Guest post by board member Austin Rogers
What if I told you that OnRamp was as much about a kingdom as it was about cars?
As a child, one of the fuzziest concepts in the Bible to me was the “Kingdom of God.” I assumed it was perhaps another term for “the Heavens” where God lives. Or maybe it is some future perfect state of existence when all of creation has been redeemed by God. Or maybe it’s just another word for the Church.
The Kingdom of God is a mysterious concept, but it’s one Jesus spoke often about. He wanted us to lean in and seek out the deep truths of God’s Kingdom.
Let me briefly share a few of those deep truths.
The Kingdom of God = believers leading and serving in multiple charities partnering together to serve foster kids and recovering addicts.
First, every Kingdom needs a king. Who is the king in the Kingdom of God? Both the Old and New Testaments seem to specify that Jesus, the Messiah, is the king of God’s Kingdom. In Peter’s sermon after Pentecost in Acts 2:30, Peter explains that God has fulfilled His promise from Jeremiah 23 and elsewhere to “set one of [David’s] descendants on his throne,” referring of course to Jesus. And in Revelation 17, John describes the “Lamb” (Jesus) as the “Lord of lords and King of kings.”
Second, why call it a “kingdom”? Is this just a historical leftover from an age when kings and kingdoms were common? Actually, there’s a crucial reality to the Kingdom of God that transcends time or culture. I love the way George Eldon Ladd describes it in his classic book, The Gospel of the Kingdom. Rather than referring to a certain territory, government, or people group, the Bible primarily uses “kingdom” to describe “the authority to rule” or “the sovereignty of the king.” “The Kingdom of God is His kingship, His rule, His authority,” Ladd writes. So, when Jesus says we must “receive the Kingdom of God” like little children in Mark 10:15, He is teaching us to enter into God’s Kingdom by accepting His authority over our lives. This is also why Jesus taught His followers to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It is a request for God’s good and perfect desires for His creation to happen here and now, and in praying this prayer, it also aligns our hearts with God’s.
Third, Jesus speaks about the kingdom both as being something coming in the future and something we enter into and live out now. Understanding God’s Kingdom as His authority expressed in our lives helps to make sense of this paradox. In Matthew 13, Jesus compares the Kingdom to crops growing amid the weeds, symbolizing the way in which God’s will is carried out by His people in the world even amidst the evil and brokenness that we see all around us.
“Kingdom of God” = one church family sponsoring a believing widow’s family for a vehicle donation = Christians sacrificing to meet one another’s physical needs.
Today, the Kingdom of God is limited to the degree to which His will is done and His authority recognized “on earth as it is in heaven,” but someday God will destroy all sin, brokenness, and death and redeem the world so that His Kingdom extends across all of creation.
Fourth, what exactly does life look like in God’s Kingdom? This is perhaps the most exciting part of all! In the Old Testament, we find a beautiful vision of prosperity and peace between humans as well as between humans and creation. It’s a state of existence where nations no longer go to war and people no longer inflict pain on each other (see, for example, Isaiah 2:2-4 and Micah 4:3). It’s a world where all of creation is at peace with itself, where “the wolf will lie down with the lamb” and the “child will put his hand on the viper’s den” (Isaiah 11:1-9).
In the New Testament, Jesus, who is often called the “prince of peace,” taught his followers to be peacemakers who “will be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:9).
What about prosperity? In the Old Testament, we find a vision of God’s Kingdom as an abundant feast and a state of plenty. “You will still be eating last year’s harvest when you have to move it out to make room for the new,” describes Leviticus 26:10.
In the New Testament, we find Jesus proclaiming that the good news of the Kingdom is, among other things, “good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). The “abundant life” that Jesus said he came to bring us in John 10:10 is both spiritual and material – not that God wants His people to enjoy riches that others don’t have, but rather that He wants His people to participate in bringing about this abundance through providing for the needs of others.
This vision of shared prosperity is illustrated beautifully in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 15), where God says “there will be no poor among you.” It is not that God himself will supernaturally provide for everyone’s physical needs, but rather His people would do so themselves. When someone in the community had need, God gave this instruction: “you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be.” And we know from elsewhere in the Bible that when God tells His people to lend, they are to do so out of love, “expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35-36).
OnRamp’s volunteer Vehicle Repair Director, Jeremy Smith, winning Christian Brother’s Corporate “Lighthouse” award for being a light to the community through his service to OnRamp.
There’s a real-life example of this beautiful vision found in the New Testament. Right after Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came upon believers for the first time, the gathered Christians suddenly realized the profound need that existed among them and were driven to radical generosity, even selling their property and possessions to provide for anyone who had need. (See Acts 2 and 4.) When the Spirit of God came upon the believers, so also did His Kingdom – His reign, His authority, His will being carried out on earth as it is in heaven. And a characteristic trait of God’s Kingdom is that everyone’s physical needs are met, often by God’s own people. God has a huge heart for the poor, and so should we.
And now we see the connection from a kingdom to cars! We see the work that we do at OnRamp not just as a “good deed” or a nice thing to do, but in a very real way as participation in the Kingdom of God. We get to partner with God in bringing the good news of the Kingdom to those who have need. OnRamp’s assistance in meeting those needs has a profoundly positive impact on the lives of our clients, and is our way of advancing God’s kingdom on earth so that His will is done a bit more on earth as it is in heaven. That makes OnRamp’s mission one of the most strategic and exciting activities we can imagine!