The Lord did not come to preach the church, but the kingdom. He did not send His messengers to preach the church, but to preach the kingdom. However, the church is the messenger, and the vehicle for this message. It is also His bride, the queen that will rule with Him in the kingdom. Therefore, it is right for the messengers and ministries who God has sent to be devoted to building the church in order for there to be a vehicle for the kingdom message, and for the important purpose of the Lord having a worthy bride. However,...

Our perspective of the kingdom must be based on knowing the King. As I have contended that much of the biblical teachings on righteousness deal with stewardship, which is management, there is a sure biblical witness that the Lord cares deeply about this. It was this issue in the Parable of the Talents that determined which servants heard "Well done," and which heard "You wicked, lazy slave!" (see Matthew 25:21-26 NIV) That is how important being a good steward is. Whatever He has entrusted us with, we want to see it used to its maximum...

For the past few months we have been addressing the subject of our time, especially as we prepare the way for the kingdom by taking up the call to preach the gospel of the kingdom. As we see this present world collapsing into increasing discord and disorder, the kingdom will be marked by increasing peace and order. We must therefore order our own lives according to kingdom principles and be a demonstration of the kingdom. We will see an increasing contrast between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of God, and between the lives of those that...

The goal of this part of our study on the kingdom is to become better stewards of what our King has entrusted to us. As we have also addressed the last couple of weeks, sometimes spiritual fruit can be hard to measure, but not impossible. However, before we cover how we might judge our spiritual investments in more depth, let's go back to the management of our resources in the natural—especially the money we are entrusted with.

If we do not proactively rule over our money, it will rule over us, dominating our time and energy to get...

Last week we began addressing our responsibility to test the fruitfulness of ministries and missions in which we are investing the Lord's resources. In large operations such as charities, which are devoted to distributing material goods, this is much easier to measure than when we examine evangelistic and missionary outreaches.

I have asked numerous large audiences of Christians how many met the Lord through crusades, Christian television, tracts, or other such means of evangelism. Usually all of those combined were less than 5 percent of the audience. The other 95 percent responded that they had met the Lord...