The baby in the manger came as a conquering King to dethrone us and then to enthrone himself in our hearts and lives forever and ever.

If you have children or are around children, you know that you are in relationship with little self-anointed self- sovereigns, who think that the only authority they need in their lives is their own. Your little boy thinks of himself as king, and your little girl carries around with her the identity of queen. Children aren’t born with a natural affinity for and commitment to the kingdom of God, because they are sinners. Sinners tend to see submission to an authority other than their own as a loss of freedom, and they tend to tell themselves that they have everything they need to successfully control their lives on their own. Sinners have a greater commitment to the kingdom of self than they do to the kingdom of God. They want to make their own rules and write their own stories. And they tend to constrict their daily field of concern to the small confines of their own desires, goals, choices, feelings, happiness, and needs.

Back to our children. We’ve all dealt with battles with our young children over what to eat, what to wear, and when to go to bed. That battle over what to eat doesn’t happen because your three-year-old son read a book about the Paleo diet and decided that this is the way he wants to eat. In fact, your son knows nothing about a healthy and nutritious diet; that battle is not about food, it’s about kingdoms. He is fighting not your cuisine but your authority. He is fighting to be king, that is, the only authority he has to follow. That battle your four-year-old daughter is willing to have with you over when to go to bed is not the result of a in-depth sleep study; it too is a battle for kingship (or should I say queenship?).

Let’s get even closer to home. Why do you get angry in traffic or irritated when someone disagrees with you or envious when someone gets something that you would love to have? Because it’s not just your children that battle for kingdom authority—you do too. You want to drive on unpopulated roads because few things are more important to you than your own schedule. You want people to agree with you because you want a kingdom filled with people who always recognize the brilliance of your thinking. Why do we all struggle with envy? We struggle with it because our greatest allegiance is to ourselves and our happiness.

There simply is no denying it: life this side of eternity is one big and unending war of kingdoms. Much of our inner turmoil and our interpersonal struggles are the direct result of kingdoms in conflict. Sin causes us to live inwardly directed, selfish lives instead of the lives of upward worship and outward love that we were created to live. Think about Adam and Eve. They were living in a glorious garden kingdom, where every need was supplied and God would come down and commune with them. They had it all, except one thing: self-rule. So they chose to step over the King’s boundaries, taking authority into their own hands, while deluding themselves into thinking that it would be okay. Sadly, the results of that choice still live with us today. Reflect for a moment on how much of your anger in the last several weeks came out of your love for an allegiance to the kingdom of God. You and I don’t tend to get angry with those around us because they have broken God’s law. Rather, we are most regularly angry because the people broke our law, that is, the law of whatever makes us happy at the moment. In those angry moments, our problem is not that we are around difficult and disagreeable people; we have a kingdom problem, and blaming them misses the whole reason for the conflict.

So if Jesus came to be Savior, he also had to come to be King. I don’t mean a monarch over a specific geographic area. Jesus had to rescue us from our bondage to our little kingdoms of one and usher us into his kingdom of loving authority and forgiving grace. He came to destroy our self-oriented kingdoms and dethrone us as kings over our own lives. In violent grace he works to destroy every last shred of our allegiance to self-rule, and in rescuing grace he lovingly sets up his righteous rule in our hearts. In grace he patiently works with us until we finally understand that truly good rule in our lives is his rule.

The baby in the manger came to be King, and he would not settle for anything else. That infant was the King of kings and Lord of lords. He would grow to be a man, a perfect man, who would talk again and again about the kingdom he came to establish; but he would do much, much more than just talk. The King would die as a criminal, so that criminals against his rule would be welcome into his throne room and live with all the rights and privileges of being members of his royal family. One of the glorious ironies of the biblical story is that the King—the king that we willingly love, worship, and serve—had to first die. Ordinarily the death of a conquering king is the end of the story. But this King came to conquer by dying for those over whom he would establish his rule. This is grace: the King died to dethrone kings so that he would be their King forever and ever and ever.

The baby wasn’t wearing a crown and had none of the trappings of royalty, but don’t be misled. He came to be King, and his kingship is your salvation.

For further study: Matthew 6:19–33

For parents and children:

Central theme: Kingdom

Get your children to talk about what they think a kingdom is. Help them to understand that sin causes us to set ourselves up as kings in our own little kingdoms. Talk to them about how Jesus was born not to make our little kingdoms work, but to invite us to a much, much better kingdom.