Good News

Kevin DeYoung post:  He Stopped Looking for the Ladder

Russell Moore has a way with words. I love the stirring conclusion to his chapter “Kingdom: Heaven after Earth, Heaven on Earth, or Something Else Entirely?” The chapter is part of the soon to be released book Don’t Call it a Comeback: The Old Faith for a New Day.

If evangelical Christianity is about anything, it ought to be about the gospel—that’s the meaning of the term evangelical itself. If so, we must recognize that our mission is to be found in what makes the good news good. We don’t have to be left to our own striving and clawing. And we don’t have to try to be emperor of our own lives, or of those around us. We point instead to a kingdom that overshadows—and knocks down—every rival rule, including our own.

This means our proclamation agrees with our non-Christian friends that something’s deeply wrong with the way things are, even as we show them how they’re not nearly outraged enough by the world the way it is. We tell them—and remind ourselves—of the good news of an invisible kingdom now in heaven, showing the pockets of the kingdom in our struggling little churches, and singing out for the glorious kingdom that will one day explode through the eastern skies. But, most importantly, we announce who is King in that kingdom: the One who joined us in our grave holes, even as we alternated between a hardened self-sufficiency and a screaming for the snake father we’d chosen for ourselves. Our Brother/Lord brought the kingdom in a way we’d never have thought of. He stopped looking for the ladder, and cried out to his Father.

And he was heard.