Date: 16th November, 2025
Message: Racing into the Kingdom of God
Minister: Pastor Laide Olaniyan
(Jer. 17:12-14) – “12 A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary. 13 O Lord, the hope of Israel, all that forsake thee shall be ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters. 14 Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved: for thou art my praise.”
The Lord our God is a Glorious King, He is a living God, the True God and an Everlasting King.
His dominion is not of the earth. Jesus facing Pilate, was asked if He was a King, Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king (John 18:35-37).
Indeed there is a kingdom, but that kingdom is not earthly nor earth. The kingdom that Jesus came to establish is an everlasting and an heavenly kingdom (John 18:36). The controversy that many believers have is reconciling a kingdom that is not from here that should be manifested here because in our Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6:10 we pray thy kingdom come. So, what is the coming of the kingdom? What is the Kingdom?
(Rev. 11:15) – “And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.” – Before Jesus said thy kingdom come, there had been an existing kingdom here on earth that is operational that has been running things and that have had definitions (of how government flows). The kingdom is not the Ijesha kingdom, all the kingdoms of men are under the kingdom of this world. What we have as tribal divisions, national boundaries are actually different shades/empires of the same operation of a singular kingdom of this world which is called the kingdom of darkness.
Now Jesus came and said He is bringing in another kingdom which is another reign, another rule and another life. Life is not just something we are given, it has its own rules, reign, motion, structure, stature, flow, order and expression. The kingdom is a system of wisdom of life in itself that runs in God. When we think of faith, we often think of faith in a disjointed way, we don’t see it as the entirety of our life. Faith is a complete change of a person, a way of life and definition of everything that pertains to man.
Jesus said that my kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). God’s kingdom is not earthly, it’s pure heaven, it is not of this present world at all. Kingdom is a wisdom or the arrangement of the will of a person that is actually in display. Anyone coming to God is coming to be rewritten. The intention of Jesus is to completely wipe away every structure and definition that we have lived by or that has run us previously. The warfare of the church is in our being rewritten upon.
(2 Cor. 3:1-3) “ 1 Do we begin again to commend ourselves? or need we, as some others, epistles of commendation to you, or letters of commendation from you? 2 Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: 3 Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.”
The ministration by the spirit is the writing of new laws or new programmes upon the lives of men. The ministration of the word is the wiping away of a wrong code and the re-writing new laws. The church is meant to import heaven’s will upon the heart by writing the laws in our heart. Writing is actually the instrument of conversation. It’s not just communication of knowledge, it is not just informative, it is a transformation from utterance and from writing. The church is to change souls via the power of the spirit.
(Phil. 3:20) – “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ:” – Conversation is our way of life, it’s not a discussion between two or more people. It’s not just what you say, but how you live life. The conduct of our lives speaks volumes. Our thoughts are louder in the spirit than our words. Our heart’s conversation, the transaction of thoughts in our heart and in our mind matters a lot. (Prov. 23:7)
The transaction of thoughts all through our life is a form of worship. What we spend our life thinking about is actually who we are. Heaven desires to raise men similar to how men are raised for earthly professions.
The only lens through which we can see God is through the heavens. We need to be made to be able to see God, and this is done by communicating heaven to us until we have heaven in us (Luke 17:20-21).
The only place we can see life is through heavens. Heaven here means the life that is from above. Heaven knows how we were all raised and if something about us is going to be changed, God is going to make that change by His word.
The kingdom of heaven ought to be within us. Some think kingdom is when a man is at ease in the kingdom of this present world but God sees the kingdom as a man under the rule of heaven and his life is regulated. The inward man can be controlled by heaven. The inward man is subject to the activities of heaven, of a life higher than himself. The Kingdom of God in man is how much of heaven rules a man’s life.
(Heb. 11:34-38) These people mentioned in this scripture didn’t look like men of valour or highly esteemed men, but heaven was writing them in its heaven’s hall of fame. They lived a life that made them become better than the world. Naturally they might have looked like they were at the mercy of the world, just like Jesus looked like He was at the mercy of Pilate.
(2 Cor. 4:16-17) – “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
Some of the contradictions we are going through are actually heaven’s blessings to work in us glory and riches beyond comparison. We must understand that some of the dealing wrought in us are treasures. When a man of the world lives, it looks like the whole world is crumbling on him, but believers are meant to live by faith – (Heb. 11:39) “And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.”
A good report is when a man has lived a life not of this world. It is not necessarily referring to being praised by men for doing something well. Rather it’s when a man has lived a life that is not written here, a life lived for the invisible or spiritual.
All of the men of faith listed in Hebrews lived for the spiritual and not for the present world. They were looking for something beyond the present, though they hadn’t met with Jesus, they looked forward to His coming. The labour of heaven through our parents is that God wants to write us up, and into heaven.
