Happy Thanksgiving! During this Thanksgiving weekend, we think of all the things and people we are thankful for in our lives. As a church family, we are truly blessed with so many good things, but most importantly, we recognize that we have a person to be thankful to. God is the source of all the good in our lives, and I encourage you to take a moment this week to express your thanks to God. If you can, express your thanks to a loved one too to encourage and bless them!
Something that God has been speaking to me about lately is the idea of the upside-down kingdom. The whole basis of the upside-down kingdom is the idea that the kingdom of God often functions in a way that is very different and almost opposite from the way the world operates. The kingdom functions on an entirely different set of principles than what is familiar to the world. In Romans 5:1-5, Paul describes at least three ways that the kingdom of God functions almost opposite to the way of the world.
In Romans 5:1-2, he says,
“Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory.”
Some of the key words in this passage are righteousness, peace with God, grace, and the hope of God’s glory. If we think about these ideas by the world’s standards, they have very little meaning. Few people in the world seem to care or talk about righteousness or grace today. But for Paul, these are such central ideas and are foundational for faith.
The first upside-down aspect of the kingdom is that things like righteousness, peace with God, and grace are at the centre of our lives. We choose to make these things important in our lives, even though the world has very little understanding of them. We live with entirely different goals, and with a focus on things that are quite foreign to the rest of the world.
Paul goes on to say in verse 3-4,
“But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
The idea of taking pride in our problems is another upside-down element of the kingdom. By the world’s standards, problems in life are something we try to survive through because we have no idea what the outcome of our problems will be.
The second upside-down aspect of the kingdom is that we are not only trying to survive through our problems. We are actually able to thrive and grow through them. It is not as if we as Christians are spared from trouble in life. But we know for certain that God cares for us in our troubles, and God can even use these circumstances to shape our character and give us hope. God can redeem any and every circumstance. There is no person, no issue, no area of life that God cannot redeem.
Romans 5:5 says,
“This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
When we face problems in our lives, the one place we put our hope is in God. Paul says here that when we hope and trust in God in the midst of our troubles, this hope will not put us to shame.
The world says that the person we need to believe in is ourselves. One of the biggest things the world tells us today is to “believe in yourself.” But the upside-down aspect of the kingdom is that we are not to put our hope in ourselves, but in God. And Paul encourages us, saying that when we put our hope in God, we will not be put to shame. By the world’s standards, trusting someone other than yourself is a foolish thing to do. But the hope we have in God doesn’t put us to shame, because in the end it will be proven that God truly is the only person worthy of our trust and faith.
LifeSpring family, we have so much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving season. Most of all, we are thankful to the giver of all the good things in our lives, the King of this upside-down kingdom who calls us to hope in Him in every season of life.