Scripture: "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven."--Matthew 6:10
"That one Light and Spirit, which was only one from all A eternity, before angels or any heavenly beings were created, must to all eternity be that one only Light and Spirit by which angels or men can ever have any union or communion with God. What, therefore, can have the least share of power towards man's redemption, but the Light and Spirit of God making again a birth of themselves in Him, as they did in His first glorious creation.
"Hence it is that the Gospel state is by our Lord affirmed to be a kingdom of heaven at hand, or come among men, because it has the nature of no worldly thing or creaturely power, receives nothing from man but man's full denial of himself, has no existence, but in that working power of God that created and upholds heaven and earth, and is a kingdom of God become man, and a kingdom of men united to God through a continual, immediate Divine illumination. What Scripture of the New Testament can you read that does not prove this to be the Gospel state, a kingdom of God into which none can enter but by being born of the Spirit, none can continue to be alive in it but by being led by the Spirit, and which not a thought, or desire, or action, can be allowed to have any part in it but as it is a fruit of the Spirit?
" 'Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' What is God's Kingdom in heaven but the manifestation of what God is and what He does in His heavenly creatures? How is His will done there, but because His Holy Spirit is the life, the power, and mover of all that live in it. We daily read this prayer, reminding us that nothing but a continual, essential, immediate, Divine illumination can do that which we pray may be done. For where can God's Kingdom become, but where every other power but His is at an end, and driven out of it? How can His will only be done, but where the Spirit that wills in God, wills in the creature?
"This is the truth of the Kingdom of God, come unto men, and this is the birthright privilege of all that are living members of it, to be delivered from their own natural spirit which they had from Adam, from the spirit and wisdom of this world, and through the whole course of thier lives only to say, and do, and be that which the Spirit of their Father worketh in them."
How much has been written about what the Kingdom of heaven means, but here we have what it really is. As God rules in His Kingdom in heaven, so when the kingdom comes into our hearts He lives and rules there. The Kingdom of God consists of the men in whom God rules as He does in heaven.
