5th in a 5-part series on the pillars of life

Back in the garden, God gave Adam the keys to the Kingdom, dominion over all creation. Because Adam lost them, God's been trying to help the rest of us as Adam's heirs to recover our inheritance. God didn't set this up as some grand, failed experiment. After that initial setback, He put in motion a plan whereby we, His proxies and territorial stewards, would re-establish His Kingdom.

This enterprise was summarized by Jesus in His last words to his disciples - marching orders we know as the Great Commission: "Go and make disciples." But reconciling men to God and helping them discover their true royal identity and authority has always been God's plan.

Consequently, our posture towards the world projects the confidence of displaced heirs. The earth is the Lord's. He didn't create humanity for the misery and bondage that so many endure, but for a life of joy and abundance. Recognizing this, the original disciples moved out fearlessly into a hazardous and antagonistic world, a world that they turned upside down. As we recognize the mandate of exercising dominion that our royal identity confers, we raise the dead no less fearlessly than did Jesus' disciples.

As we take dominion over creation, we exercise the Great Commission authority Jesus conferred on us. We do so understanding God's kingly relationship to it both in a past-tense and future-tense perspective, church planting, which is the strategy by which we take dominion over small subsets of territory, and apostleship, which is the strategy by which we plant churches.

Practically, we exercise divine authority in every realm of the real world in which we live. Whether in our families, our workplaces, or our social and governmental institutions, we allow God to transform our culture through our interactions with it.