Session 1 ended with an assignment and a promise: God is filling a cast, and there is a part written for you. This session is about what that part actually looks like on a Tuesday.
Most Christians carry a quiet assumption they have never examined — that the Christian life is essentially waiting. Waiting for heaven, and coping in the meantime. Behave well, endure what comes, and one day it will be worth it. On that account, salvation is a rescue from here to there, and the years in between are a holding pattern with better morals.
If that is roughly your picture, this session is going to press on it.
So the question is: what did Jesus actually die to give you — and when does it start?
Not what you will receive later. What is on offer now, what it costs, and how far your present life sits from it.
Consider This
Pull out your journal and finish this sentence in writing, before you read on: Because I am a Christian, my life right now is different in that…
Be honest rather than impressive. You will need this at the end.
One more thing. Keep your journal handy as you work through this and every subsequent session. Record your revelations, observations, and your discomforts. Ask the Holy Spirit what He wants you to see.
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, You know how small my expectations have become, and how much of that I have called realism. Show me the life Jesus actually died to give me. If I have settled, tell me. If I have been waiting for something You already handed me, open my eyes. Holy Spirit, teach me. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Four hundred years of silence stood between the last Old Testament prophet and the next voice God raised up. Four centuries with no word. Israel lived under Roman occupation, taxed by an empire and policed in its own streets, waiting for a deliverer who did not come and did not come and did not come.
Then a man appeared in the wilderness with a message.
Illustration
Consider what it cost to hear him.
Matthew reports that Jerusalem, all Judea, and the whole region around the Jordan went out to John. Understand what that sentence describes. No cars, no trains, no buses — and for the overwhelming majority, no donkey either. It meant walking. From Jerusalem down to the Jordan is roughly twenty miles of descent through hard, dry country, and then the same twenty miles back up.
People do not walk forty miles in that terrain for a religious lecture. They walk it because they are desperate, and because they have heard that God has finally said something.
Hold that picture. The question this session eventually asks you is whether you want what is offered badly enough to walk toward it.
In those days John the Baptist came into the wilderness of Judea proclaiming, “Repent (μετανοέω), for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
We hear “repent” and think apologize. Feel bad, say sorry, resolve to do better. That is not what the word means, and the difference is the difference between guilt and transformation.
Word Study
μετανοέω metanoeō G3340
“Repent” · Matthew 3:2 · Mark 1:15
Range. To change one’s mind; to think differently afterward; to reconsider so thoroughly that the reconsideration reorders what one does.
The sense here. Meta (“after, change”) + noeō (“to perceive, to think”) — the verb is about the mind. Not primarily emotion, and not primarily behaviour, though both should follow. John is telling a nation to think again about what God is doing, because their assumptions are about to be overtaken by events.
Why it carries the argument. If repentance were merely regret, the appropriate response to the announcement would be sorrow. It is not. The appropriate response is a revised view of reality — the kingdom is here, so stop thinking as though it were elsewhere. That is the work this entire session is asking of you.
Source. BDAG, s.v. μετανοέω.
Then Jesus took up the identical message, and added a word that dates it.
Now after John was imprisoned, Jesus went into Galilee and proclaimed the gospel of God. He said, “The time (καιρός) is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. Repent (μετανοέω) and believe the gospel!”
Word Study
καιρός kairos G2540
“time” · Mark 1:15
Range. A decisive or appointed time; the right moment; an occasion with content, as distinct from duration.
The sense here. Greek has another word for time — chronos, the ticking of the clock, the sort you measure. Mark does not use it. Jesus does not say enough time has passed. He says the appointed moment has arrived.
Why it carries the argument. Kairos makes the announcement an event rather than a prediction. Something has begun that had not begun the week before, and the required response is not preparation but a change of mind.
Source. BDAG, s.v. καιρός; contrast χρόνος.
And when He sent the disciples out, He put the same sentence in their mouths — with instructions attached that are worth reading slowly.
As you go, preach this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven is near!’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give.
Three voices, one message: John, then Jesus, then the Twelve. And the message is not the kingdom is coming. It is near — the perfect tense you met in Session 1, an arrival that has happened and stands.
The kingdom is not primarily somewhere you go. It is a reign you may live under, starting now.
And these three verses are not the exception. They are the pattern.
134 times. Count every occurrence of basileia — “kingdom” — across the four Gospels and Acts, straight from the Greek text, and this is what you get. Matthew and Luke carry the weight of it; John does something theologically different with the idea rather than dropping it (see John 3:3, 3:5, 18:36); and Luke does not let go of it even in Acts — the book opens on kingdom teaching and closes on it, four chapters and twenty-seven years apart.
