In honor of my first blog post, I think it is only fair to write about the reason I can do missions in the first place; the early church. I was recently reading the book of Acts which records the days of the first Church, and building off of the gospel of Luke, the account begins with a dead man coming to life, the same undead man promising to give his followers His Spirit, and then promptly disappearing forty days later. Quite honestly, this sounds more like the beginning of a mediocre gothic novel than that of a perduring international life-transforming movement.
However, about two thousand years after these events took place, the followers of the resurrected Jesus are, according to the International Buisiness Times, as of 2010, there are about 2.2 billion Christians, about a third of the population. So, how is it possible for a small movement to grow so large? Logic dictates that for any movement to grow and last, the reason must lie, at least partially, in its origins. So therefore the question becomes, what did the early believers do to spread their message from a small area in the Middle East to the farthest confines of the Earth?
The answer I’ve found in Acts seems laughably simple; they didn’t do anything. The second chapter of Acts begins with the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, and since then, every time an apostle did any action to share the message of Jesus, odds are that Luke would include the preface “filled with the Holy Spirit”. The apostles did not do anything to further the Church except what they were commanded to do by Jesus, they preached nothing that was not given them to say by the Holy Spirit, they had no strategy except to obey humbly, preach boldly, and pray without ceasing.
And incredibly enough, this strategy worked. The movement grew from 120 people gathered to cast lots to find a successor for a dead traitor to, “filled with the Holy Spirit”, doing absolutely unbelievable things like
- The baptism of 3,000 people at once (Acts 2.41)
- Healing the sick and lame (Acts 4.7, 4.16, 8.7)
- Killing someone with a word (Acts 5.5, 5.9)
- Magically escaping from jail (Acts 5.19, 12.11)
- Healing the paralyzed (Acts 9.35, 8.7)
- Bringing the dead to life (Acts 9.40, 20.10-12)
- Randomly disappearing from one place and appearing in another (Acts 8.39)
- Causing an earthquake with your voice (Acts 16.29)
- Delivering some of the finest rhetoric ever recorded (anytime anyone is imprisoned, persecuted, or tried, which happens in about every chapter).
Nevertheless, these acts did not come by themselves. They were highly risky and were mixed with interludes where the believers were
- Stoned (Acts 7.49, 14.19),
- Caught in Riots (Acts 19.29, 21.30),
- Plotted against (23.12), shipwrecked (27.41),
- Arrested and tried (again, basically in every chapter)
- And even martyred (Acts 7.50, 12.2).
However, the movement did not stop there, despite all the drawbacks, there are still people taking risks and doing deeds like these for the sake of the Gospel, and have been since the days of the first Church.
But, the key is, that these people do not do it alone. They do it by the power of the Holy Spirit in them.
And now, it comes back full circle to this blog, like the people before me, I want to continue the work Jesus began all those years ago and entrusted to disciples who made disciples and made disciples and made disciples, all the way until someone made a disciple of me. Like me, these people, felt called to use their time, to, “filled with the Holy Spirit” spread the Gospel through the Earth.