When we got born again, something supernatural happened to us, our spirit was quickened. Our spirit was made to sit with Christ on the throne, but our soul was not quickened when we got born again. It was added to the church for the program of salvation. Our soul became a member of the body of Christ. The church is where the soul finds change. The prosperity of the soul in the body is limited when the body is not present. There is a need for the physical presence of the body with the soul in church (the institute for the soul’s prosperity) for the soul to prosper. At the point where the soul is added to church, the soul is a babe (in Christ). (1 Pet. 2:2).
For the soul to grow into a full proper child, the old man must be dealt with, through the leading and learning of the Spirit and through the teaching of doctrine. The soul is an old man but in the new life in Christ, the old man is seen as a babe.
The old man doesn’t die in one day, neither does it die because you were added to church, but it takes a process, a severe training of the soul. There is a high concentration of learning in the old man, he knows ways, he knows patterns, he is skilled in how things are run, whereas the new man, the soul that was added to the church is a babe and does not know left from right of spiritual things so wisdom and old ways begins to seek expression and control the man who is supposed to be the man that is raised to take charge. To solve this imbalance, the old man has to be mortified. We need to mortify the old man and allow the expression of life of the new man. The old man is killed by showing doctrine, by how you show the life of the Spirit because you are supposed to mortify the deeds of the body through the Holy Spirit.
The teaching/doctrine is a two edged sword which is supposed to kill the old man and make the new man come alive. God knows how to kill the old man and give supply of life to the new man until he grows up to be a proper man. The old man doesn’t die one day. The old man did not die because you were added to the church, there is a process of death to kill the old man. The training to mortify the old man seems severe on the old, which might cause us to want to run back.
(Rom. 6:3-5) – “3 Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: 6 Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.”
The crucifixion of the old man is for the destruction of the body of sin. (Col. 2:11) God wants to destroy the old man (flesh) completely, through the leading of the spirit. (Eph. 4:20) “But ye have not so learned Christ; If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus:” The teaching of Christ starts in the milk of Christ. The deliverance of the old man begins from the milk of Christ and not from the word of Christ. The deliverance of the old man starts from the milk of Christ, Christ begins to teach you from milk things. Some people, through the milk of the word, have been able to put to death the old man to a measure even without being exposed to the word of Christ. Christ begins to teach you separation from the old man. (Eph. 4:22) – “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;”
What defines the life of an old man is deceitful lust. What is called a man is actually a system of life ruled by laws. The old man is governed by the law of sin and death (Jam. 1:15). For a man to not be led by the desires of the flesh or by his own lust, a new man that is born of the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus must emerge.
The man that has been delivered from the old man hasn’t come to the end of his journey to God, but has become a man that God can begin His eternal agenda with. The man who God has delivered is called a spiritual man. A spiritual man is raised through the doctrine of Christ, from faith to hope to charity to become a proper spiritual man who can understand heavenly things. God wouldn’t communicate heaven to us until we can understand heaven
(1 Cor. 2:6-14) God needs us to come of age for Him to communicate His mind for us. Without coming of age, God cannot begin to speak to us. It’s quite painful that God can’t communicate some things to us due to our age and attitude towards spiritual things. He won’t be able to communicate heaven in a language that we can understand if we are not (made) spiritual.
(Heb. 6.1) – “Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God, Of the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment.” – The fullness of the kingdom will only be taught to a man who has become spiritual or who has become Christ. The labour of our grandparents is centered on giving to us treasures of the kingdom, and truth of heaven for us to understand the kingdom.
Our presence in church is a blessing because it begins to probe our righteous minds to labour for more of God – “But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.”(Matt. 13:16). We must use our days on earth to sojourn well. The real labour of a man should be centered on the work of salvation that is being wrought in the soul. Is your soul being raised to be a man of the world to come or is it still fading away with the present? The lifetime opportunity given to us is to change the eternal estate of our soul. Nothing in this world matters after death, not even our achievements but what goes with us that will never die is the estate of our soul.
(Luke 21:17-19) “In your patience possess ye your souls.” meaning that somewhere, somebody else is in possession of our souls, or something else is ruling our soul that wants to run it till destruction. God is giving us an opportunity to not only take possession but to submit our soul to a higher King for the purpose of redemption and/or regeneration of our soul.
The greatest possession of a man is to take ownership of his soul and labour of the quality of work that the soul has. God is not only raising a people that is better than this world but a people that should be higher than heaven and earth because they have been raised/prepared for a world that is to come. We will achieve great victory if this is all that has been wrought in us; being more precious than this world. This is what is called salvation, to be better than this world.
Our desire should not only be for us to start this journey, but much more that we may complete this race. We must all be resolved in our heart to get to the end of our faith (Heb. 12:1-7). The exhortation to us is for us to continue in faith. Jesus started and finished the race. To finish the race is to endure contradictions. (Prov. 3:11-12) Don’t let contradictions make you abandon the journey, see contradictions as a blessing.
THE END.