Here is the definition this course will use, and it is worth memorising:
A Kingdom Life is a life surrendered to the Father, modeled after the life of Jesus, and empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Three clauses, three Persons, and no room for a spectator. Surrender is a posture of the will. Modeled is a pattern for the journey. Empowered is a source that is not you.
Notice what the definition does not say. It does not say comfortable. It does not say successful. It does not say a life free of trouble — Jesus was explicit that trouble is included (John 16:33). What it says is that the reign of God has an address, and the address is a human life.
Illustration
Two doors, one house.
The gospel of salvation is the front door. You come in out of the weather. You are safe, you belong, the danger is behind you — and that is not a small thing, because outside it was raining and dark and you were not going to survive the night.
But nobody lives in an entryway. The kingdom is the kitchen. That is where the food is, where the conversation happens, where the tears flow, where healing and forgiveness happen, where people sit for hours without noticing. You have to come through the front door to get to the kitchen. But strangers get the front hall. Only family gets the kitchen.
A great many Christians have come through the front door, hung up their coat, and stood in the entryway for thirty years, grateful to be dry and never once walking down the hall.
Scripture describes this life in a dozen directions at once. Rather than give you a list to skim, here are four clusters — because they are not four unrelated benefits but one life seen from four sides.
Identity. Purpose. Power. Price. Those four words are worth keeping, because they are also the shape of the rest of this series, and because you will be asked to score yourself against them before this session ends.
What is now true of you. Not earned, not pending. Stated as accomplished fact, and unpacked properly in Sessions 11 and 12.
So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; what is old has passed away — look, what is new has come!
God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God.
Then Jesus said to those Judeans who had believed him, “If you continue to follow my teaching, you are really my disciples and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
New. Righteous. Free. All three in the indicative mood — descriptions, not targets. This is imputed righteousnessRighteousness placed to a believer's account because of Christ, rather than earned by the believer's own record. "God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).This is why God calls you righteous before He makes you righteous. The verdict comes first and the making follows — which means you are not working toward acceptance, you are working from it.Treated fully in Session 11: God calls you righteous before He makes you righteous, and that order is not a technicality. It is the ground you stand on while the making happens.
What you were made for. Taken up in full in Session 8.
“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure, hidden in a field, that a person found and hid. Then because of joy he went and sold all that he had and bought that field.”
A purposeful life and a fruitful life — a life with an assignment on it.
What you have been given to work with. The whole second movement of this book — Sessions 9 through 15 — is about this one.
Look, I have given you authority (ἐξουσία) to tread on snakes and scorpions and on the full force of the enemy, and nothing will hurt you.
Word Study
ἐξουσία exousia G1849
“authority” · Luke 10:19
Range. The right to act; delegated jurisdiction; permission that carries weight because of who granted it.
The sense here. Not raw force — Greek has dynamis for that, and Luke uses both in this very verse (“authority… over the full force of the enemy”). Exousia is the badge, not the muscle.
Why it carries the argument. A police officer stops traffic with a raised hand, not with superior strength. The hand works because of what stands behind it. This is why the Christian life is not a matter of summoning enough spiritual intensity. You are not being asked to overpower anything. You are being asked to know what you carry.
Source. BDAG, s.v. ἐξουσία; cf. δύναμις in the same verse.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come so that they may have life, and may have it abundantly (περισσός).
Word Study
περισσός perissos G4053
“abundantly” · John 10:10
Range. Over and above; beyond what is necessary; surplus, more than enough.
The sense here. The core idea is excess relative to need — not luxury, but more than the minimum required. In John 10 the contrast is with a thief who leaves a flock diminished; the shepherd leaves it with more life than survival requires.
Why it carries the argument. Western readers hear “abundantly” and think money. The word does not say what the surplus consists of; the context says it is life. What is promised is not a comfortable standard of living but a supply exceeding what the assignment demands.
Discipline check: the range of perissos includes “superior” and “extraordinary,” and it would be easy to import all of that here and land on a prosperity reading. One sense operates in one sentence, and John’s sentence is about life against death.
Source. BDAG, s.v. περισσός.
What it will cost you. This cluster is usually left off the list, and leaving it off is how people are ambushed.
The first cost is the steepest, and Paul states it as something already done to him.
For through the law I died to the law so that I may live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
There is a practical consequence to that verse: you cannot offend a dead man. A life genuinely surrendered is a life increasingly difficult to insult, because the self that would have taken the insult has been handed over. That is a cost before it is a freedom, and it is worth being honest about the order.
