“Make your top priority God’s kingdom and his way of life.”
Matthew 6:33

I’m fully convinced that apprenticeship to Jesus is the most essential thing to living a genuinely human life, now and eternally. It doesn’t matter your age, personality, gender, or any other facet of life. Jesus is both a master at living in God’s kingdom as well as training everyone else to do the same.

Frankly, it’s virtually impossible for any of us to live in God’s kingdom without Jesus showing the way. That’s because God’s kingdom is radically different from all the other kingdoms that exist in our world.

All of the other kingdoms are the broken and destructive results of the original transgression. The first humans decided they would be self-autonomous and define good and evil according to themselves rather than God’s wisdom. Every generation since that initial rebellion has contributed to a world filled with selfishness, contempt, violence, greed, and self-preservation. Every kingdom has been built upon this brokenness and every person living in the world’s kingdoms is both perpetrator and victim.

Jesus comes to rescue us from these corrupt kingdoms by bringing us into God’s kingdom — God’s rule and activity for the flourishing of humans, and through us to the rest of creation. Because it is completely void of the original transgression, God’s kingdom is completely upside-down from all the other kingdoms. So much so that after proclaiming that God’s kingdom had arrived, Jesus had to spend vast amounts of time teaching and showing people how God’s kingdom operated. 

This is summarized in the word “righteousness” — to live right by God and right by others. This righteousness is based on virtues such as love, joy, peace, humility, generosity, contentment, and compassion. It’s counter-intuitive to our experience in the world’s kingdoms where virtually any chance of success is based on money, power, prestige, fame, beauty, possessions, skills, education, and ambition.

This is why apprenticeship to Jesus is so essential. He is the master practitioner in God’s upside-down kingdom. He knows how to easily and naturally live rightly at all times and in all situations. And he is such a master, that he can teach this to anyone who chooses to join him as an apprentice.

God’s kingdom is not only upside-down to all the other kingdoms, but it’s also lived from the inside-out. Much of Jesus’ teaching addresses this. Israel were hand-picked by God to learn and embody God’s flourishing activity for the good of the world. However, by Jesus’ time, they had made a fatal mistake. They focused on outwardly obeying God’s commandments without addressing their inward brokenness. So rather than becoming an upside-down nation embodying God’s kingdom, their failure to deal with the inward brokenness formed them into a kingdom like all the others.

While they attempted to live rightly with God and others through outward obedience, this form of “righteousness” missed the actual target — the human heart. Our will — and all of the human aspects of our humanness touched by our will — need to be transformed from the inside-out. This is what Jesus meant when he said:

For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:20

Our righteousness must go far deeper than the meticulous outward compliance to God’s Law. It must come from a transformed will, expressed through our thoughts, emotions, decisions, body and relationships. Only then can we live rightly in God’s kingdom.

Jesus shows that God’s kingdom deals with the inner brokenness that has plagued humanity from the beginning. Life in God’s kingdom flows from the healed and transformed “insides” of the human will and mind to the “outsides” of the human body and relationships.

Put plainly, we can become people who have learned the inward virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, forgiveness, compassion, generosity, and humility. From that healed inward reality, we can live in God’s flourishing activity.

We don’t have to be angry. We don’t have to lust. We don’t have to lie, bully, or manipulate. We don’t have to be anxious, worry, or fret. We don’t have to slander or gossip. We don’t have to self-promote or self-protect. We don’t have to amass and protect wealth. We don’t have to manage our reputation or brand. We don’t have to lash out or pull away in our relationships. We don’t have to strive for influence or authority. We don’t have to retaliate.

Do you realize that all of those things were virtually impossible for Jesus, not because he was God, but because he was a healthily formed human being who had fully mastered life in God’s kingdom? For example, at the “worst” moment of his life — betrayed, falsely convicted, abused, and brutally impaled upon a cross — it was natural and easy for him to genuinely pray for his enemies, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

And Jesus can show us how to become like him in every way. Again, this is why apprenticeship to Jesus is essential. Only he can train and transform us into his character, faith, and power. 

He can show us how to live his way of life from the inside-out as we pursue God’s upside-down kingdom.