Five quotes on the Kingdom of God

THE KINGDOM:  What you can't see is often more important than what you can.  Because of Jesus, the eternal has penetrated the temporal, and heaven and earth have collided.  The Kingdom of Heaven is near and the veil is thin.

“It is the childlike mind that finds the kingdom.”  - Charles Fillmore

“If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.”  - William Law

“For me Christianity is about the Kingdom, not about the Church:  it has to do with human growth and development not church growth and development.”  - Michael Taylor

“The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.”  -  H.G. Wells

"Earth is crammed with heaven,and every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."
- E. Barrett Browning

Which is the real world?

Which one is the real world?

• Narnia, or the the professor's english countryside estate?
• The prince's palace, or Cinderella's sooty cellar?
• Your town; or another, more supernatural realm?

More specifically, from which direction does life flow?  From which direction does authority and power flow? 

The Kingdom of Heaven is not "heaven"  - what we falsely call the "afterlife."  Rather, it is a dominion in time and space; a world, as Jesus indicated, that was markedly "near."  Accessible.

Why else would we say we are "surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses?"  You can't be surrounded by something far away.  You are surrounded by these encouragers even now.  There are other characters in the story.  It's not just "Jesus and me."  As Dallas Willard indicates, there is no such thing as empty space.  The air around us is occupied. 

"Still, we have been speaking of the Otherworld and the manifest [the one we see] world as quite separate places.  The ancient Celts, however, made no such distinction... The material and the spiritual were not separate or self-limited states:  both were equally manifest at all times."  (--from The Paradise War, by Stephen Lawhead, p. 87)

So which is the real and most authentic world, the one that has the power to shape the other and call it into its true form? 

The unseen is the supernatural current of electricity that gives its light to the seen.  It is the seed that gives its genetics to the fruit; the Firstborn his inheritance to the follower; the Original its form to the copy.  The goal is restoration.  This is of course what we mean when we say that one day, the Kingdom of Heaven and the kingdoms of earth will be unifed: the natural earth (the 'seen' world) will be folded into and repaired by the supernatural (presently unseen) Kingdom of Jesus.  Heaven restoring earth.   Supernatural healing the natural. 

“The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.”  - H.G. Wells