Beyond it, a Kingdom Life is an uncomfortable life — the Spirit is named ParacleteFrom the Greek παράκλητος (paraklētos) — one called to someone's side. English translations render it Helper, Advocate, Counselor, or Comforter, and no single word carries all of it. The word belongs to the courtroom as much as the sickroom.Jesus uses it of the Spirit in John 14–16, and 1 John 2:1 uses it of Jesus Himself. Notice what "Comforter" implies about the conditions He is sent into: you do not send a comforter to someone who is comfortable.Treated fully in Session 10, which tells you something about the conditions He is sent into. It is a warrior’s life, because the works of the devil do not dismantle themselves. And it is a life in which trouble is promised rather than avoided.
I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In the world you have trouble and suffering, but take courage — I have conquered the world.
Both halves of that verse are the same sentence. Any version of the Christian life that keeps one and drops the other is not the one Jesus described.
Luke 10:19 says nothing will hurt you. Believers are martyred every year. Believers get cancer, lose children, and are imprisoned for their faith. The objection is not clever; it is obvious, and anyone who reads that verse honestly will feel it.
Three things are worth saying, and the third is the one that matters most.
First, look at what provoked the sentence. The seventy-two had just come back exhilarated because demons submitted to them. Jesus grants the point — and then, in the very next breath, takes the ground out from under their excitement.
“Look, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions and on the full force of the enemy, and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names stand written in heaven.”
Jesus Himself relativises the promise within two sentences of making it. The thing that cannot be taken from them is not their bodily safety. It is their names, written down.
Second, the New Testament nowhere treats this as a guarantee of physical immunity — and the men who heard it are the proof. Every one of them knew persecution; most of them, according to the early church’s memory, died violently. If they understood Luke 10:19 as a promise of safety, they were catastrophically wrong about it, and none of the writing they left behind suggests they felt betrayed.
Third, and most importantly: whatever hurt means in that verse, it cannot mean what the apostles’ own lives disprove. The enemy’s power to genuinely and finally damage a person who belongs to God is what has been broken. That is a claim about ultimate harm, not about comfort, and the difference is the difference between a promise you can trust and a promise you will watch fail.
Where this stays unresolved. Scripture does not tell us where the line falls between the harm we are protected from and the harm we plainly are not. Jesus said the words, and Jesus also said we would have trouble, and He does not reconcile them for us. Anyone who resolves this neatly — in either direction — is adding to the text.
Jesus lived this life. That much is not in dispute. The question is whether it was available only to Him.
The usual assumption is that Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead because He was God — which would settle the matter, since we are not. But the New Testament writers keep going out of their way to say something else.
“Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man clearly attested to you by God with powerful deeds, wonders, and miraculous signs that God performed among you through him…”
Read that construction again. Peter, preaching at Pentecost with the events still fresh, says the miracles were things God did through a man.
So Jesus answered them, “I tell you the solemn truth, the Son can do nothing on his own initiative, but only what he sees the Father doing.”
Therefore he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he could become a merciful and faithful high priest in things relating to God…
Had to be. The writer of Hebrews treats Jesus’ full humanity as a requirement, not a costume. And Luke tells us how the ministry was powered: Jesus went into the wilderness full of the Holy Spirit (Luke 4:1), and came out of it announcing that the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
If Jesus’ works were done in the power of the same Holy Spirit who now lives in you, the question of who can live this life has an uncomfortable answer.
This is the load-bearing claim of the session, and a thoughtful reader should push back hard. It sounds like a diminishment of Christ, and diminishments of Christ have a long and bad history.
State the concern at full strength: if Jesus’ miracles were done by the Spirit’s power rather than His own divine power, is He still fully God? Have we quietly traded the Christ of the creeds for an especially anointed man?
The answer is no, and the distinction is old. Historic Christian teaching holds that Jesus is one Person in two natures, fully God and fully man, neither confused nor divided. Nothing in this session touches His deity. What is at issue is not what He was but what He habitually drew on.
Paul’s language is the hinge:
…who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself (κενόω) by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature.
Word Study
κενόω kenoō G2758
“emptied himself” · Philippians 2:7
Range. To empty; to make void; to deprive of significance or effect.
The sense here. Paul does not say what was poured out, and the sentence’s own grammar supplies the answer: He emptied Himself by taking on the form of a slave. The emptying happens by way of the addition, not by subtraction of deity.
Why it carries the argument. This is the difference between “He stopped being God” — which Paul does not say and the church has never taught — and “He declined to draw on what was His by right, and lived instead as a man dependent on the Father and the Spirit.” The second is what the Gospels show us on every page.
