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The Western World has the story of Jesus Christ embedded in its culture and its history. The four accounts of His life in the New Testament are among the most well-known books in the world today. But what of the events that followed His life, His teachings, His death, resurrection and ascension to heaven?
Today I would submit that the second volume of this story that began in Luke’s gospel has the potential of shaking modern Christianity down to its foundations! In our bibles this book is entitled “Acts,” or “The Acts of the Apostles.”
In the preface of his translation of Acts, “The Young Church In Action,” J.B. Phillips wrote:
“It is impossible to spend several months in close study of the remarkable short book, conventionally known as the Acts of the Apostles, without being profoundly stirred and to be honest, disturbed. The reader is stirred because he is seeing Christianity, the real thing, in action for the first time in human history. The newborn Church, as vulnerable as any human child, having neither money, influence nor power in any ordinary sense, is setting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for God through Christ. The young Church, like all young creatures, is appealing in its simplicity and its singleheartedness. Here we are seeing the Church in its first youth, valiant and unspoiled — a body of ordinary men and women joined in an unconquerable fellowship never before seen on this earth.
“Yet we cannot help feeling disturbed as well as moved, for this is surely the Church as it was meant to be. It is vigorous and flexible, for these are the days before it . . . . became fat and short of breath through prosperity, or muscle bound by over organization. These men did not make ‘acts of faith’ they believed. They did not ‘say their prayers,’ they really prayed. They did not hold conferences on psychosomatic medicine, they simply healed the sick. But if they were uncomplicated and naive by modern standards, we have ruefully to admit that they were open on the God-ward side in a way that is almost unknown today.”
If anyone is interested in why these comments were made, and want to be challenged by them, I hope you will subscribe to my blog at https://livingtruth.com or my facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/livingtruthcom where we will seek to find what can be learned from the First Century Church!
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