Luke 17

Living the life of the kingdom of God on earth in this age is not supposed to be easy. This is a place and time where we face temptations and troubles. It is also a place and time full of opportunities for faithfulness according to what we profess to believe. We are as those who have been dropped behind enemy lines, who need to be careful not to find ourselves deserting to the other side. We do not want to be led astray by someone offering the world’s sweets in exchange for heavenly food. Those who use their influence to lead Christians astray are doing wrong. Jesus says that it would be better for such a person to sink into the depths of the sea with a heavy weight secured around his neck than to face the judgment of God that is coming against him.

The most distressing fact about the confusion of this spiritual environment is this: There will be sin within our ranks, and even within our own hearts, and the danger of becoming an enemy of the Lord and leaving the company of His friends is very real. For this reason, when a brother in Christ sins against us, we have a responsibility to help that person in the direction of repentance, and then to forgive him. We need to be willing to do that over and over again, and not to give up. It is only through faith that we will be able to live in this way of truth, repentance, and forgiveness. This is what our Master commands us to do. We live by faith, and this faith has a true story at the center of it, a story that is inseparable from the One we love, Jesus Christ. That story tells us that we have been saved by His worthiness and not our own. Even the greatest ones in the kingdom on their very best days are still unworthy servants, for they have been ransomed through the blood of a perfect Redeemer. This story empowers us, and Christ Himself empowers us, to live the life of truth, repentance, and forgiveness.

The kingdom of God behind enemy lines is still a place full of all kinds of blessing. We have been healed after all, healed of the horrible leprosy of sin. Yet, amazingly, not everyone who, by faith, receives that healing responds to the fact of healing with the appropriate life of faith that should follow such a great miracle. Like the ten lepers who go their way by the command of Jesus, and on their way to the priest find they are healed, nine do not return with appropriate praise. They believed Jesus, and did what He said, and they were healed. But there is another kind of faith, a later faith that is consistent with healthy life behind enemy lines. Only one had this greater grace, a faith that refuses to go forward in the way of even strictest adherence to the instruction they were all given, without first returning to praise the Savior. There is something here for us. It was a Samaritan who had this additional blessing. This one man would experience a better healing than the rest, a healing beyond the removal of leprosy.

This is what the kingdom of God is like now. It is in our midst, and yet it can be easily missed and neglected. What happens to us when we forget the story, and the Man behind the story? What happens to us when we wander, and are increasingly blind to the One we once embraced? Like Israel in the wilderness, we have been delivered from Egypt, but our pathway to the Promised Land is amazingly circuitous. After years of that kind of life, we may seem to lose any palpable regard for the glory cloud among us. We die on this side of the Jordan and leave it for the next generation to be more fruitful in mission than we have been. This wandering way is not the life of eternity. Today so many could bump into the Lord they sing hymns of love to, dust themselves off, and move on with very little awareness of His presence. One day there will be no confusion about who Christ is, both in the church and outside of it. The coming again of the Son of Man will be as clear as the lightening flashes that fill the sky from east to west.

In His first coming, Jesus came with the kingdom of God, but He came to suffer, to be rejected and to die. Even after His resurrection, with the passing of centuries of church history, we have easily reached the point where the church itself has very little practical expectation of His presence and His coming, maybe only one leper in ten. We are all busy doing what everyone else does. We are eating, drinking, buying, selling, marrying, working, and some, if they wish, even gather for worship once every week. This is not the way to be fruitful. We are sleep-walking behind enemy lines in a day of kingdom opportunity. We are wandering in the world, not particularly distinguishable from everyone around us. Yet the Lord knows how to make a distinction between those who are His and those who are not on that final day.

He knows how to bring an end to the customary peace of any nation, and He knows how to bring an end to this age. Suddenly we will see with amazing clarity. We need to ask for this clarity now, and we can only have it by the grace that God gives to some, the grace to see, to worship, and to serve; the grace to have a heightened and living awareness of the healing that we have received, and to turn away from every other work with a sense of priority that insists that the Lord must be worshipped immediately. Remember Lot’s wife. Her way was the way of looking back longingly for a Sodom that was being destroyed. The way of the faithful must be the way of looking forward and pressing on, even to the cross; the way of keeping your heart longing for another land, that at all costs, you would draw nearer to the God who healed us through the blood of His Son.