Source. BDAG, s.v. κενόω. The theological discussion runs under the heading kenosisFrom the Greek κενόω (kenoō), "to empty" — the term for what Paul describes in Philippians 2:7, where Christ "emptied himself" by taking on human nature. It does not mean He stopped being God, or surrendered any divine attribute. It means He declined to draw on what was His by right, and lived instead as a man dependent on the Father and the Spirit.You can see it in the Gospels: Jesus grows in wisdom (Luke 2:52), sleeps from exhaustion in a boat, and says plainly that He does not know the day or hour of His own return (Mark 13:32). None of that is pretence.Treated fully in Session 2.
Where this stays unresolved. Precisely how a single Person can be fully God and fully man, and what it means for the divine nature to be present while the human nature depends on the Spirit, is beyond us. The church has named the mystery — the hypostatic unionFrom the Greek ὑπόστασις (hypostasis), meaning a person or individual reality. The church's term for the truth that Jesus Christ is one Person in two natures, fully God and fully man, without the two being blended into a hybrid or split into two persons.The wording was settled at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, which said the two natures are united "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." Note what that sentence does: it rules out four wrong answers without supplying a mechanism. The term names the mystery; it does not explain it.Treated fully in Session 2 — rather than explained it. Naming a thing is not the same as understanding it, and we should not pretend otherwise.
I tell you the solemn truth, the person who believes in me will perform the miraculous deeds that I am doing, and will perform greater deeds than these because I am going to the Father.
It is the most uncomfortable verse in the session, and the discomfort cuts two ways. Some readers have been taught it means nothing much; others have been taught it means everything and have been quietly crushed when their experience did not match.
Greater almost certainly does not mean more impressive. It is difficult to out-do raising Lazarus. The clause Jesus attaches gives the reason — because I am going to the Father — which points at scope rather than spectacle: one man in one province becomes a Spirit-filled church across the world, and the works multiply accordingly.
What the verse will not allow is the reading that Jesus’ works were a closed exhibition. He says the person who believes in me, and He does not qualify it.
Where this stays unresolved. Whether “greater” means larger in scope, different in kind, or something else is genuinely debated among careful readers, and John does not settle it. What cannot be avoided is that Jesus expected His followers to do what He did.
Put those two things beside each other — the life described in Scripture, and the life you are actually living — and there is a distance between them.
The gap. Every believer has one. The measure of maturity is not its absence but the direction of travel.
Everyone has a gap. The apostle Paul had a gap. Naming it is not self-condemnation, and it is not humility either — it is simply accurate, and you cannot close a distance you refuse to measure.
What makes the gap hard to see is that we mostly did not choose it. We inherited it.
“Our environment, our theological traditions, and our teachers have much more to do with what we believe than we realize. In some cases they have much more influence over what we believe than the Bible itself.”
Jack Deere · pastor, author, and former seminary professor · Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, 1996
That is why Session 1 spent time on confirmation bias, and why this session opened by asking you to write down what you actually expect. Most of the gap is not rebellion. It is a ceiling somebody installed in you a long time ago, which you have never had reason to test.
So there is a decision here, and it is smaller and harder than it sounds.
It is smaller because nothing is being asked of you that God has not already supplied. The authority is given. The Spirit is resident. The righteousness is credited. You are not climbing toward a life God is withholding.
It is harder because the pursuit is daily, unglamorous, and contested. Two of Jesus’ kingdom parables end the same way — a man finds treasure and sells everything he has; a merchant finds one pearl and sells everything he has. In both, the finding is joy and the cost is total.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he found a pearl of great value, he went out and sold everything he had and bought it.”
Neither man is portrayed as making a sacrifice. They are portrayed as making a trade, and as being delighted about it. That is the tell. If pursuing this life feels only like loss, you have not yet seen what is in the field.
Consider This
Ask the question plainly and answer it out loud, because a decision you never say is a decision you have not made:
Do I want this?
Not do I approve of it. Not does it sound biblical. Do I want it enough to reorder my week around it.
You have a definition, a description, and an honest picture of the distance. What remains is the one thing this material cannot do for you.
The gap does not close by being understood. It closes by being walked, and the first step is always the same: telling the truth about where you actually stand.
Take thirty minutes, alone with your journal with nothing to prove.
One. Go back to the sentence you wrote in Consider This at the start — because I am a Christian, my life right now is different in that… Read it again now that you have read the session.
