This is Christianity, a Spiritual Society, not because it has no worldly concerns, but because all its members, as such, are born of the Spirit, kept alive, animated, and governed by the Spirit of God. It is constantly called by our Lord the kingdom of God, or heaven, because all its ministry and service, all that is done in it, is done in obedience and subjection to that Spirit by which angels live and are governed in heaven. Hence our blessed Lord taught His disciples to pray, that His Kingdom might come, that so God's will might be done on earth, as it is in heaven; which could not be, but by that same Spirit by which it is done in heaven. The short is this: the kingdom of self is the fall of man, or the great apostasy from the Life of God in the soul, and every one, wherever he be, that liveth unto self, is still under the fall and great apostasy from God. The Kingdom of Christ is the Spirit and Power of God, dwelling and manifesting itself in the birth of a new inward man; and no one is a member of this kingdom, but so far as a true birth of the Spirit is brought forth in him. These two kingdoms take in all mankind: he that is not of one is certainly in the other; dying to one, is living to the other.
From "The Spirit of Prayer" by William Law
