Kingdom's Keys Fellowship
Where God's Kingdom Meets Man's Heart.
Pentecost 96 Living the High Life
Pentecost 96 Living the High Life
In the 1949 movie, Knock On Any Door, a gang member philosophically sums up his frustration of living in a dead-end New York City environment when he says, “Live fast, die young and have a good looking corpse.” In many ways it categorizes much of the secular world’s philosophy, which tells us to get what we can while we can, no matter what you have to do to get it.
I remember sensing the lostness and futility other kids felt while living on the edge of East Harlem. I had just moved up from North Carolina as I was entering my teen years, a culture shock to say the least. The one difference between them and myself was the fact that I knew what many of them did not know. There was a whole other world outside the slum neighborhoods and the concrete asphalt canyons they were accustomed to.
Sure, they saw the pictures of wheat fields in Kansas and the clear surf in Hawaii but those were book and radio show visions. They were not real. Even the veterans that returned from the brutality of the WW2 had seen the outside but what they experienced there they worked hard to forget.
Yet there was much more. I knew one day I would escape the nightmare of city life and return to sunshine in open fields, see the mountains and thick forests waking in the morning and the waves crashing on the beach with the incoming tide. I would again hear the accents of different places and taste the richness of local foods. There would again be the fresh faces of people my age who were happy and absorbed in small town banter and milkshake drive-ins. I would not be taken in by a philosophy that sold out to the moment for the ‘pot porridge’ of gang acceptance and the fake toughness of teen bravado, fatalism in the raw.
But all of that was to be eclipsed one day when I found that ‘outside’ was more than being outside the city but outside of the world and in the Spirit. Seeing by faith in Jesus from within instead of being led by what I saw without. Sure, that other world outside the city was alluring but it only set the stage for what later would be entering the deeper reality of a spiritual life in God.
When Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world, how true His words were. He brought us the discovery that everything we see from ‘sea to shining sea’ and in the ‘starry expanse’ reflects the deeper spiritual reality behind them. That for me, the living vitality of faith, brought Him to bear, not only on my mind but also in my heart and soul. When you live in the Spirit it is living faster than the speed of light, where dying to sin and evil is the beginning of a youth that never dies and your corpse is merely a vessel to begin the journey prepared for you from the beginning of the world. Jn.10:10 “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
Stay tuned………
In the 1949 movie, Knock On Any Door, a gang member philosophically sums up his frustration of living in a dead-end New York City environment when he says, “Live fast, die young and have a good looking corpse.” In many ways it categorizes much of the secular world’s philosophy, which tells us to get what we can while we can, no matter what you have to do to get it.
I remember sensing the lostness and futility other kids felt while living on the edge of East Harlem. I had just moved up from North Carolina as I was entering my teen years, a culture shock to say the least. The one difference between them and myself was the fact that I knew what many of them did not know. There was a whole other world outside the slum neighborhoods and the concrete asphalt canyons they were accustomed to.
Sure, they saw the pictures of wheat fields in Kansas and the clear surf in Hawaii but those were book and radio show visions. They were not real. Even the veterans that returned from the brutality of the WW2 had seen the outside but what they experienced there they worked hard to forget.
Yet there was much more. I knew one day I would escape the nightmare of city life and return to sunshine in open fields, see the mountains and thick forests waking in the morning and the waves crashing on the beach with the incoming tide. I would again hear the accents of different places and taste the richness of local foods. There would again be the fresh faces of people my age who were happy and absorbed in small town banter and milkshake drive-ins. I would not be taken in by a philosophy that sold out to the moment for the ‘pot porridge’ of gang acceptance and the fake toughness of teen bravado, fatalism in the raw.
But all of that was to be eclipsed one day when I found that ‘outside’ was more than being outside the city but outside of the world and in the Spirit. Seeing by faith in Jesus from within instead of being led by what I saw without. Sure, that other world outside the city was alluring but it only set the stage for what later would be entering the deeper reality of a spiritual life in God.
When Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world, how true His words were. He brought us the discovery that everything we see from ‘sea to shining sea’ and in the ‘starry expanse’ reflects the deeper spiritual reality behind them. That for me, the living vitality of faith, brought Him to bear, not only on my mind but also in my heart and soul. When you live in the Spirit it is living faster than the speed of light, where dying to sin and evil is the beginning of a youth that never dies and your corpse is merely a vessel to begin the journey prepared for you from the beginning of the world. Jn.10:10 “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
Stay tuned………
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