The upside-down Kingdom | Shades of Red

Episode 137 - Stephanie invites us to ponder the upside-down Kingdom of God that Jesus heralded. we talk about hell, about the enemy opf our soul and his strategies to take us down with him. We mostly focus on the supremacy of our Lord, King and Savior. No wonder Jesus talks about heaven and hell more than anyone else in Scripture. He is cupping our face in His hands and gently redirecting our gaze to our heavenly Father, who awaits to restore us to fellowship with Him and with one another—male ‘kai’ female. Christ came to destroy the works of the devil and to unravel the threads of lies he has woven in our relationships and identity. Jesus restores our relationship to God, to one another, and to ourselves by losing His relationship to the Father, by dying alone, and by becoming sin in our stead so that we might become the righteousness of God as the very core of our identity (2Corinthians 5:21).

When death became inevitable, He embraced the most despicable torture ever invented, so shameful it made His followers run away. Though He remained sinless after a lifetime of adama-dwelling, He agreed to swap places with us, adama for adama, and, in agreement with His Father since before the foundation of time, endured the ultimate torture: he became so intimately experientially knowledgeable about evil, that He experienced the separation from the Father that should have been ours at the base of our own tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

In the upside-down Kingdom of God, the first will be last, and the last will be first. Weakness is strength, and pride comes before a fall. The poor in spirit will inherit the Kingdom of God. Blessed are the persecuted. These are the new laws of gravity in the Kingdom of God—so different from the ones in the fallen spiritual realm.

Jesus gave us the spiritual laws of His Kingdom in what we know as the Sermon on the Mount. His Kingdom is not about equality and rights, or authority and leadership. It is about unity and love as God uses each one of us to build the Kingdom of God on adama-ground today—the adama-ground of our hearts, both personally and as the body of believers, as well as the adama-ground of all humanity, believers and unbelievers alike. We are all shades of red, and Christ died for all who call on Him to be saved. We are called to serve a world in dire need because we share with Christ our adama-flesh. The poor around us are many. Many are the worthy causes in our day.

For more on this topic, join our guest teacher for a thorough look at the upside-down Kingdom Jesus invites us to join, with our special Gospel Spice teacher, Roslyn. Become a member today for free to access her teaching, along with all the other, member-exclusive lessons that take you deeper into the Gospel Spice experience of Shades of Red.