The Kingdom is a little like this – you very rarely get to have a season of joy and victory, and then you leave that and enter a season of sorrow and defeat! Instead we tend to have both joy and sadness simultaneously; we experience victory in one area and defeat in another.

I have found one of the most helpful metaphors for understanding this tension in life are parallel train tracks. Your life runs along these 2 tracks constantly – at any moment you are full of joy and contentment – and simultaneously you can equally feel pain and disappointment. We even experience this in God’s nature – He is at the same time a God of love AND a God who judges. He is full of mercy, yet jealous for purity.

In our understanding of the Kingdom we call this experience eschatological tension. The Kingdom is here – but it is yet to come! It is now – but not yet! We struggle to live with this tension and the temptation is to break the tension and to hold only 1 truth, especially when we are considering why some are healed and some aren’t, why sometimes good things happen to “bad” people and bad things happen to “good” people, and so on. The agony and ecstasy of life. So we are tempted to break the tension and believe only 1 of the truths- either the Kingdom is here right now and everyone should be healed and happy and prosperous. Or – the Kingdom is yet to come so right now no-one will get healed and suffering is all we should expect. But both of these truths become errors without the tension of holding them both to be true at the same time.

So may God meet you between the tracks, and may you know His Presence in you and around as you move forward in life, at one moment in joy and in other in sadness. He is there in the midst of you!

Growth doesn’t happen in our lives simply by being alive. It seems to me Jesus was very deliberate about calling his disciples forward into growth. He exposed them to truth or demonstrations of Kingdom activity and then called them forward into that area of experience – demonstration and proclamation.

How does God expose us to new things that require us to grow? I would suggest there are 4 main ways He invites us to grow.

1. Through exposure to truth in the Bible – given for transformation not information! As you read the Bible,  ask yourself – is there something here for me to believe? to practice?; to turn from?

2. Through power encounters and Kingdom clashes – notice what you notice as you go through your day. Our days are full of “God moments” – but we can often miss them if we are rushing

3. Through the Holy Spirit speaking to us

4. Through other people discipling us – we need people who will call us forward in our following of Jesus; and we need to be deliberately calling other people forward – one hand forward and one hand back!

We need to invite pressure in our lives to push us into growing – stagnation and boredom are the only other alternatives!

More next week!