Seeking God’s Kingdom

By Fred Pruitt

Soren Kieregaard wrote:

”Pursue God’s kingdom first? But what is it then that I must do? Shall I seek a job in order to do something?”
”No, you shall seek first God’s kingdom.”

”Shall I give all my possessions to the poor?”
”No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom and His righteousness.”

”Shall I go out into the world like an apostle and preach the kingdom?”
”No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom.”

”But isn’t this in a sense to do nothing?”
”Yes, certainly it is, in a certain sense.”

You must, in the deepest sense, make yourself nothing, become nothing before God, and learn to keep silent. In this silence is the beginning, which is first to seek God’s kingdom.

In this way (and it is a godly way), one comes to the beginning by going, what appears to be backward. The beginning is not that which we begin with, but arrive at. One comes at it backward. The beginning is the art of becoming silent.

Man differs from the beasts in that he can speak, but in relation to God it may easily be his ruin that he is too willing to speak. In proportion as a man becomes more earnest in prayer, he has less and less to say, and in the end he is quite silent. He became silent. Indeed he became, if such a thing be possible, something still more opposed to speaking than silence is. He became a hearer. He thought that to pray was to speak. He learned that prayer is not only to keep silence, but to listen. And so it is. Prayer is not to hear ones self speak, but to arrive at silence, and continue being silent; to wait till one hears God speak.

Hence it is that the word of the Gospel, ”Seek ye first God’s Kingdom,” not only says ”No” to every question as to whether it is ”this” or ”that” that we must do, but it says, ”You shall begin by praying.” Not as though prayer always begins in silence, but because when prayer really has become prayer, then it has become silence–and that is what it means to seek first God’s Kingdom

This Kieregaard piece is exactly pure. This is some of the purest air I’ve breathed.

This that has overtaken me recently, has taken me again to stark nakedness and overwhelming simplicity. I am finding it is the strait gate and the narrow way.

What he writes abaout is not a physical silence, as some might think it. It isn’t something we effect, fabricate, or learn how to do. We tried all that and it didn’t work.

It is as SK says, we become nothing before God. That nothing is the entering in. All the negatives and positives are in that nothing that we take, and we take them all in the nothing.

It truly is all or nothing. Which does one choose? Seek the all and lose it, or sink into nothing and find it all?

And Paul hit the nail when he said we are “having nothing, and yet possessing all things.” As long as we retain anything as ours, whatever we retain is our reward, but when we have nothing, for the first time everything there is, is ours. Once it isn’t ours in that former way, then it all, and that means all, is ours. Not to manipulate or control, but only to behold in fixed single eye sight.

About the Son

The only sin is not to believe the Son. That is what the gospel says. There’s all that other stuff people go on and on and on and on and on about, but it all boils down to this one and only thing.

But what does that mean?

It means that we must believe the Son in us. That is what it means to be born again. It means to believe the Son in us.

None of us is ever going to go back to 30 AD and Nazareth and Jerusalem and walk those dusty streets with Jesus and his crowds. In terms of the world of space and time, it happened then, and it doesn’t happen now, since now is happening now. So we’re never going to go back in time and be “with Jesus” as it was in those days.

So the only way we’re ever going to really “walk with Jesus” is to find Him in our own consciousness (or heart or mind or spirit) and to believe Him when we find Him there.

How do we do that?

Well, if we read the gospels, He comes walking along and gets our attention. And He makes a clear offer. Again, since we’re never going to live in Capernaum or Cana in 30 AD, the only place this can happen is in the universe of our own being. Jesus comes walking along down the dusty road inside us. He has always only been an “inner Christ.” Even when He walked with the apostles and they thought He had come to be the new leader of a restored Israel, He was always pointing, even while affirming Himself as “He who should come,” to the Spirit who would indwell them. In other words, He would never again be Jesus walking in Galilee, but forever after revealed IN US as the Christ by the Holy Spirit.

And what He is revealing is that this very Son testified to by the Holy Spirit has come to be Christ in every one who will receive. So anytime anyone truly hears, he is hearing only what is inside himself thundering, the Word of God spoken in every man in every place, only needing to find emptiness and receptivity to come alive in the true Vine. That’s where Jesus is walking these days, and that is the stage of our belief.

I’m pretty sure in heaven that if we do get a glimpse of Jesus of Nazareth standing out where He can be seen, and perhaps He will and I would love it if He did, He’s going to look like every person who was ever a person. We will look at Him and see everybody who ever lived. Including ourselves. And if there were cavemen, they’ll be there, too. Along with Adam and Eve.

Oh, it will be Jesus alright, make no mistake. We will wave palm branches and shout Hosanna and we will cry sweet tears of joy to see the King.

But when we look at Him when He passes by on the donkey, well, we can see everybody we ever knew or thought of or heard of again, including ourselves, riding on the donkey toward Jerusalem.

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Let Jerusalem shout, and Zion rejoice!

A man asks: “Who is this coming?”

Another shouts, “Look, it is Jacob, and a great multitude with him.”