Kingdom Minded or Self-Seeking?

I had a wonderful sleepless night last night – sometimes that’s the way it is as we wrestle with something that we can’t put a name to. It’s been this way with me for a week now, dealing with different things, but last night I had a marvelous breakthrough in the area of being Kingdom minded.

Kingdom mindedness is something we have not seen, not ever, in the Body of Messiah. Well, maybe at the very beginning, but even then it was hampered by the Jewish laws that barred Gentiles from receiving the gospel until Peter’s encounter with Cornelius. After that – since then, it has been a struggle. Warring ethnicities became warring denominations, and warring teachers and warring movements. Even charitable organisations war against each other! And it’s because we are not Kingdom minded.

A Kingdom minded ministry is not an empire builder, nor does it see its congregants as property or simply resources – an audience that they are entitled to have. A Kingdom minded person will gladly lay down not only their life unto death for the good of the Kingdom, but also their prosperity, their honor, and their status. A Kingdom minded person is not jealous of the success of another but rejoices if the truth is being preached better and more effectively elsewhere. A Kingdom minded teacher will send students to another teacher if they are better off with someone else, or need something that they personally cannot give.

It is easier to kill for an ideal than to die for it, and easier sometimes to die for it than to live for the reality of it. We have the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the truth is that we have to be willing to sacrifice ourselves for the good of it. We have to be willing to watch our ministries diminish and others rise up if that is the plan of YHVH. We have to be willing to labor in obscurity, to live in poverty, to be a failure in the eyes of the world, if that is what our assignment requires. We have to be willing to be hated, but we have to make sure that we have not personally inspired that hatred through our own behavior. The Kingdom minded person will do anything to avoid misrepresenting the character of the King.

The Kingdom minded individual realizes that they are not important at all compared to the Kingdom itself, the people within it, and the lost outside of it. It’s a paradigm changer in our individualistic, “What about me?” society.

Our families may even want to drive us towards success, or inspire us to greed and jealousy – but we will find ourselves fighting against God Himself if we succumb to it. Everyone has their own job, and each job is important. A Kingdom minded person cherishes the part played by each member of the body, from the eye to the hand, to even the knees. Success is doing what we are each called to do, where we are called to do it, excellently and with humility and not trying to be anything else – because we don’t need to be anything else than what we are called to do. The “Well done good and faithful servant” probably won’t be as readily heard by the people who sought to do everyone else’s work and neglect their own – but I believe will be heard loud and clear by the people who faithfully did according to their own assignments, no matter how much society tried to deceive them into thinking their role to be insignificant.