More Than Sunday: Kingdom Authority

Sunday’s sermon covered one of my most favorite things about God’s Kingdom—Authority. I think I love it so much because as a child I was raised in an environment that didn’t understand authority, because of that it was misused. Once I experienced God as my authority, I learned that living without it is to live without safety, security, and stability. I hate when things feel unsafe. It's like having the ground fall out from beneath me.

We’ve all experienced life with and without submission to God, but maybe we don’t always recognize it. Think of your life pre-Jesus. Mine was fear, anxiety, people-pleasing, indecisiveness, loneliness, and the list goes on. It was like being a small child lost in the woods. You don’t know which direction to go, who to trust, or if anyone is going to take care of you. It’s dark, it’s scary, and there are things bigger than you just around the next large tree. I don’t know what your life was like before Jesus, but at some point, the Holy Spirit opened your eyes and you recognized and believed. In that moment, you recognized the authority of God. He sent Jesus because He had the authority to do so. He saved you because He made you and has the authority to make your salvation a reality. In that moment, like I was, you were brought out of the woods and found God's love. But as we heard from Sunday’s message (11/17), that’s not the end of discerning His authority. It goes beyond that.

God is authority. God is everywhere. Therefore, His authority is to dwell in every nook and cranny of your soul. It's all your thoughts, all your hopes, all your disciplines, all your decisions, all your conversations. Allowing Him to dictate how those go is to submit to His authority. It is to live by His rule and reign—His Kingdom. For me, the message was a great reminder that discerning His authority and submitting to it is an ongoing, relational thing that will never end. That every yes I give Him is an act of submission to His authority. The more I do it, the more freedom that comes. It's freedom from the need to prove myself, make every decision on my own, worry and fret over the right and the wrong, the list goes on.

The second part of the message unpacked discerning authority between one another. Two main reasons I have refused authority within the Church is 1) I'm trying to protect myself from getting hurt or 2) I'm trying to prove something. But if I'm living submitted to God's authority I have His safety and security, and I am released from the need to protect myself. He does that for me. And if my feelings do get hurt, if I do get betrayed, it isn't devastating. It will not undo my whole world, because He stabilizes me to handle whatever comes. I also don't have anything to prove. I'm not making all the calls when I'm submitted to Him. He is doing that. It's on Him to come through. If I'm following God's lead then I have nothing to be concerned about because the One True God does not mess up.

Discerning and submitting to God's authority is what makes the Kingdom run smoothly. As Fox said, it's the oil. Can you do it without it? Sure, but you will be miserable. I would rather go through the painful humbling of getting on my knees than to live in misery and get nothing but more misery from it. I encourage us to lean into this message. Listen to it several times. Makes notes, pray, talk about it. God's children are not to walk around in misery. We are meant to walk in freedom, unity, and harmony. The path to those things is discerning His authority and the measures of authority He gives to those around us.

“No one has ever been as miserable as the person who could not discern authority.” —Fox