The Gospel of the Kingdom — Part 5
Is God playing favorites? Are there first-class Christians and second-class Christians?
That’s the question I get the minute I say the Kingdom has requirements. It’s a fair question. So let’s answer it.
When it comes to the Bible, I guess you’d call me a fundamentalist. I believe the Bible always agrees with itself. It can’t say one thing in one place and something entirely different somewhere else. So read these two side by side.
John 3:16 — “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
Matthew 5:20 — “For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Whoever believes. And then — unless your righteousness surpasses the Pharisees’. If those two are talking about the same outcome, you’ve got a problem.
As I was growing up in Christ, I heard men preach out of both sides of their mouth trying to make those agree. They’d say “believe” had to be proven by your works. That it meant more in the Greek. So I studied the Greek. The word is pisteuō. And lo and behold, it means “believe.”
So here’s the answer. They’re not the same outcome. One is eternal life — you don’t go to hell. The other is entering the Kingdom. Two outcomes. Same Bible. No contradiction.
The first one is free.
Romans 6:23 — “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
The second one asks something of you. Jesus said so Himself, to people who had already believed.
John 8:31 — “So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, ‘If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine.’”
They believed. That’s the first road. If they continued, they’d be His disciples. That’s the second.
That’s the line between a believer and a disciple. A believer accepts what was done for him. A disciple continues. He picks up his cross and follows. And here’s something most of us read right past.
Acts 11:26 — “and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. And for an entire year they met with the church and taught considerable numbers; and the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.”
The disciples. That’s who got the name first. It wasn’t a label they put on. It was a name they lived into. And it still belongs to the ones who follow.
Now somebody will say, “In Acts, ‘disciple’ just means believer.” Every disciple starts as a believer. But not every believer goes on. Jesus already told us the difference: “If you continue.”
And right about here somebody else thinks: so there IS a first-class Christian and a second-class Christian. God plays favorites. No. It’s not favoritism. It’s the same as anything else the Lord gives you — it’s about what you did with what you were handed. Everybody who’s saved gets out of the cage. Everybody. But the Kingdom is a relationship you build and a road you walk, and not everybody walks it. That’s not God rigging the game. That’s God respecting the choice He gave you.
Think about Israel. Everybody came out of Egypt. Everybody ate manna in the wilderness. But God didn’t serve manna in the Promised Land.
Joshua 5:12 — “The manna ceased on the day after they had eaten some of the produce of the land, so that the sons of Israel no longer had manna, but they ate some of the yield of the land of Canaan during that year.”
Believers live in the wilderness eating manna. Disciples cross the Jordan and take the land.
So why live right, if salvation’s free? Not to keep your salvation. That was a gift. You live right because the Kingdom, and what’s laid up for you there, depends on what you do with the gift.
Same cage. Same open door. Two roads out. Which one you walk is up to you.
More where this came from. Follow along.
