They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles.
— Acts 2:42-43
Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous English sage, once said that one of the surest evidences of intellectual immaturity is the desire to startle people. Yet there are Christians who have been fed upon the odd, the strange and the curious so long and so exclusively that they have become wholly unfitted spiritually to receive or to appreciate sound doctrine. They live to be startled by something new or thrilled by something wonderful. They will believe anything so long as it is just a little away from the time-honored beliefs of sober Christian men. A serious discourse calling for repentance, humbleness of mind and holiness of life is impatiently dismissed as old-fashioned, dull and lacking in "audience appeal."
Yet these things are just the ones that rank highest on the list of things we need to hear, and by them we shall all be judged in that great day of Christ. A church fed on excitement is no New Testament church at all. The desire for surface stimulation is a sure mark of the fallen nature, the very thing Christ died to deliver us from. A curious crowd of baptized worldlings waiting each Sunday for the quasi-religious needle to give them a lift bears no relation whatsoever to a true assembly of Christian believers. And that its members protest their undying faith in the Bible does not change things any. "Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."
thought
Is the "apostles' teaching" still at the heart of our worship services or do we feature the more interesting story-telling and Christian entertainment? Perhaps it is the Spirit's power demonstrated in some wonders and miraculous signs we need.
prayer
Lord, give me a hunger for the solid food that feeds the heart and a holy dissatisfaction with anything less.
...always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.
— 2 Timothy 3:7
In the Christian life also we find this pattern repeated: a few important things and a world of burdensome but unimportant ones. The Spirit-taught Christian must look past the multiplicity of incidental things and find the few that really matter. And let it be repeated for our encouragement, they are few in number and surprisingly easy to identify. The Scriptures make perfectly clear what they are: the fact of God, the Person and work of Christ, faith and obedience, hope and love. These along with a few more constitute the essence of the truth which we must know and love.
Christ summed up the moral law as love to God and man. Salvation He made to rest upon faith in God and in the One whom He had sent. Paul simplified the wonders of the spiritual life in the words, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." The temptation to forget the few spiritual essentials and to go wandering off after unimportant things is very strong, especially to Christians of a certain curious type of mind. Such persons find the great majors of the faith of our fathers altogether too tame for them. Their souls loathe that light bread; their appetites crave the gamy tang of fresh-killed meat. They take great pride in their reputation as being mighty hunters before the Lord, and any time we look out we may see them returning from the chase with some new mystery hanging limply over their shoulder. Usually the game they bring down is something on which there is a biblical closed season.
Some vague hint in the Scriptures, some obscure verse about which the translators disagree, some marginal note for which there is not much scholarly authority: these are their favorite meat. They are especially skillful at propounding notions which have never been a part of the Christian heritage of truth. Their enthusiasm mounts with the uncertainty of their position, and their dogmatism grows firmer in proportion to the mystery which surrounds their subject.
thought
Seizing upon minor issues and becoming engrossed in details can be an excuse for failure to live the unmistakable truth.
prayer
O God, You are the Light. The closer I come to You the more clearly the dark holes of my heart are exposed. Shine on me and burn away the dross. For Christ's sake.
Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
— Genesis 15:6
The church must claim again her ancient dowry of everlastingness. She must begin again to deal with ages and millenniums rather than with days and years. She must not count numbers but test foundations. She must work for permanence rather than for appearance. Her children must seek those enduring things that have been touched with immortality. The shallow brook of popular religion chatters on its nervous way and thinks the ocean too quiet and dull because it lies deep in its mighty bed and is unaffected by the latest shower. Faith in one of its aspects moves mountains; in another it gives patience to see the promises afar off and to wait quietly for their fulfillment. Insistence upon an immediate answer to every request of the soul is an evidence of religious infantilism. It takes God longer to grow an oak than to grow an ear of popcorn. It will cost something to walk slow in the parade of the ages while excited men of time rush about confusing motion with progress. But it will pay in the long run?and the true Christian is not much interested in anything short of that.
thought
Abraham believed God and kept on believing God. He waited 25 years for the birth of Isaac. In his lifetime, Abraham never saw the emergence of the people Israel or experienced possession of the Promised Land. He just believed and kept on believing.
prayer
Father, You are everlasting. You are forever. Help me to trustfully walk with You through the valleys and over the mountains. I want to be an oak.
Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.
— Psalm 119:105
Pastors and churches in our hectic times are harassed by the temptation to seek size at any cost and to secure by inflation what they cannot gain by legitimate growth. The mixed multitude cries for quantity and will not forgive a minister who insists upon solid values and permanence. Many a man of God is being subjected to cruel pressure by the ill-taught members of his flock who scorn his slow methods and demand quick results and a popular following regardless of quality. These children play in the marketplaces and cannot overlook the affront we do them by our refusal to dance when they whistle or to weep when they out of caprice pipe a sad tune.
