For fourteen weeks now, Your Summer with God has been building toward something we haven’t named yet. You’ve heard Franklyn’s story of encountering the living God. You’ve learned to recognize His voice for yourself. You’ve built a daily gratitude practice that keeps you present to Him in the ordinary.
And this week, we’re finally naming what all of it was building toward. Living in the Kingdom, not as an occasional experience, but as where you actually live.
Living in the Kingdom (Part 1) is a FREE 4-week course which launches on September 10. It exists for exactly this moment. Encounter, voice, and gratitude stop being three separate practices. They start becoming one sustained way of life within the Kingdom.
If you’d rather start the journey now and come back to this afterwards, you can begin right here: Start with God Encounters. For everyone else, here’s why Living in the Kingdom was always where this summer was headed.
Why Three Practices Were Never Meant to Stay Separate
Encounter, voice, and gratitude were never designed to function as three unrelated exercises running in parallel. If you’ve been treating them that way this summer, checking one box and moving to the next, it’s worth pausing to notice what they were actually building toward together.
Luke 17:20-21 records the Pharisees asking Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come. They expected a visible spectacle they could point to and observe from a distance. Instead, Jesus told them the Kingdom of God doesn’t come with observation. It is already among them, already present, already available to be lived in rather than merely watched for.
This starts exactly there. It was never a distant event to anticipate, but a present reality to inhabit.
This Same Pattern Shows Up in Every Gift
This same quiet accumulation shows up wherever a gift is actually growing. Those exploring the gift of prophecy often find that living in the Kingdom deepens exactly this kind of gifting. It moves from occasional flashes into a sustained, everyday sensitivity. The same is true of spiritual impartation, where the deepest formation rarely happens on the timeline that would make it easiest to notice.
Still not sure you can actually hear God’s voice for yourself? You’re not the only one. Start our free 8-minute course, Breakthrough to Hearing God’s Voice. It’s free. It’s short. And it might be exactly what turns the uncertainty into recognition.
Consequently, encounter gave you the reason to believe the Kingdom was real and near. Voice gave you the means to actually hear the King who governs it. Gratitude gave you the posture that keeps you present inside it, rather than merely visiting on occasion.
None of the three was ever the destination. Living in the Kingdom was the destination all along. The three practices were simply the road that led there. Each one prepared you for the next without announcing that’s what it was doing.
It helps to say plainly what this means practically. Encounter without voice tends to fade into a nice memory rather than an ongoing relationship. Voice without gratitude tends to stay transactional, useful for guidance but thin on daily sustenance.
Gratitude without the first two can drift into a technique, a mood-management habit disconnected from the King it’s supposed to orient you toward. Living in the Kingdom is what happens when all three finally operate together, each one correcting what the others alone would leave incomplete.
Seeking First What Most of Us Seek Last
Matthew 6:33 instructs us to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Everything else follows once that priority is actually in place. Notice the ordering embedded in that instruction. First, not eventually, not once other things are settled.
However, most of us reverse the order without realizing it. We treat the Kingdom as something to fit in around an already-full life, rather than the priority that reorganizes everything else.
This means letting that reordering actually happen. Not treating this verse as an ideal you admire without adjusting your life around it. Consequently, the practices you’ve built this summer, encounter, voice, gratitude, were never meant to be extras layered onto an unchanged life. They were meant to be the beginning of a genuinely reordered one.
This is worth being concrete about, since “seek first” can otherwise stay a nice phrase rather than an actual pattern. It doesn’t necessarily mean adding more religious activity to an already full schedule.
More often, it means letting the encounter, the listening, and the gratitude you’ve practiced this summer start reshaping ordinary decisions: how you spend an evening, how you respond under pressure, what you say yes and no to. Living in the Kingdom shows up there long before it shows up in anything that looks explicitly spiritual.
