Tuesday, October
9, 2018
The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures. They also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus. But since they could see the man who had been healed standing right there among them, there was nothing the council could say. So they ordered Peter and John out of the council chamber and conferred among themselves. “What should we do with these men?” they asked each other. “We can’t deny that they have performed a miraculous sign, and everybody in Jerusalem knows about it. But to keep them from spreading their propaganda any further, we must warn them not to speak to anyone in Jesus’ name again.” So they called the apostles back in and commanded them never again to speak or teach in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John replied, “Do you think God wants us to obey you rather than him? We cannot stop telling about everything we have seen and heard.” The council then threatened them further, but they finally let them go because they didn’t know how to punish them without starting a riot. For everyone was praising God for this miraculous sign—the healing of a man who had been lame for more than forty years. As soon as they were freed, Peter and John returned to the other believers and told them what the leading priests and elders had said. When they heard the report, all the believers lifted their voices together in prayer to God: “O Sovereign Lord, Creator of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them—you spoke long ago by the Holy Spirit through our ancestor David, your servant, saying, ‘Why were the nations so angry? Why did they waste their time with futile plans? The kings of the earth prepared for battle; the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Messiah.’ “In fact, this has happened here in this very city! For Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate the governor, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel were all united against Jesus, your holy servant, whom you anointed. But everything they did was determined beforehand according to your will. And now, O Lord, hear their threats, and give us, your servants, great boldness in preaching your word. Stretch out your hand with healing power; may miraculous signs and wonders be done through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” After this prayer, the meeting place shook, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. Then they preached the word of God with boldness. Acts 4:13-31(NLT)
In a Scripture passage one thought
usually grabs me and says: HEY;
pay attention here! That
attention-grabber in the opening sentence is the boldness of Peter
and John to heal a man in the name of Jesus. And that boldness got them in trouble with the
religious leaders. But, at the end of
the passage that boldness spreads to all the disciples, and they began proclaiming
Jesus with that same boldness. That
which gets you in trouble with earthly leaders is often that which unleashes
heaven’s power. Boldly – that’s how the
early church served God, and that’s how God grew the early church.
From a human perspective the odd
thing about the church growing is that God seems to grow churches (and humans)
in the most unusual and difficult circumstances. It’s completely upside-down from what we’d
do.
Consider this little flower (or
weed…hey, I’m not a gardener). It is growing
out of the side of a brick wall in the middle of a city. I was at First United Methodist Church in
Gastonia, NC, several years ago for a conference. It was lunch break, and I was headed to the
Fellowship Hall on the lower level, and this little green growth jumped on my
eyes like Peter’s boldness before the religious leaders. My immediate thought was: The soil in my yard is like clay fired in
the kiln…hard as nails, and twice as rusty…but how in the world does a flower
grow in a brick wall in the middle of a city?
And it hit me just as hard that
God already gave us the answer to that:
For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:9(NLT)
Churches, like flowers growing out
of the side of a brick wall, may be small or large, city, country, or suburban,
formal or free-style, denominationally-connected, or independent, charismatic
or the frozen chosen; mostly all of that is culture and choice. Some may grow, while others die like a weed
sprayed with Round-Up™. Some may be
trying valiantly to hold-on, barely keeping the doors open, while others seem
to blossom with little effort visible on the surface.
One thing is certain; the church
God uses to accomplish His mission will be found in every one of the categories
the experts
use to try to explain the movement and ways of God. But, apart from the Spirit of God, how can
you explain anything God does? And apart
from boldness to proclaim the Gospel like Peter and John, and all the other
early church disciples, how could you expect to find the Spirit of God in any
of those places?
For You Today
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.
