Bringing Heaven to Earth (Matt 6:10)

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven - Matt 6:10

At the heart of this most famous of prayers, Jesus teaches us to pray for God's Kingdom to come, and for His heavenly will to be done on earth.

This is essentially what Jesus's whole life was about. At the incarnation, God descended from heaven to come to earth. During Jesus's life, He performed miracles, healed the sick, brought the dead back to life, delivered peace to the restless, and gave hope to the hopeless.

He was glorified on the Cross, descended into hell to take back the keys of death, and then rose on the third day. 40 days later, He ascended back into Heaven - but not before promising that His followers would receive power from on high, the Holy Spirit, whom He sent back to earth on the day of Pentecost.

And ever since that day, it has been the church's job, not only to pray to God for the Kingdom of Heaven to come to Earth, but to be a part of God's answer.

When we become born again, we become one spirit with Christ. Our spirit unites to His and together we cry out "Abba Father."

Through our born again spirit we have access to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. We must learn to align our soul, or our consciousness, to what God is speaking to us through our spirit.

We must learn to continually say no to the deathly desires of the flesh, and yes to the life giving desires of the spirit.

And we must not simply think about these things in our minds, but live them out through our bodies. Our bodies act as the conduits by which we are able to manifest externally that which we have received from God internally.

To sum all this all up we could demonstrate this flow neatly as:

Heaven -> Spirit -> Soul -> Body -> Earth

Our spirit receives directly from heaven. Our soul receives what God has deposited into our spirit. Our body takes directives from our soul. And the destiny of the Earth is altered by what we do through our bodies.

The human body contains more potential and power than any of us could possibly imagine. The life of Jesus shows us what is possible when we use our bodies as temples to reveal the glory of God.

Tragically, far too many of us reverse this heavenly sequence into a sequence of death:

Earth -> Body -> Soul -> Spirit -> Heaven

We do not bring heaven to earth, but we attempt with futility to lift this fallen earth up to heaven.

We have eyes only for this earth and its pleasures. Our bodies are enslaved to the lusts and temptations of this world. We use our souls to find ways to gratify our bodies. We ignore our spirits and thus are deaf to the voice of heaven.

There is only one Man in history who was independently able to reverse this sequence, because he is not of the earth.

And He invites us to follow Him and thus help fulfill the very prayer He teaches us to pray.

Do you not know that you are God’s temple

and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?

1 Cor 3:16