Dallas Willard's #1 Illustration

A message most of us miss

Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God 126 times. More than any other topic. It was the heart of his message.

What people mean by the Kingdom

Yet ask most Christians what it actually is, and you get answers in a few predictable places.

Heaven later

The most common: The Kingdom of God is basically where you go when you die—specifically a very abstract vision of heaven: clouds, light, and rest, not a grounded or redeemed vision.

The end-times kingdom

A close second is that the kingdom of God has to do with the end of time—Jesus' Second Coming, Revelation imagery, a kingdom that God sets up after everything falls apart. The Left Behind books of the 90s did a lot of work here. Some hear "kingdom" and think of church programs, missions, and buildings, whether within their own church or spanning churches. For others, it's just question marks and confused blends of Bible verses.

What few land on—and this is the striking part—is what Jesus actually means when he says "The Kingdom is at hand" or, as some Greek experts put it, "the Kingdom is here now." Dallas Willard noticed this. And he used an unexpected story from his own childhood to explain it.

Electricity is at hand

A new kind of power

Willard grew up on a farm in rural Missouri. He writes: "Electricity was available only in the form of lightning. We had more of that than we could use." Then the R.E.A.—the Rural Electrification Administration—extended power lines into the countryside.

"Our relationships to fundamental aspects of life—daylight and dark, hot and cold, clean and dirty, work and leisure, preparing food and preserving it—could then be vastly changed for the better." Think about what that actually meant. For a hundred years people would burn this liquid called kerosene to power their lamps and lanterns. That's ending. No more iceboxes and cellars. No more scrub-boards and rug beaters.

Available, but not automatic

The power to transform their lives was right there.

But here's the part Willard emphasizes:

"We still had to believe in the electricity and its arrangements, understand them, and take the practical steps involved in relying on it." The farmers, in effect, heard: "Repent, for electricity is at hand." Turn from your kerosene lamps. Change your mind about how life works. Some farmers said no. They didn't enter the kingdom of electricity. Some didn't want to change. Others thought they couldn't afford it.

The Kingdom is here now

Beyond a vague feeling

And that's how most people respond to Jesus today. The Kingdom of God gets treated as a vague feeling or something that only kicks in after we die. But what if living inside the Kingdom both continues in eternity and starts now?

What participation looks like

Forgiving someone who hurt you. Loving your difficult coworker. Using your money generously instead of anxiously. Trusting and walking with the Holy Spirit every day and hour. That's connecting to the power—participating in "the kingdom of the heavens," to use Matthew's words. Jesus never said the Kingdom was coming someday. He said it was "at hand"—literally within reach. Like electricity humming in the lines outside the house. And "repent" doesn't mean what most people think—feeling guilty about bad things. A part of that is true, but in Greek it means change your mind. Like those farmers reorienting their lives from lamps and iceboxes to the new way of electricity.

God’s rule made accessible

The Kingdom has a lot to do with God's rule and reign. This has always been around and never stopped. But through Jesus, it became accessible to ordinary people. Tangibly here—for anyone to see, turn toward, and step into. This is "His Kingdom come, His will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

More than a ticket to heaven

Many people oversimplify the gospel to merely "forgiveness for sins and a ticket to heaven later." Willard is saying Jesus offers both forgiveness and an invitation into what he calls "the masterclass of life."

Why Jesus heals

This more complete view of the Kingdom also explains why Jesus performed so many miracles. Not simply to prove he was God become man, but because he actually cares a lot about the good, physical world He created—healing bodies, feeding stomachs, calming storms—and physical healing is a major part of God taking charge as king. This is also one reason Jesus had to bodily, not just spiritually, rise from the dead.

Ephesians 1 says that God's mystery revealed in Christ is "to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ." God's kingdom has been advancing on earth for thousands of years. And one day Jesus will overflow God's rule and reign upon the earth to the full, as we see in the final pages of the Bible.

The question is whether you'll connect to the power that's available right now. Like the farmers who kept their lamps, we can keep living in the dark. Or we can flip the switch. The Kingdom of God is at hand. As real and transformative as electricity humming in the lines outside your house.

What would change if you actually believed that?