“These who have turned the world upside down have come here too.”
-Acts 17:6
I have been studying the people of the Early Church in the book of Acts this past week. The Christians chronicled in the 5th book of the New Testament changed the world forever. They were passionate, bold, full of faith. They had an extreme hunger, desire, and urgency for the expansion of the kingdom of God.
As I have read through this adventure story, I came to this conclusion:
Love for Jesus and commitment to His mission was the main focus of their entire lives.
Anything that was in competition or in conflict with that focus was quicklty cast aside and put to death.
They lived completely abandoned to God.
In our generation we more commonly put to death (or at least dillute) the commitment to love Jesus and give ourselves to His mission so we can protect our methods, money, status, reputation, pride, personal priorities, and a host of other things.
They lived to abandon themselves while we live to protect ourselves. Part of the challenge with the modern day, new millennium church is that we have a confused sense of purpose.
We are looking to save the church (and ourselves), but the Early Church understood that Jesus created the church (through Him) to save the world.
My prayer is that the world again sees a group of Jesus followers completely abandoned to God in their generation.
Let’s do it again.
Let’s change the world.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 8:05 am and is filed under The Church, Discipleship.
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“These who have turned the world upside down have come here too.”
-Acts 17:6
I have been studying the people of the Early Church in the book of Acts this past week. The Christians chronicled in the 5th book of the New Testament changed the world forever. They were passionate, bold, full of faith. They had an extreme hunger, desire, and urgency for the expansion of the kingdom of God.
As I have read through this adventure story, I came to this conclusion:
Love for Jesus and commitment to His mission was the main focus of their entire lives.
Anything that was in competition or in conflict with that focus was quicklty cast aside and put to death.
They lived completely abandoned to God.
In our generation we more commonly put to death (or at least dillute) the commitment to love Jesus and give ourselves to His mission so we can protect our methods, money, status, reputation, pride, personal priorities, and a host of other things.
They lived to abandon themselves while we live to protect ourselves. Part of the challenge with the modern day, new millennium church is that we have a confused sense of purpose.
We are looking to save the church (and ourselves), but the Early Church understood that Jesus created the church (through Him) to save the world.
My prayer is that the world again sees a group of Jesus followers completely abandoned to God in their generation.
Let’s do it again.
Let’s change the world.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 8:05 am and is filed under The Church, Discipleship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.