"kingdom" Tagged Sermons (Page 2)
Samuel’s return to active ministry in verse 3 sets a pattern his whole later itinerary follows, prefiguring Christ’s own continual, moving ministry. True repentance, unlike its false counterfeits, actually transforms rather than merely regrets. Christ’s kingdom, like Samuel’s ministry, is defined by that same ongoing transformation.
Samuel’s calling in the night gets misread more often than not, treated as a template for every believer’s personal experience rather than something genuinely unique to him. Three specific features set his childhood ministry apart from any ordinary calling. Even here, the coming of Christ’s kingdom is already present, not merely anticipated.
Hannah’s story carries real weight for how women read Scripture, and her place in the larger history of salvation runs deeper than a single answered prayer. Her song anticipates Mary’s own centuries later, both women subordinating themselves to what God is doing. God and his kingdom come first here; everything else, including Hannah herself, comes second.
Israel’s wickedness at the end of Judges sets the dark backdrop against which Ruth and Samuel begin to tell a different story. The Old Testament kingdom, fractured and lawless here, stands in sharp contrast to the kingdom Christ brings. Even in these darkest chapters, the shape of what is coming is already visible.
Even during what could be called Jesus’ year of popularity, his reading of Isaiah 42 provokes the Pharisees rather than winning them over. Matthew 12:31-32 makes the stakes explicit: where Christ is, the Spirit and the kingdom have arrived in their finality, not merely as a preview. Popularity and confrontation, it turns out, were never actually in tension.
Vos and Ridderbos both inform this reading of the Pharisees’ own hope for obvious, immediate signs of blessing, a hope Christ’s answer in Luke 17 deliberately disappoints. The contested phrase ‘the kingdom of God is within you’ in 17:21 gets careful exegetical attention. Three observations about Christ’s kingdom close out a chapter that resists the very kind of sign-seeking it describes.
Returning to the three kingdoms and three kings of creation, the live debate over whether technology itself is good or bad gets taken up. Various sects err through a flat Biblicism, before Psalm 8’s astonishing claim closes things out: in Christ, we are exalted above the very heavens.
Three kingdoms turn up under three kings in the sixth day’s creation, with man given a remarkably exalted position among them. Only by holding to the living Word, amid the evolution-versus-creation debate, can we keep ourselves from slipping into paganism.