Kingdom Culture

I have lived in several different earthly cultures. They have all changed me in different ways. For a long time now, God’s Kingdom culture is where I focus most of my effort.

Remember the game for toddlers with holes of different colors and shapes on every side of a hollow box? It has corresponding blocks that can pass through those holes with a matching shape. Before moving to Africa my cross-cultural training used something like that to prepare me.

Imagine your birth culture, where you grew up, is a square block. Now imagine moving to a different culture that is a circle. Thinking of the child’s game, will my square be able to pass through the circle hole? 

The hard corners don’t let it go in. The only way to make it fit is to round the corners down to make it more like a circle. That is what happens when we live in a new culture. I believe this describes how we conform to the image of Christ and His kingdom culture.

As believers, we live here, in our imperfect world corrupted by sin, but we also belong to and live in the Kingdom of God. Abba graciously adopts us into His kingdom culture when we accept Jesus’ work on the cross as our own.

Obviously, our earthly culture does not fit neatly in God’s kingdom culture. Never-the-less, after establishing a relationship with our Creator we begin growing. Over time all followers of Jesus increasingly reflect the nature of our creator with various degrees of progress.

Receiving the love of God is the most powerful thing we do. 1 John 4:4 This perfect love rounds our sharp edges. 

Sometimes chipping and chiseling, sometimes sanding and polishing, we are all under construction by our Creator for His glory, always.

Deepening our relationship with Jesus is the best focus of our lives. The natural result of this focus is us becoming more like Him. Who we spend time with changes us.

We want to represent Him in our spheres of influence as excellently as possible because we are His ambassadors. We are the primary way others meet Jesus, inviting them from their cultures of origin into God’s kingdom culture. As we imitate Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, people notice.

The fact is all followers of Jesus are in training to reign with God for eternity. Cooperating with the process of transformation from my culture of origin into the kingdom’s culture is worth it, regardless of what my circumstances or feelings have to say.

From chipping to polishing, I look and respond increasingly like the best me Abba intentionally created, in the image of God. I cannot reflect Christ like any other person.

This is a lifelong process of allowing the Holy Spirit to work in and through us. We will never be our perfect Christ-like-self on this side of heaven. However, by the grace of the love of God and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we do wear down those corners and become more like him day by day.