This Sunday we start off our last “Done by Hope” annual focus sermon series. This one is going to go for 8 weeks and bring us through things like Reformation Day, All Saints, and Christ the King Sunday. But unlike some of our sermon series this year, this one doesn’t have “hope” in its name. Instead, it just repeats a line from the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy Kingdom Come.”
When you look up that petition in Luther’s Small Catechism, you find that the answer to “What does this mean?” is that “God’s Kingdom certainly comes by itself without our prayer, but we pray in this petition that it may come to us also.” That is hope. Hope looks for God’s Kingdom to come of its own accord, but also for God’s Kingdom to come in our lives.
But “kingdom come” is sometimes a mystifying way of putting this reality. I remember one of my seminary professors who postulated that we should likely not talk about “kingdom” anymore because people in America haven’t had a king, but that we should talk about “reign”. Somehow “kingdom” confuses us, but “reign” makes sense.
So putting that together, we pray in this petition that God’s reign may come to us also. We pray that God would once again assert His reign over our lives, conquering our sin and setting up His throne in our bodies, hearts, and minds. We pray that His reign changes our lives, our behaviors, and even our insecurities. He reigns in us because His Son, the King, invaded our world in the incarnation and battled for it on the cross, proving His victory on Easter Sunday.
As we walk through the next 8 weeks of this sermon series, I hope that it brings you a fuller understanding when you pray this line from the prayer that Jesus taught us, “Thy Kingdom Come.”
(We’ll return to our look at the 7 letters of Revelation next week.)