If the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field or a pearl beyond compare (Matthew 13), then that means the kingdom of heaven is the mission the church should be pursuing at the cost of all other pursuits. If the church and the people who make up the church live with an eternal perspective, then they will be pursuing the mission with the zeal of the two individuals in the parables Jesus told. As Robert Farrar Capon puts it, “The church, like the purchaser of the field, can never afford to leave ‘unbought’ any part of the earthly field in which God has hidden the treasure of the mystery. It does not dare to risk its own sure knowledge of where the mystery of the Word is—to risk its certainty that it has the right name of the Word (Jesus) and that it knows the precise location (The Incarnation) of the treasure that makes the whole world precious—by failing to purchase to itself every last bit of the field” (Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2002], 116). What are you doing to “purchase the field”? What are you doing to make sure the knowledge of the kingdom is deeply embedded in the field that is this world?
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