The way of death

Jared Wilson reminds us that, despite the church's many efforts to the contrary, the Kingdom message is really very simple:

When Jesus' cousin grew up into this tumultuous landscape and answered YHWH's call upon his life, he went out to the Jordan River, the historic borderline of deliverance for Israel, the line Joshua had led them across from desert wandering into the Promised Land. And when he got to the Jordan, John didn't begin conspiring. He didn't amass arms, begin a grassroots political campaign, urge rigorous law-keeping, or preach any of the other myriad ways his countrymen were seeking to establish the kingdom. He simply said the kingdom was at hand and if anybody wanted in he would be more than happy to dunk them in the river.

"Repent!" he called. And "Repent!" his cousin, our Lord Jesus, called after taking the reigns of John's burgeoning kingdom community.

The way into the kingdom life is the same way out of worldly life -- death. As baptism illustrates, the way into the kingdom is the way of death, burial, and resurrection.

Go to a new place, this action commands us. Leave the old one. Abandon it and its ways, its self-idolatry in the guise of spirituality.

Amen. That's a long quote, but I still recommend reading the whole article.