Two. Work down the four clusters and score each one honestly from 1 to 5, where 1 is this is not my experience at all and 5 is this is plainly true of my life:
Three. Look at your lowest number and ask one question: is this low because I do not believe it, because I have never been taught it, or because I have never acted on it? Those are three different problems with three different remedies, and mistaking one for another is why people stall.
Four. Write one sentence — not a plan, one sentence — naming what you will do about the lowest number this week. Then tell somebody.
Keep this page. You will be asked for it again at the end of the course. The point is not the score. The point is the direction of travel between now and then.
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
Jesus did not die to get you into heaven. He died to get heaven into you.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!) — Thanks to Pastor Miles McPherson of Rock Church, San Diego
Father, give me a heart that desperately seeks face-to-face intimacy with You, and faithfully avoids what displeases You.
Jesus, create in me a heart guided by the Word of God, carrying a burden for people who are far off.
Holy Spirit, develop in me a heart that gives and receives forgiveness, worships without embarrassment, and depends on prayer rather than on my own competence.
With Christlikeness as my goal and the Holy Spirit as my guide, knit my heart to Yours. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (1998). The best-known modern argument that the kingdom is available now and that discipleship is apprenticeship to Jesus in ordinary life. Where this session states the case in twenty pages, Willard makes it in four hundred.
Substantial
Gerald F. Hawthorne, The Presence and the Power: The Significance of the Holy Spirit in the Life and Ministry of Jesus (1991). The scholarly treatment of this session’s most contested claim. If the section on Jesus working as a man raised your eyebrows, this is where the argument is made carefully and at length.
Academic
C. Stephen Evans, ed., Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God (Oxford, 2006). A collection of essays on Philippians 2 and what “emptied himself” can and cannot bear. Read this if you want to know exactly where the boundaries of orthodoxy sit on the question.
Day 1 Read Luke 4:14–21 slowly. This is Jesus stating His own job description in His hometown synagogue. Which line of that mandate excites you? Which one frightens you? Why that one?
Day 2 Sit with the word repent as it actually reads — change your mind. Not what should I feel sorry about but what have I been thinking that is not true? Name one belief about the Christian life you may have inherited rather than examined.
Day 3 Read Matthew 13:44–46. Two men, two finds, the same response. What in your life would have to be sold to buy that field? Be specific.
Day 4 Read Luke 10:1–20 whole, so that verse 19 sits in its own story. Why do you think Jesus redirected their joy in verse 20? What is He protecting them from?
Day 5 Read John 14:12 and Acts 2:22 together, then Luke 4:1. If Jesus worked in the Spirit’s power, what does that change about what you expect of an ordinary Tuesday?
Day 6 Print your Session Map — use the button at the bottom of this page — and find a believer you trust. Ask them for five minutes: walk them through the five stations, then read them the sentence you wrote about your lowest Gap Assessment score. What did they see in you that you couldn’t see in yourself? And did naming it out loud change anything about what you’re willing to do this week?
If something in this session stuck with you, confused you, or hit harder than you expected, I’d genuinely like to hear it — email me.
Kingdom Essentials · Session 2 · Argument Map
Kingdom Life
“What did Jesus actually die to give you — and when does it start?”
Four centuries of silence ended with one message, repeated by John, Jesus, and the Twelve: the Kingdom of Heaven is near — a decisive moment already arrived, not a someday.
A Kingdom Life is a life surrendered to the Father, modeled after Jesus, and empowered by the indwelling Spirit — three Persons, and no room for a spectator.
Identity, Purpose, Power, Price — one life seen from four sides: new and free, on assignment, carrying real authority, and costly enough to name honestly.
Jesus’ miracles were things God did through a man, full of the Spirit and dependent on the Father — not a private divine shortcut, but the same Spirit who now lives in you.
Everyone has a gap between this life and the one they’re living. Naming it isn’t shame — it’s the only way to actually close the distance.
So Now
The reign of God isn’t somewhere you go. It’s available now — and it has an address: a human life.
Matthew 3:1–2 · Mark 1:14–15Identity, Purpose, Power, Price — not four separate benefits, but one Kingdom Life seen from every angle.
2 Corinthians 5:17 · Luke 10:19The man who found the pearl sold everything gladly. If pursuing this life feels only like loss, you haven’t yet seen what’s in the field.
Matthew 13:45–46Kingdom Principle
Jesus did not die to get you into heaven. He died to get heaven into you.
Next · Session 3, The Nature of Man. You have seen the life on offer. Session 3 asks what kind of creature you would have to be for any of it to be possible — and the answer starts in Genesis, with the words image and breath.