Giving the Kingdom,
by Doug Reed

"Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not,
and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you will
be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you: good
measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running
over will be put into your bosom. For with the same
measure that you use, it will be measured back to you."
- Luke 6:37-39

The latter part of these verses is often used to talk about
money and little else. I think that is a pity. Look at the
flow of the passage, and you will see that this is talking
about all of life. At the heart of the kingdom of God is
the grace of God. The coming of the kingdom meant
we get what we don't deserve. We live everyday in a
relationship with God where the measure of our blessing
is Jesus and not ourselves. That is what grace is.

Yet, at the same time, the more we give the Kingdom of God
to our brother, the more of the kingdom we have ourselves.
Moreover, if we withhold the kingdom from our brother,
we withhold it from ourselves.

This passage begins with saying Don't judge and you won't
be judged. Don't condemn and you won't be condemned.
Does this mean that we ignore right and wrong in peoples'
lives? Does this mean anything goes? If we read the
entirety of Jesus' message, we will see that He never taught
such a thing. However, these words warn that we should not
trap our brother in a system where he gets what he deserves.
Rather we should both give and expect grace. We should
expect God to love our brother when he does not deserve it.
We should expect God to forgive our brother when he does
not deserve it. Furthermore, it is grace that sets our
brother free not condemnation. The result is that when
we can see God's grace for our brother, we can see it
for ourselves.

Jesus goes on to talk about forgiveness. The same principle
applies. If we don't give the gift of forgiveness, we will
have trouble receiving the gift of forgiveness. Here we see
that our relationship with God is very much related to our
relationship with each other. If God has forgiven someone,
and we don't, who do we have a problem with? We not
only have a problem with our brother, we also have a
problem with God.

We see this in the ministry of Jesus and the coming of
the Kingdom of God. Grace was breaking forth in the
Person of Jesus Christ. One of the worst things you could
do was stand in the way of grace. Jesus had more rebukes
for those who stood in the way of grace than He did for
the worst sinners of the day. Grace was coming, but it
was coming with a warning. If you stood in the way of
what God was doing, you could get flattened. That is a
lot of what this passage is about.

Finally, we get to the passage we hear so much about.
"Give and it shall be given to you". This is not just about
money. If we participate in God's grace towards our
brother, it opens the door for greater grace in our own
lives. Not only that, it opens the door for true happiness.
The more selfish we are the more unhappy we will be even
if we have everything. Yet, giving people are happy people
no matter what. Participation in God's grace towards
another human being fills our hearts in a way nothing
else can.