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The kingdom here intended is the dominion of His grace — that provision of His infinite mercy, by which He is to subdue our sinful race into cheerful allegiance, and exulting homage, and general service. This, as yet, has come but in part. Its full and final establishment has been long the theme of prophecy, and the burden of prayer. The movements of God in His kingdom of Providence had respect from the beginning to the development of this kingdom of grace. Let us now consider the several aspects of this kingdom.

I. It is spiritual. As man's noblest nature is his inner, invisible, and spiritual one, it is to this mainly that God and the religion of God look. The power that is to change the face of earth, and the history of the race, is not an army, not a fleet, not a treasury; but a word of salvation — something of the mind, and for the mind — and it is a Spirit renewing and sanctifying — the creative Spirit come down, to rear again and restore our fallen, created spirits. Now, as the Holy Ghost is the great primal agency in advancing and upholding the spiritual dominion of God on earth, aught that grieves or repels Him — aught that assumes to replace Him in His prerogatives, or claims to mortgage Him to a certain ecclesiastical communion, or to imprison Him in certain ordinances, as dispensed by a certain order of men, and, above all, aught that forgets our dependence on Him, or affects independence of Him and His aids, is so far a hindrance in the way of the coming of this spiritual empire. To enter ourselves Christ's Church, or to aid others in advancing it, we must be born of the Spirit.

II. It is social. Though religion begins with the individual, it, after having renovated the inner world of the heart, necessarily affects the outer world, or the man in all his relations to his fellow-creatures; both those of like feelings with himself, or men spiritually minded, and those also who are not yet in affinity and sympathy with him, or, as the Scripture calls this last class, the men who are carnally minded. If a man is a true disciple of Jesus, he is, or ought to be, the better man in all his relations to worldly society, as far as those relations do not assume to control and overtop his duties and relations to heaven. Education and commerce and art — so far as they keep themselves in a position of due deference to a pure Christianity — will elevate and bless society. So far as they shall rival or defy her, they cannot fail to disappoint the hopes which they excite, and to bleat the body politic into a diseased appearance of prosperity, the unsoundness of which any great reverse of affairs will soon betray. Pauperism, slavery, and the question of labour in our times can be reached most safely and effectively by Christian principles diffused throughout the community.

III. But whilst this religion, beginning in the individual and spiritual man, works inevitably its way outward upon all social relations and interests and maladies, it is, unlike the government and institutions of earth, eternal. So Daniel described it, "a dominion that shall never end." The Churches of earth are but like the receiving-ships of a navy, from which death is daily drafting the instructed and adept recruit for his entrance upon service in the far and peaceful seas of the heavenly world. Christ asks the heart and the homage of the deathless spirit; and, as death moulders and disperses for a time the bodily tabernacle, He neither loses His rights in, nor His care over, the spirit which that bodily tabernacle for the time housed. Now the kingdom of heaven has already known, amid seeming and local reverses, its stages of regular extension and advancement. It has overspread a large portion of the globe. The most powerful nations of the world are its nominal adherents. Missions are diffusing it on this very Sabbath amongst tribes whose names even our fathers knew not, and in empires which those fathers deemed hopelessly barred against the access of our faith. Prophecy assures us that this shall go on with still augmented zeal, and still expanding conquests. The Jews shall be brought in. Mahommedanism shall fall, and is even now evidently withering. Antichrist shall be shattered. These are stages in the social development of Christ's blessed kingdom. But behind and above them come higher developments in the individual Christian. The righteous here have in their earthly homes but lodges in the wilderness. The most prosperous of earthly churches is but a green booth, reared by pilgrims beside the fountains of Elim, and which is soon to be forsaken in their onward march beyond the line of the present visible horizon. But in the heavenly Canaan there is a fixedness of tenure, and perpetual repose, and fulness of felicity — of knowledge — and of holiness. Towards this crowning and culminating state of the Redeemer's kingdom all the earlier and inferior stages tend. Zion's sorrows are disciplinary; her reverses but school her for a more successful onset on the powers and strongholds of darkness; and with the destinies of her Redeemer embarked in her, and with infallibility and Omnipotence united in her Helmsman, her course, like His, is "conquering and to conquer." Now, when the Word of God speaks of this kingdom, it sometimes alludes to its incipient, and sometimes to its advancing, and sometimes again to its final stages. In its spiritual and individual beginnings it is within us. In its social leaven reaching the tribe, the nation, and the race, it is around us. In its last and triumphant day it is no longer a matter of time and earth. It is beyond and above. It has come in splendour never to wane, in power never to be lessened; and the kings of the earth bring their glory into its gates never to be closed. To pray, then, for Christ's kingdom, is to pray for the conversion of sinners and the edification and sanctification of disciples.

(W. R. Williams, D.D.)

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KJV: And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.

WEB: He said to them, "When you pray, say, 'Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your Kingdom come. May your will be done on Earth, as it is in heaven.