Read So Much More: Moving Beyond Kingdom Principles to Kingdom Power for Free Online

wilderness and spent forty days and nights fasting as He prepared Himself to begin His ministry and facing temptation from the enemy to give it all up and take the easy way out (Luke 4:1–11).
    When the time of temptation in the wilderness ended with the devil leaving Jesus for a more opportune time, Jesus, anointed by the power of the Holy Spirit, emerged from the wilderness to begin His ministry (vv. 13–14). This first portion of His ministry is often referred to as the Galilean portion of His ministry. As He began His public ministry with preaching and teaching, He began with a proclamation. Out of all of the important subjects Jesus could have chosen to address as He began His ministry, He chose this particular message. And this message He began proclaiming at the beginning of His ministry from that day forward became the most consistent message He taught. In fact, this message would become the overriding theme of everything He taught and everything He did.
    What was this central thesis statement of Jesus’ ministry that He began His ministry with and proclaimed for than anything else? Mark records the proclamation this way:
After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
—M ARK 1:14–15
    So what was the first message Jesus proclaimed? What did He call the message of good news, the gospel message He came to proclaim and is calling us to repent and believe? It was the message of the kingdom. He proclaimed that the kingdom of God is near and that we are to repent and believe this message because this is the gospel message—a message of very good news!
    Matthew records that same message with an additional important detail: “From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 4:17). From that time on, Jesus preached the same message. That first message became His most consistent message. It was the message of the kingdom; that the kingdom of God was near, at hand, and had arrived on the scene.
    In Luke’s account he tells us that one of the first things Jesus did after this proclamation was to return to His hometown of Nazareth and go to the Sabbath service at the synagogue. There He made the claim to be the Messiah, the Anointed One, who had come to usher in the kingdom:
He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
—L UKE 4:16–21
    In reading this passage from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah (61:1), Jesus was announcing the coming of the kingdom; and in case anyone missed the indirect implication, Jesus made it abundantly clear when He said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” What an amazing statement! Try to imagine yourself in this scene for a moment. You are just going to church for another ordinary Sabbath service and all of a sudden this guy whom you’ve known all your life, whom you’ve seen grow up as a young man living in your community and working in His dad’s carpenter shop, stands up and reads this Messianic prophecy and says, “I’m the guy who is fulfilling this today in your midst. The time is now. The kingdom is at hand.”
    The phrase “kingdom of God” appears fifty-three times in the Gospels,