Keys To The Kingdom (Part 1)

Keys To The Kingdom

Matthew 19:16 "And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

We are all people just trying to find our way.  Every day we seek to better understand the meaning of our lives.  We pray to God to discover our gifts and release them into the world, and hope to find happiness, peace, and strength along the way thru His Spirit.  For some of us the keys to the kingdom ring loud and clear, declaring what we and how we do it from moment to moment, day to day thru our journey in life.  For others, these keys to the kingdom are buried below the noise of daily life, ego, fear, and the pressures that we face in society. Because of the locks put on them by these particular things those people rarely address the problems that keep them caged and in bondage and never use the keys.

As a pastor I’ve witnessed dozens of people discover their own keys to happiness and self-fulfillment, and I’ve noticed common themes emerge.  In all those cases, the happiness they discovered and developed internally was seeded by the realization of Jesus Christ in their lives. Once they realized these truths in their own way they became free intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. They were then able to find the happiness, peace, and strength they sought, and the keys to the kingdom were placed in their hands.

Yet, some folks I pastored always failed to possess the keys to the kingdom. I'm not the most intelligent person on the block, but I think I have figured out why. In over 40 years of pastoring I’ve found the root cause of most human stress is simply our stubborn propensity to hold on to things that keep us caged or bound.  I've been there myself so I can speak from experience. We hold on tight to the hope that things will go exactly as we imagine and plan and then we complicate our lives to no end when they don’t. I've seen many hold on to things they should have let go of years before, but they were caged by the thoughts of it and it haunted them daily.

So how do we unlock locked doors? By realizing if it's locked, and there is a key, it will do us no good unless we use it. Most of the things we lock on to as tangible fixtures in our lives aren’t really there.  If they are there in some form, they’re changing, impermanent, or simply imagined in our minds. Life gets a lot easier to deal with when we understand this.

One of the hardest lessons in life is letting go of things that have us bound, whether it’s guilt, anger, love, or loss.  Change is never easy because we fight to hold on and we fight to let go.  But letting go, according to God, is the healthiest and only path forward.  It clears out toxic attachments from the past and paves the way to make the most positive use of the present.

You’ve got to emotionally free yourself from some of the things that once kept you bound, so you can move beyond the past and the pain it brings you. The keys to the kingdom only work if you use them daily in your life.