Time to Get Real 3

[HKHaugan]

Remember in the last writing how Jesus is the picture of final ultimate and complete reality? Well that reality is the Kingdom of God, His Kingdom. It is a Kingdom of the heart, an eternal Kingdom, the Kingdom we have been called into and the Kingdom we carry within to offer without. It is His presence planted in each of our hearts, which we have been given the privilege to offer and give away. He, the Lord Jesus, is the open door to a destiny of personal hope fulfilled. With that in mind we need to look at what we call reality in the present.
When I say the present I mean every next moment because for us that is our immediate reality, existing and
living in every next moment, leaving one moment and entering the next. If ultimate reality is always the same, always present, that is Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever (Heb.13:8), it is this secondary reality, the ‘now’ we live in, that God has given each of us a specific role, a task and a job description. It is a temporary reality called time. It is the one we meet every day, month, year, minute, hour, second and moment.
So, what I am saying is this, there are two realities, one permanent and the other temporary. The Kingdom of God is forever. This world in which we find ourselves, our personal world, our interpersonal world, is fallen, imperfect, in need of recovery, which is what makes it temporary. God has chosen His eternal permanent Son, Jesus, to bring it all back to Himself and each of us is a part of His recovery plan. The permanent has come into the temporary to make everything new and permanent. That was the purpose of the Cross and the Resurrection to replace the temporary with the permanent. That is reality at work
in us. That’s why we take up our cross of faith every next moment so that others can be born spiritually and resurrected in the Spirit.
Has God made it that up close and personal? As one well known Alaskan says frequently, “You betcha!” It is God’s heart and our hearts in a Kingdom of hearts. No wonder Saul’s hardened heart is broken, brought low, humbled and his world’s eyes blinded so that he might become Paul, a visible missionary of heart transformation whose spiritual eyes become Kingdom eyes that cause world eyes to behold Jesus and so that their eyes become Kingdom eyes that in turn ‘Kingdomize’ their everyday world. God has given us the task of ‘eternalizing’ a ‘temporized’ world, that is, bringing ultimate reality into temporary reality thus replacing the temporary with the permanent. That’s the work He has given us to do. Every next moment is no longer a moment in time but a spiritual moment to let the permanent presence of Jesus be felt within and offered to be felt in the hearts of others. Wherever we are, whomever we meet and whatever we are doing in any moment presents the opportunity to offer His heart. What are we doing with the ‘time’ we have been given? Every next moment awaits our decision. Will it be giving in to the ‘temporary’ or the ‘real?’ I say, “It’s time to get real!”