Jesus summed up his life purpose in these words: "I must give the good news of the Kingdom of God . . . for that is what I was sent to do." (Luke 4:43). What did he mean by it? He made it the first petition in the Lord's Prayer: "When you pray say: Our Father . . . Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." Prayer is the deepest thing we do and in that deepest thing we do, the coming of the Kingdom is the most important. It is the foremost and the uppermost -- without it the prayer is comparatively meaningless. This is the framework and the core of everything. Rauschenbush says, "The Kingdom is the vertebrae on which all things in the body hang."
The key is this: "Thy Kingdom come. They will be done on earth, as it is done in heaven." The second phrase explains the first. The coming of the Kingdom was the doing of the will of God on earth as it is done in heaven. How is the will of God done in heaven? In the individual will? Yes. In the collective will? Yes. In the total social arrangements of heaven? Yes. It is a complete totalitarianism, a total way of life in this life now.
But wouldn't that be total bondage? Strangely enough, No. Here is a complete totalitarianism in which, when you obey it totally, you find total freedom. I do not argue. I only testify: When I belong to Christ and his Kingdom, I am most my own. Bound to the Kingdom, I walk the earth free. Low at his feet, I stand straight before everything else. There is one difference between the earthborn totalitarianism and God's heavenborn totalitarianism: if you obey the earthborn totalitarianisms, fascism, naziism, communism totally you find total bondage. If you obey God's Kingdom you will find total freedom.
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E. Stanley Jones (1884 - 1973)
Was a 20th-century Methodist Christian missionary and theologian. He is remembered chiefly for his interreligious lectures to the educated classes in India, thousands of which were held across the Indian subcontinent during the first decades of the 20th century. According to his and other contemporary reports, his friendship for the cause of Indian self-determination allowed him to become a friend of leaders of the up-and-coming Indian National Congress party. He spent much time with Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the Nehru family. Gandhi challenged Jones and, through Jones' writing, the thousands of Western missionaries working there during the last decades of the British Raj, to include greater respect for the mindset and strengths of the Indian character in their work.His work became interdenominational and world-wide. He helped to re-establish the Indian “Ashram” (or forest retreat) as a means of drawing men and women together for days at a time to study in depth their own spiritual natures and quest, and what the different faiths offered individuals. In 1930, along with a British missionary and Indian pastor and using the sound Christian missionary principle of indigenization. (God’s reconciliation to mankind through Jesus on the cross. He made Him visible as the Universal Son of Man who had come for all people. This opening up of nations to receiving Christ within their own framework marked a new approach in missions called "indigenization") Dr. Jones reconstituted the “Ashram” with Christian disciplines. This institution became known as the ”Christian Ashram.”