Are You Building a Kingdom That Will Last?

There is a reality television show from Britain called Eden that serves as one of the more unintentionally profound illustrations of modern life. In 2016, twenty-three strangers were sent to a remote estate in the Scottish Highlands, completely cut off from the outside world for an entire year. They built shelters, grew food, tended livestock, and created their own society from scratch. They endured hunger, exhaustion, insects, and boredom. They gutted it out.

When they finally emerged, they discovered that Brexit had happened, Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States, and — perhaps most staggeringly — their show had been canceled after only four episodes. Nobody had bothered to tell them. For nearly a year, they had been laboring according to a set of rules for a game that had already ended.

It is a story that is almost funny until you sit with it long enough to realize how familiar it feels.

How many of us are doing the same thing? Grinding away, building something, following a set of unexamined instructions about what a successful and meaningful life is supposed to look like — instructions absorbed from coworkers, social media, cultural expectations, and the quiet accumulation of a thousand small influences — never stopping to ask whether the show we are building our lives around is still even running?

This is the question at the heart of one of the most well-known prayers in history.

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he began by honoring God and then moved immediately to this: "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." It sounds simple. It sounds easy to agree with. Most people who have prayed those words have done so without a moment of hesitation. But beneath the surface of that prayer lives a question that is far more uncomfortable than it first appears.

Whose kingdom are you actually most concerned with building?

During the time Jesus walked the earth, the people around him were desperate for God's kingdom to come. They prayed for it daily. The ancient Jewish prayer known as the Kaddish includes a plea that God would rule his kingdom speedily and soon. This was not a casual hope — it was a deep, centuries-old longing. And yet, when Jesus began explaining what God's kingdom actually looked like, people kept walking away disappointed.

The rich young ruler in Matthew 19 is one of the clearest examples. He had wealth, influence, and a genuine spiritual hunger. He came to Jesus asking what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus told him to sell everything, give it to the poor, and follow him. The man walked away sad, because his possessions were great. Jesus was not primarily making a statement about money. He was making a statement about allegiance. The man wanted God's kingdom as long as it did not cost him his own.

That tension is not unique to one man in the first century. It lives in most of us.

We are, by nature, kingdom builders. We have platforms instead of thrones and retirement accounts instead of royal treasuries, but the impulse is the same. We wake up every day ready to expand our influence, accumulate our possessions, and secure our futures. None of those things are inherently wrong. The problem surfaces when our kingdom becomes the thing we are most devoted to protecting.

Jesus addressed this directly in Matthew 16, after Peter acknowledged for the first time that Jesus was the Christ. Rather than celebrating, Jesus immediately began explaining that he was going to the cross. Peter pushed back. This did not fit the plan. Jesus responded by calling Peter to take up his cross and follow — and then said something that reframes the entire conversation. In Matthew 16:25-26, he explained that whoever tries to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for his sake will find it, and that gaining the whole world means nothing if it costs you your soul.

This is not a call to misery. It is a call to clarity about value.

One of the most persistent fears people carry about surrendering to God's kingdom is the assumption that what God wants must be the opposite of what they were made for. But that assumption does not hold up. A designer does not create something and then use it against its own design. God, who formed each person with intention and purpose, is not waiting to redirect you toward something that contradicts how he wired you. More often than not, your design and your destiny are pointing in the same direction. God does not call you to abandon how he made you — he calls you to finally use it for what it was built for.

In Matthew 6:33, Jesus offers one of the most direct promises in all of Scripture, summarizing that those who seek God's kingdom and his righteousness first will find that everything else they need is provided. Seek first his kingdom. Not second. Not eventually. First.

Jesus also described the kingdom of heaven in Matthew 13:44-46 as a treasure hidden in a field and a pearl of great value — both so worth having that the person who finds them sells everything else without hesitation, not out of loss, but out of joy. The surrender is not the tragedy. Missing the treasure is.

So the question worth sitting with is this: are you still following the rules of a kingdom that was never going to deliver what you hoped it would? Are you reinforcing walls made of sand while the tide keeps coming in, rallying yourself and everyone around you to build a little higher, a little stronger, convinced the payoff is still coming?

God's kingdom is not a consolation prize for people who could not make their own plans work. It is the treasure in the field. It is the pearl of great value. And the only way to receive it is to release what you are currently holding in your hands.

The show you have been building your life around may have already been canceled. The question is whether you are willing to come home.