Two Kingdoms: The Weighty Invitation to Follow Jesus

There's something profoundly unsettling about living between two worlds. We feel it in the pit of our stomachs when we check our bank accounts, when we scroll through social media, when we watch the news. Something is off. The kingdom we're living in doesn't quite match the kingdom we were promised.

When Jesus began His public ministry in Galilee, His message was simple yet seismic: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:15). These weren't just nice religious words meant to make people feel better. This was a declaration of war—a cosmic confrontation between two competing kingdoms.

The Kingdom Conflict We Forget
Before we can understand what it means to follow Jesus, we need to grasp what He was calling people away from. The context matters immensely.

John the Baptist had just been arrested. Why? Because he had the audacity to tell King Herod Antipas that his adulterous marriage violated God's law. Telling a king he can't do what he wants rarely ends well for the messenger. John found himself in prison for preaching that God's kingdom had different rules than Herod's kingdom.

The people hearing Jesus's message were living under crushing realities. Herod was building elaborate cities to impress Rome, and funding these projects through oppressive taxation that fell hardest on the poor. He was diverting water resources to fuel luxurious Roman baths, leaving agricultural communities struggling to survive. He was importing Greek culture wholesale—new gods, new sexual ethics, new values—even building cities on graveyards where observant Jews couldn't live.

For years, the Jewish people had been caught in this tension: Should we be Greek or should we be Jewish? The kingdom of the world offered wealth, power, security, and cultural sophistication. It whispered that God's ways were backwards, that monotheism was restrictive, that there was a better path to fulfillment.

Sound familiar?

The Kingdom of God Is Now
When Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God was "at hand," He wasn't just talking about a future reality or a distant heaven. The Greek phrase carries both temporal and physical meaning—the kingdom is here, right now, standing before you. The reign of God has arrived on earth.

This is where we often get confused. We ask: When is the kingdom coming? Is it now or later? The answer is yes. The kingdom came with Jesus. The kingdom is growing now. The kingdom will be fully realized when Christ returns. It's not static—it's a triumphant progression from the cradle in Bethlehem to the throne room of heaven.

We're not just waiting around for Jesus to come back. We're invited to participate in His kingdom right now.

The problem is we've become spiritually numb. We've grown so tired of the onslaught from the kingdom of the world that we forget we've been called into a different kingdom entirely. Or worse, we try to reconcile the two—attempting to make God's kingdom work according to the world's rules to get the world's results.

It doesn't work that way.

An Upside-Down Invitation
What happens next in Mark's Gospel is revolutionary. Jesus walks along the Sea of Galilee and sees Simon and Andrew casting nets. He simply says, "Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men." Immediately, they leave their nets and follow Him.

A little farther down the shore, He sees James and John in their boat with their father Zebedee, mending nets. He calls them, and they leave their father with the hired servants and follow Jesus.

Here's what we miss: In first-century Jewish culture, aspiring disciples would seek out a rabbi, prove themselves worthy, and hope to be accepted. It was always people coming to the teacher.

Jesus flips this completely upside down. He comes to them. He pursues them. He invites them where they are.

This is the gravity of the incarnation—God comes to where we are. We don't have to wait and wait to be noticed by God. The kingdom of God comes to us.

The Cost of Following
There's another myth we need to dispel. We often imagine these disciples as desperate men with nothing better to do, scraping by with failed fishing businesses, jumping at any opportunity for upward mobility.

The text tells a different story. James and John were mending their nets in the boat—something you only did mid-fishing when the catch was so good you had to repair and get back out quickly. They had hired servants, which meant this was a profitable family business. These men had something to lose.

Jesus wasn't asking them to leave nothing. He was asking them to make every other attachment in their lives secondary to His purpose. He was saying that everything else they had was subordinate to following Him.

The rich young ruler couldn't do it. He walked away sad because he had great wealth and couldn't imagine that following Jesus was better than what he already possessed.

But these fishermen did it. They left the boats, the business, their father, the good thing they had going.

Why?

The Experience That Changes Everything
They had experienced Jesus. This wasn't the first time they'd seen Him. They'd been around His ministry and John the Baptist's. They'd heard the teaching. They'd witnessed the love, the truth, the hope He offered. They'd experienced transformation.

For us to follow Jesus in a way that is truly sacrificial, we have to experience Him in a way that is truly transformational.

When we experience the tangible, transformational love of God, it makes sense to leave everything else behind. It makes sense to be honest in a dishonest world. It makes sense to fight injustice, to worship sacrificially, to be generous, to love our enemies, to prioritize the kingdom of God over career advancement or political power.

We read Scripture because we experience Jesus there. We worship because we encounter God's transforming love. We gather in community because we experience Christ in one another. We practice generosity because helping the poor is better than accumulating stuff we'll just throw away anyway.

What Are We Holding Onto?
The uncomfortable question we must ask ourselves is this: What do I believe is better and more important than being obedient to God in my life?

Is it comfort? Stability? Control? Success? Approval? Security?

What are we not willing to give up to follow Jesus?

The invitation to repent and believe in the gospel is weighty because it asks us to recognize that we're living in the tension between two kingdoms. The kingdom of the world continues to promise fulfillment through wealth, power, pleasure, and security. It raises taxes on the poor, diverts resources to the powerful, imports values that run counter to God's design, and tells us we're backwards for believing differently.

But there is another kingdom. A kingdom where the last are first, where the meek inherit the earth, where losing your life means finding it, where a crucified Messiah reigns as King.
The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. Right here. Right now. Standing before you.

The question is: Will we repent—turn away from the kingdom of the world—and believe that following Jesus is better than the good things we're holding onto?

Because it is. It truly is.