hope. They looked forward to the Messiah doing all this for them, raising them up to complete reconciliation with God, taking sin away.


We today live in a world where the Messiah came and did all that in the way of God's love- not man's love. Man's love is twisted and warped, it's full of getting not giving. Not that it isn't normal to desire to receive all the best from God, but God's love is about giving. The Messiah came and gave all that the people of Israel were promised but not in the way they expected.


Isn't that the trouble with a lot of things in life? We imagine things and expect things to happen in certain ways and we're unable to accept when they come to us in different ways. We want to make sense of things and we do that by keeping things in order. Chaos seems to come when we find things out of order to our natural way of thinking, with our expectations shot to pieces. So we try to reorder things, to put things back into order to make sense of them. Sometimes people can do that, other times they just want to do away with the reality of things and keep to their same plan of order wanting it to come in another way, in a future way where things make sense to them again.


Things not coming in the way we've imagined and expected in all truthfulness should be... expected. A paradox, yes, a paradox that leaves us going in circles if we're not careful. Expecting the unexpected. Some people are taught just that. They have it drilled into their heads to be prepared for anything, and yet as prepared as they become they are still surprised by situations. We can be prepared to a degree but only to a degree and then even the most prepare find the unexpected troublesome.


We'll continue to live a life of expectation, but we all really do need to be able to accept when the unexpected happens and to find the truth through any lies that might be present. Isn't that the most important thing of all? To accept that thing might not turn out how we imagine them, but have an open heart and mind to realize that whatever God's will may be that we'll find it through His love if we only seek to find Him and His way, always.


The kingdom of heaven is the gospel Jesus preached and wanted His disciples to preach. When Jesus died and rose from the grave He sent his Holy Spirit to us and He told His disciples to continue to preach His message - His message being that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. The kingdom of heaven is at hand and has been at hand and will be at hand until Christ comes again. We who believe in Him, believe in this and in believing we hope and wait and we're full of expectations.


May the Lord bless and keep us in Him now and forever, always His, by His mercy and grace prepared.


Amen.