Friday, March 27, 2009

He'll Do It Again

In Acts 2, you can read all about the birth of the first church and how it began with some 3000 people being saved and baptized. No kidding. That’s the number “three” with three zero’s behind it. And all this happened without the benefit of a church building, a microphone, or a copy of the New Testament. When God poured out His Spirit on the day of Pentecost, He really started the church off with a bang.

And it didn’t stop. By Acts 4, the Bible tells us that the number of the men (apparently not counting women and children) had grown to 5000. By the time you get to the end of the book of Acts, the message of the Gospel had spread out from Jerusalem and had been carried as far away as the city of Rome. Numerous churches had been planted and the world has never been the same since.

One strange thing about the book of Acts, though: It ends very abruptly. It’s almost as if Dr. Luke was writing one day and decided to put his pen down and close the book without a proper ending. Why is that? We’ll probably never know this side of heaven.

But maybe, just maybe, the reason the book of Acts ends so abruptly is because it is the only book of the Bible that has yet to be finished. Could it be that the book of Acts is still being written today and we are a part of the story? The book is titled The Acts of the Apostles, but I think it could better be titled The Acts of the Church. And the book of Acts was only the beginning of that story.

Some people look at Acts 2 and think that God would never work that way today. Some people read how God used a relatively small group of people to literally turn their world upside down (Acts 17:6) and think that God could never use them in the same way. I’ve got a Greek word for that: “baloney!” God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So let’s all pray and ask God to bless our church like He blessed those early churches in the book of Acts. He hasn’t changed, and I believe He wants to do it again.