Hope and the Gospel of the Reign of God

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Our Christian hope is based on the purpose and character of God and the demonstrated faithfulness of Christ in His death and resurrection. Our ultimate hope is an eternal life of restored relationship with Him in His Kingdom that we will experience as reality finally in the restoration and redemption of all things. We understand this will be a physical reality in the new creation. Until then we live in the tension of the “now” and the “not yet”. At CityGate we use the image of the City Gate to symbolize many aspects of the Christian faith. Christ came preaching the gospel of the Kingdom of God. This is a kingdom one enters through the gateway of salvation. Regeneration, repentance, faith and forgiveness of sin are essential for inclusion in the Kingdom of God. However, we understand there is much more to living out our faith than standing at the gate. Restored relationships are the purpose of God. Reconciliation to God also means that we will grow in our desire to be reconciled to His way of ordering reality; we are to be servants of a new kingdom. Our lives should now be a growing reflection of this. As the Church together and as individuals our lives should be a foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus had a clear understanding of what He was on earth to accomplish and of the cost. We grieve over our sins and the hardness of our hearts and resist evil because we do not wish to offend God whom we have come to love through His gracious work in us. We hunger for His righteousness, as this is what saves us at two levels: firstly the righteousness of Christ applied to us and secondly the righteous life which pleases Him. The Gospel of the Kingdom offers real hope for the way people are to live together and organise life. It addresses and answers the problems of our life together. As we grow in our understanding of the reign of Christ among us and submit to the conviction of the Holy Spirit and understand His law we see that it is comprehensive and encompasses all the interaction of human beings. Thus, after times of large-scale conversion, or when the influence of Christianity is spread deeply in society, one sees widespread benefit at many levels in society. Our hope is not a romantic idealism or a woolly vagueness about the future. We hope for what is real and should to some measure be real among us. We are called to live here and now for God, continuing to fulfil the creation mandate and as a prophetic witness of Christ for those separated from Him. We are called to pray and to work for God’s will to be done on earth. To the measure that it is not real or understood among us it is a cause for weakness, discouragement, disobedience and idolatry. It is important to hope, but to hope in something unrealistic and unobtainable is a cruel illusion, breeding cynicism. We do not believe in an immediate utopia, or that by our work we will gradually bring it into existence. There is a future time for the restoration of all things known only to God. We live in the tension of the now and the then. As Jacob discovered in his dream “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven”. We need to demonstrate that we are people of a greater hope. Amid our own frustrations and fears we should demonstrate the life of faith lived in the context of the coming Kingdom.