The Kingdom Isn’t a Feeling, It’s a Way of Living Together
Romans 14:17 says “… the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit…”
Notice what’s excluded from that definition. No reference to circumstances, no reference to a particular emotional high, nothing dependent on your day going well. Instead, the Kingdom is described as a quality of life, sustained regardless of what’s happening around you.
This distinction matters enormously for anyone measuring their summer by how many dramatic moments it contained. This was never about maximizing peak experiences. Rather, it’s about righteousness, peace, and joy becoming the steady undercurrent of an ordinary life. Available in the middle of whatever circumstances you’re actually facing today.
Consequently, if this summer felt quieter than you expected, with fewer dramatic breakthroughs and more ordinary Tuesdays, that’s not a sign of distance. It’s closer to the actual definition Paul gives here. A steady quality of life rather than a string of highlights. It means learning to recognize that steadiness as the substance itself, not as a disappointing substitute for something more dramatic you were still waiting to feel.
Living in the Kingdom Means the King Is Actually Present, Not Just Referenced
It’s possible to talk about the Kingdom constantly. You can still relate to God as a distant concept rather than a present King. Colossians 1:13 describes believers as having been “rescued… from the dominion of darkness and brought… into the kingdom of the Son he loves…” It’s a decisive and completed relocation, rather than an ongoing negotiation.
This, then, isn’t about working your way toward eventual acceptance. It’s about recognizing a transfer that’s already taken place and beginning to live like it.
Consequently, the practical question isn’t whether you’re allowed into the Kingdom. It’s whether your daily patterns, your attention, your gratitude, your listening, actually reflect where you’ve already been placed. Living in the Kingdom (Part 1) exists to help make that reflection concrete, turning a theological fact you already believe into daily practices that actually embody it.
From a Mustard Seed to Something That Fills the Whole Loaf
Matthew 13:31-33 describes the Kingdom of Heaven as a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds. It grows into a tree large enough for birds to nest in its branches. It also compares it to leaven, worked into flour until it leavens the whole loaf.
Both images describe something small becoming pervasive. Not through a single dramatic event, but through a natural, almost invisible process of expansion.
Our post on Growth You Can’t Feel Yet Is Still Real Growth explored exactly this kind of process. Growth that accumulates quietly before it becomes visible. This works the same way.
It rarely announces itself with a single decisive moment. Instead, it spreads through an ordinary life the way leaven spreads through dough. What started as a small seed of encounter, voice, and gratitude has quietly worked its way into everything.
Prophetic intercession works the same way. Our post on partnering with heaven to shift earth explores it in more depth. It was never meant to remain a rare peak experience. It was meant to become part of an ordinary, Kingdom-shaped life.
Why September 10 Matters for Everything You Started This Summer
Our post on How to Stay Connected to God When Your Routine Falls Apart already established this. Connection with God was never dependent on ideal conditions holding steady.
This depends on that same truth, but takes it further. It’s not just about staying connected through disruption. It’s about a whole way of living that holds together regardless of what season you’re in.
If you started Your Summer with God in June, this is the moment everything you’ve built starts converging into something sustainable. If you’re only starting now, there’s still time to move through God Encounters, Breakthrough, and Maximize Your Gratitude before September 10. Living in the Kingdom will simply be the natural next step once you have.
Either way, living in the Kingdom isn’t a fourth box to check after the other three. It’s what the other three were quietly preparing you for the entire time, whether or not you could see it happening in the moment.
Ready to Live There?
Ready to move from encountering, hearing, and practicing gratitude into actually living there?
We’ve put together Your Summer with God, three free on-demand mini-courses designed to keep you moving with God through the summer months — no schedule, no pressure. And starting September 10, Living in the Kingdom Part 1 brings it all together: a free four-week course built as the natural next step for anyone who has walked through this journey.
Step 1 — God Encounters: Hear Franklyn’s story of encountering the living God.
Step 2 — Breakthrough: Learn to hear His voice for yourself.
Step 3 — Maximize Your Gratitude: Build the daily foundation that sustains it all.
