I preached this weekend at LifePoint out of Luke 17:20-37 on the Kingdom of God and spent a good amount the sermon tracing the kingdom throughout Scriptures and attempting to show from the texts what it means to live in an already but not yet situation in regards to the kingdom of God.

Well, anyone who listens to the sermon will quickly figure out that I’m no John Piper or Tim Keller. So yesterday, I downloaded the audio from the Dwell Conference that was recently held in New York and in Tim Keller’s message titled “Dwelling In The Gospel”, he had this to say about the kingdom (I thought it explained far better than I did in my sermon what I was trying to drive home):

One of the most interesting things about the evangelical world in the last generation is that we’ve come to almost consensus to what the Bible teaches on this is that the Kingdom of God is already but not yet. That Jesus Christ inaugurated the Kingdom, it’s partially here, it’s really here, and yet it’s not fully here, it’s not completely here. And there’s a book I don’t even know if it’s in print anymore but there’s a book by John Stott called the contemporary Christian and he had a chapter in there in which he did a marvelous job i thought of talking about this already but not yet and talking about the dangers of either an under-realized or an over-realized eschatology. An under-realized eschatology usually creates an attitude toward the world thats too pessimistic. It says we can’t have any impact. We just have to basically create a fortress here in which we guard ourselves against the evil of this world. On the other hand, an over-realized eschatology is Utopian and actually talks about how we’re going to take over the culture and change the culture which won’t surely happen until Jesus returns. And one of the problems we have when it comes to cultural engagement is we don’t’ get this right.

You need to listen to the whole thing. It will be an hour well spent.