At church we are coming to the end of a series in the gospel of Matthew on the "kingdom", arguably the key theme is Jesus' preaching. Before embarking on this series, after many years in ministry, I had a working definition of "kingdom" which went something like this: "The kingdom of God/heaven is the saving rule or reign of God in the lives of people through the person of Jesus Christ." While there is much that is true in the working definition above, most particularly the centrality of Christ's person (without him there is no kingdom), I do now think this definition could be misleading in suggesting that the kingdom is now, when the consistent teaching of the Lord and his Apostles is that the kingdom is future; the "kingdom of God" is virtually synonymous with " the age to come ". It is something of a commonplace that the kingdom is not a place. It might however be true to say that the kingdom *is* a time (namely the age to ...