BODY SHOTS

At lunch the other day, I heard a quote from Dallas Willard that has been resonating with me ever since.

It was this:

"Until the Kingdom of God hits your body it has not hit you."

When I first heard it, I wasn't exactly sure what it was referring to. 

Did he mean that the Gospel of the Kingdom needed to make an impact on your physical body before it could be fully understood?

Did he mean that the Kingdom needed to be realized in some mystical way within us?

It bothered me. So, I kept thinking about it. I prayed about it. I meditated on the statement while I was on the train, or drinking my coffee in the early morning darkness. 

One verse that kept coming to me in this process was this one:

"The Kingdom of God is within you." - Jesus [Luke 17:21]

So, in what way is the Kingdom of God within me? I wondered.

All of this coalesced the other night over dinner when I shared this quote with some friends and someone asked me, "What does that mean?"

Almost intuitively I answered her, "It means that the Kingdom needs to actually affect the way you think and how you talk and what you do in your everyday life. It needs to be more than an idea. It has to change you in practical ways."

Even as I said it out loud, I realized that this was indeed what was meant by the Kingdom of God hitting your body. 

I started to wonder about how the Kingdom of God has hit my body. How it has changed the way I see people, and how I treat others, and how I share what God has given me, and how I risk my personal reputation to follow Jesus in my every day life. 

To be honest, I still have a long way to go, but thankfully I can still see a few places where the Kingdom has hit my body, and how it is still hitting me, day after day.

If Jesus is alive in me, then His Kingdom is too.

Let His Kingdom come! He must increase. I must decrease. 

Amen.

-kg