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almost always from the lips of Jesus. The synonymous phrase, “kingdom of heaven,” appears another thirty-two times, primarily in the Gospel of Matthew. This was the first message Jesus proclaimed as He began His ministry, and there was nothing else Jesus talked about more than the message of the kingdom. He declared this to be the gospel. This is the message of good news Jesus came to bring. The kingdom of God has arrived on the scene.
    I have to be honest. Even though I had read the New Testament many times, I had somehow missed that this was the primary message Jesus taught. In my first twenty years of ministry, I never preached a message on the kingdom. That is a lot of talking without ever focusing on what Jesus talked about more than anything else. But it wasn’t just me. In the conservative evangelical circle I had come out of, I had never heard another pastor do a series of messages on the kingdom. I had never heard another pastor talk about the significance that the good news that Jesus came proclaiming was that the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven is near and that He preached that message of the kingdom more consistently than any other message.
    Then, as I began my personal journey to understand why the Christian life I was experiencing was not more like what I saw in the Bible, I began to look at the New Testament more closely. And as I studied back through the teaching of the kingdom in the New Testament, I was absolutely astounded at just how central the message of the kingdom was to the life and ministry of Jesus. As I began to pay attention to this, what I found is that the teaching of the kingdom is all over the pages of the New Testament, most of the time from the mouth of Jesus.
    Let me give you an overview of what I mean. We see this subject of the kingdom come up even before Jesus came on the scene. In fact, the very same proclamation that Jesus made as He began His ministry first came from the lips of John the Baptist, the prophet sent from God to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus “In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 3:1–2). When John arrived on the scene and began to preach, His message was the same message Jesus proclaimed as He started His ministry—repent for the kingdom of heaven is near. Don’t miss the significance of this. John was sent by God to announce the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, and the words He used to announce His coming kingdom were, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
    The Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew 5–7 was one of Jesus’ most famous sermons. Have you ever noticed how predominant the message of the kingdom was in this sermon? Jesus starts His message with that famous section we call the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). A little later, in that same sermon, Jesus said, “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven” (v. 20).
    It was in this same sermon that Jesus taught His followers how to pray: “This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (6:9).
    Again in that same sermon, Jesus talked about how the kingdom of heaven is to be the primary priority of our lives: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these other things will be given to you as well” (v. 33). Over and over again Jesus’ message was clear and it was consistent. It was the message of the kingdom.
    When Jesus taught, He often told parables—stories to help illustrate a truth. We often refer to parables as earthly stories with a heavenly meaning. The real meaning of the word parable is “to come alongside of.” Jesus would throw a story along side of a