Our series during Ordinary time will explore the revelation of God’s Kingdom through his Son. We will look specifically how the incarnation—the ministry, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ—reveals the long-promised Kingdom of God breaking into human history demonstrating God’s love, destroying the powers that ravaged creation, and displaying the Messiah’s promise (to continue reading this essay, click on image above).
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YOUR KINGDOM COME
Pastoral Resources | 2025-26 Themes At-A-Glance
The Messiah Cleansing the Temple: The Kingdom’s Judgment, Mark 11:15-19; Malachi 3:1-4
The inbreaking of the Kingdom of God always comes with clarification, purification, and transformation. The rule of God’s presence is never neutral; whenever and wherever it manifests itself in the Already/Not Yet Kingdom it comes to purify, to cleanse, and to expose those who love God to His Son and His Kingdom rule. Jesus enters the Temple to assert its Kingdom purpose and goal; the worship of God’s house is never admiring its beauty and structure but to fulfill its destiny, first by purifying those who enter into it, cleansing its halls and refining His people to offer to God worship and service that glorifies and pleases Him. Let us open ourselves and our ministries to His Spirit and His searching fire, welcoming His leading and correction to embody the values and visions of His Kingdom and its holy work of grace.
Our Focus Today
The Messiah’s Decisive Act of Cleansing God’s Temple, Mark 11:15-16
Fulfilling Malachi’s prophecy, Jesus casts out those buying and selling, overturning the money-changers’ tables, and ending the profane commerce dominating the Temple. He enacts His own Kingdom judgment, disrupting the wrong practices of worship. The inbreaking Kingdom of the King actively confronts and overturns the corrupt systems of Temple worship, refusing to normalize worldly compromise and its practices which dishonor God.
Invocation
Lord Jesus, You entered Your temple with holy authority and cleansed what had become acceptable practice and had grown corrupt. Enter my own habits of worship now and walk with me. Overturn any tables I have set up for self-dealing gain and cast out every compromise I have excused in my life and worship. Halt in me all that common traffic that has crowded out Your holiness and my reverence for Your Word. I welcome today Your disruption and cleansing, for only Your cleansing can set me apart to live true to Your Kingdom. Amen.
Gloria Patri
Glory be to the Father,
And to the Son and to the Holy Spirit:
As it was in the beginning,
Is now, and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen, amen.
Chronological Scripture Readings for Today
These Scriptures allow us to read through the entire Bible in one year in chronological order.
Tuesday: Zech. 6-8; Ezra 5.3-6.14a
Psalms and Proverb for Today
These Scriptures allow us to read through the Psalms and Proverbs each month.
Tuesday: Psalm 11, 41, 71, 101, 131 and Proverbs 11
The Messiah’s Decisive Act of Cleansing God’s Temple, Mark 11:15-16
Fulfilling Malachi’s prophecy, Jesus casts out those buying and selling, overturning the money-changers’ tables, and ending the profane commerce dominating the Temple. He enacts His own Kingdom judgment, disrupting the wrong practices of worship. The inbreaking Kingdom of the King actively confronts and overturns the corrupt systems of Temple worship, refusing to normalize worldly compromise and its practices which dishonor God.
Reflection
The inbreaking of the rule of God among His people included His purification and cleansing of both His Temple and its practices of worship. The Messiah-King represented his Father’s purpose and will, and he refused to observe corruption without His intervention to remedy it. He both confronted and overturned the profane practices of Israelite worship of His day. He entered into His own temple and dismantled a corrupt system that had exchanged holiness for gain, and He refused to allow their crooked ways of commerce to crowd out God’s purposes of worship in the Temple. We must welcome the disruptions He makes in our routines to rid us of compromise and to restore right worship before Him in all we do.
Engaging God’s Word Today
What “tables” might our Messiah need to overturn in your own life and worship today, i.e., those compromises, habits, or profane commerce you have quietly normalized? How can you allow His cleansing authority to disrupt them in you to exalt His Kingdom?
