Your Kingdom Inheritance—Ruling as Joint Heirs with Jesus

Most people believe that we live in hundreds of different countries, large and small, that cover the face of the earth.

We order our lives according to the governments and cultures of those countries. We eat the food that the earth provides and we raise our families. It’s all we’ve ever known and it’s all our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents ever knew. We believe that we are stuck with what earth has to offer. We limit our whole lives to what’s on the planet because that’s the way everyone has been living for thousands of years.

However, we have lost touch with reality.

Even those of us who claim to know the ultimate King (God) do not understand that we also belong to a country that supersedes any of the known countries. We think of “the Kingdom of God” as a term pasted into prayers and sermons like an add-on. We don’t consider it our home country any more than Mars. We think the Kingdom of God and Heaven comprise some kind of invisible future destination above the clouds.

The truth about the Kingdom is difficult for people to understand. I always feel as if I’m battling against 2,000 years of mental block. We’ve been so conditioned to think “religion” that God has difficulty getting through to us the real message He delivered to us through Jesus Christ—which is about His Kingdom and how much He wants us to be full citizens of it, even while we’re still living on this globe. In fact, He wants us to be royalty!

God’s message is personal. Anyone who claims Christ as Savior becomes a citizen of the Kingdom of God, yet too many leave their citizenship on the shelf. They consider their faith to be religion, not citizenship, and they don’t realize that it should be making a difference in every detail of their personal, earthly lives.

You can’t see citizenship; you must experience it. In the same way, you can’t see the Kingdom of God; you must experience it. This book, divided into 90 devotional-type sections, will help you experience the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven, which are the same.

God, the King, has set up His Kingdom as earthly outposts, or colonies, populated with His citizens. The story of these colonies has not been an easy one. When Adam and Eve declared independence from Heaven, they had to set up their own government. God’s Holy Spirit was no longer their “Governor,” because they didn’t want Him to be.

So Heaven started to seem like someplace far away. We lost the language, the culture, the values, the morals, the convictions, and the lifestyle that should have been the standard for any earthly colony of the Kingdom. We became aliens to God.

Because God wanted to turn that scenario around, He sent His Son Jesus to make sure we would know about the Kingdom again. Once we find out how we fit into the Kingdom of God, everything is reversed. We begin to feel like aliens on planet Earth. We feel as if we belong someplace else. We also rediscover the present-day benefits that come with our heavenly citizenship, our royal place in the Kingdom.

It is my great passion to introduce people to the fullness of their citizenship in this heavenly Kingdom. You will see as you read that the Kingdom of God has almost nothing to do with religion. Instead, it has everything to do with the King Himself—with replicating His character and reproducing His will on earth. Maturing in their citizenship, Kingdom citizens grow to reflect their King’s culture, values, morals, nature, and lifestyle.

“Kingdom” is not my idea—it’s God’s idea. I don’t know why we ignore the obvious. Almost every book of the Bible has some reference to the Kingdom. Jesus talked about His Father’s Kingdom all the time. But we do not. Instead, we talk about the Church and Christianity.

I have a serious problem with people who define the Kingdom of God too narrowly, in terms of one denomination or a single ethnic expression of faith in Christ. Yet I have an equally serious problem with people who define it in mushy terms, as if almost everyone living on earth is a Kingdom citizen without even thinking about it.

Like the people who are profiled in chapter 11 of Hebrews, we should be looking instinctively for the Kingdom of Heaven. We all miss Heaven, but most of us can’t figure out what we’re missing. We are missing our home country:

• We miss the lifestyle of peace, love, and joy.

• We miss the place where the streets are paved with gold and nobody has to steal it.

• We miss the place where the crystal-clear air is filled with joyful singing instead of smoke and gang violence.

• We miss our heavenly Father and our older Brother, not to mention all of our other brothers and sisters who belong to the King.

• We miss all of that, and somehow we think we must wait many years before we can go there. Not so.

The Kingdom of God is a present-tense place. It is an exciting place to call home. Let’s explore together this Kingdom where we sit as royalty with Him!

And You have made them a kingdom (royal race) and priests to our God, and they shall reign [as kings] over the earth! (Revelation 5:10 AMPC)