Wanting to Join a Kingdom

The premise of all that I teach is a very simple rule ... but it has broad reaching applications. "The Scriptures are the accurate words of the King to His people". To be clear, what that does not mean is to go follow the traditions of man who say they speak for the king, but then contradict His message by making their own rules - Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, etc, etc, etc.

To put this into a word picture: imagine wanting to join a kingdom and become a citizen of that kingdom. You travel there - you get an audience with the king - you state that you have heard many good things about his kingdom and life within it and would like to join.

He then asks: will you agree to follow the rules of my kingdom? Now that seems like a perfectly reasonable request ... but here is where things get strange. You answer that you would rather follow the rules of the people wearing the funny hats. Is the king going to be pleased with that? Or perhaps instead you mention the king has an enemy trying to steal the throne and that you would rather follow his enemy's rules. Is that going to please the king? To both questions, the answer is a resounding NO. it will not make the king happy. In fact, he may become quite angry.

Now, for the sake of the analogy, the king decides to have compassion on you - even though you seem to be a little confused in how the kingdom and subjects idea works. He decides to give you a quest. If you fulfill the quest, he will allow you to join the kingdom. Now, he is not asking you to go kill a dragon and return with it's gold and treasure ... that is a challenge few, if any, of us here are capable of doing. No, instead his quest is to simply go to the royal well and drink some water from it.

That is an extremely easy quest. But he knows that this is a test. He knows that to fulfill this quest means you are submitting to his will. He knows, from experience, that many people will not accept this small challenge - and therefore, they do not get to join the kingdom. He knows that many people will plead with him, try to convince him they are good people and will be nice to others in the kingdom ... but they will will refuse to drink from the royal well and so they are turned away.

He also knows that he will allow those who want to follow the ways of those with funny hats to do so. They have, after all, drank from that well and found their place in the kingdom ... even in the palace itself. Yet, they are thought of as foolish - they are more for entertainment. They are not nobles, they are not knights, they are not merchants and tradespeople. But if you choose to follow their rules, they will convince you to drink from the well, and then you can join the kingdom, and if you still wan to follow their rules, the king will let you be one of them.

So the question I pose to you after this story is not just do you want to be in the Kingdom of Heaven, but do you want to have some honor, eventually some authority, to be a noble or knight? These are difficult roads and they take time ... and they take submission to the King's rules. Do you want honor in the Kingdom of Heaven? It requires work, training, doing quests for the Kingdom - real quests against real enemies.