Nicene Creed
We believe in one God, The Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.
We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Begotten Son of God,
Begotten of the Father before all ages,
God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God,
Begotten not created, of the same essence as the Father,
through Whom all things were made.
Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven
and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary and became human.
Who for us too, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried.
The third day He rose again according to the Scriptures, ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and His kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver,
Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Who together with the Father and Son is worshiped and glorified.
Who spoke by the prophets.
We believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sin,
and we look for the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the age to come. Amen.
The Lord’s Prayer
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever. Amen.
Doxology
Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him all creatures here below;
Praise Him above ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.
Benediction
Thank You, Lord, for Your disrupting, cleansing, and empowering presence in my life! Help me to live as a priest in Your Temple, set apart and cleansed by the King’s own hand. Let Your authority keep my worship true and pure, focused on approaching You through Your Son and gladly overturning whatever would dishonor You. Show me what it means to guard the reverence in my heart that would honor You. Show me how to refuse every worldly compromise that tempts me and may the God who cleanses His house dwell in me today, letting me worship You in spirit and in truth. Amen.
Scripture Memory for this season
Eph. 1:20-23, The Ascension and the Day of Pentecost: The Kingdom’s Cosmic Authority
20 that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Scripture Engagement
As disciples of Jesus, the Churches of Christ the King strongly seek to engage the Scriptures to discover the centrality of Christ and his Kingdom in the prophetic and apostolic writings. You will find a rich treasure of resources on engaging Scripture at the Center for Scripture Engagement of Taylor University.
Books We Are Reading this Church Year, and When
• The Most Amazing Story Ever Told, Dr. Don Davis (during season of Advent)
• Get Your Pretense On, Dr. Don Davis (during season of Christmas)
• Destined for the Throne, Paul Billheimer (during season of Epiphany)
• The Presence of the Future, George Eldon Ladd (during seasons of Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Ascension)
• Who Gets to Narrate the World?, Robert E. Webber (during seasons of the Coming of the Holy Spirit, and Headship)
• Thy Kingdom Come, Rev. Terry Cornett and Dr. Don Davis (during season of Harvest)
• The Gospel of the Kingdom, George Eldon Ladd (during the seasons of Hope and Remembering the Saints, Exalting the King)
Book Reading Reflection: Destined for the Throne
(Reading “Who Gets to Narrate the World?” during season of Coming of the Holy Spirit and Headship)
“The biblical and historical understanding of the incarnation is that God becomes creation. He takes into himself all the effects of fallen humanity spread throughout his creation. He assumes all of creation in the womb of Mary in order to reverse the effects of sin and “bring it into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21). The death and resurrection of God in Christ is then not a “release of the soul from its imprisonment to the material realm” (as Gnostics and the new spirituality assert) but a second act of creation, the redemption of the whole created order. Now, as Paul states, “the whole creation [is] groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom 8:22). That is, the whole creation has been “born again” so to speak, and now waits for its final deliverance. The whole creation, from the perspective of the Christian narrative, is pregnant and awaiting redemption.
The ancient church fathers developed a saying to capture the cosmic nature of the incarnation and subsequent redemption. The saying made popular in the ancient church is, “only that which is assumed can be redeemed.” In other words, God, in the incarnation, took up into himself the entire creation, so that the creation redeemed by God himself is now to be once again, as in the Garden, the theater of his glory.
The ancient church understood the impact of creation, incarnation and re-creation on all of creation, and that is why Christians were the leaders in the arts, in learning and in the sciences. The Christian faith narrates the world and gives shape to culture-making and to all of civilization.”
~ Webber, Robert E. Who Gets to Narrate the World?: Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals. InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL: 2008. Electronic Edition. Location 1,018.
On Eagles Wings Prayer Focus: A Long Time Comin‘
The Messiah’s Miracles and Healings: The Kingdom’s Power Over Creation, Mark 4:35-41; 6:30-44
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