They are greedy for thrills, and since they dare no longer seek them in the theater, they demand to have them brought into the church. We who follow Christ are men and women of eternity. We must put no confidence in the passing scenes of the disappearing world. We must resist every attempt of Satan to palm off upon us the values that belong to mortality. Nothing less than forever is long enough for us. We view with amused sadness the frenetic scramble of the world to gain a brief moment in the sun. "The book of the month," for instance, has a strange sound to one who has dwelt with God and taken his values from the Ancient of Days. "The man of the year" cannot impress those men and women who are making their plans for that long eternity when days and years have passed away and time is no more.
thought
Contemporary and Eternal. Are they compatible? The challenge is to recognize and communicate the eternal without contemporary or traditional forms letting in syncretistic or current worldview error.
prayer
Father, Your Word is my light along the way. It keeps me from detouring into the momentary popular or the hoary traditional. Increase my sensitivity to perceive Your light. In Jesus' name.
Then the church throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria enjoyed a time of peace. It was strengthened; and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it grew in numbers, living in the fear of the Lord.
— Acts 9:31
Time may show that one of the greatest weaknesses in our modern civilization has been the acceptance of quantity rather than quality as the goal after which to strive. This is particularly evident in the United States. Costly buildings are constantly being erected with no expectation that they shall last more than one short generation. . . . Not only in our architecture but almost everywhere else is this psychology of impermanence found. A beauty salon ad recently defined a term which has long needed clarification. It read: "Permanent Waves. Guaranteed to last three months." So, permanence is the quality of lasting three months! These may be extreme cases, but they illustrate the transiency of men's hopes and the brevity of their dreams apart from God.
The church also is suffering from a left-handed acceptance of this philosophy of impermanence. Christianity is resting under the blight of degraded values. And it all stems from a too-eager desire to impress, to gain fleeting attention, to appear well in comparison with some world-beater who happens for the time to have the ear or the eye of the public. This is so foreign to the Scriptures that we wonder how Bible-loving Christians can be deceived by it. The Word of God ignores size and quantity and lays all its stress upon quality. Christ, more than any other man, was followed by the crowds, yet after giving them such help as they were able to receive, He quietly turned from them and deposited His enduring truths in the breasts of His chosen 12. He refused a quick shortcut to the throne and chose instead the long painful way of the cross. He rejected the offers of the multitude and rested His success upon those eternal qualities which He was able to plant in the hearts of a modest number of redeemed men. The ages have thanked God that He did.
thought
Quantity growth of the church is noted at least nine times in Acts 2-9. Occasionally specific numbers are given. But quality is not sacrificed for quantity. Spirit-filled witnesses, healings, and miracles characterize the growing, first-century church.
prayer
Lord, give discernment to our church leaders so that they are deceived neither by growth in numbers nor desperate clinging to decline and methods of the past. May their eyes be focused on the primary goal of Spirit-filled living.
But Christ indeed has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen alseep.
— 1 Corinthians 15:20
That next chapter after the last is the source of all the Christian's hope, for it assures us that our Lord has put death in its place and has delivered us from the ancient curse. Death did not end the activities of our Lord; it did not even interrupt them, for while His body lay in Joseph's new tomb, He was preaching to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:18-20). And after three days, His spirit was reunited with His body and the new chapter began, the chapter which can have no ending.
Had Christ not risen from the dead, His life, beautiful as it was, would have been a human tragedy. Since He did in fact rise, His life has been shown to be an unrelieved triumph. The blood, the pain, the rejection, the agony of dying, the cold, stiff body and the colder tomb?these belong to the former days. The days that are now are days of hope and life and everlasting freedom. What is true of Christ is true also of all who believe in Him. How many saints since New Testament times have lived and hoped and labored and worshiped, only to grow old and bent and to drop at last, weak and helpless, into the open grave. If that was for them the end, then we Christians would be of all men most miserable. But it was not the end. For all of God's true children there will be another chapter, a chapter that will begin with the resurrection and go on as long as eternity endures.
thought
Relatively little is revealed in Scripture concerning the believer's life in heaven. Are we not able to grasp what it will be like? We have little or nothing in human experience that qualifies as an accurate simile.
prayer
My only hope for life in that unending chapter is You, O Christ. You are the firstfruits. We are those that follow!
The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, "Take off the grave clothes and let him go."
— John 11:44
He was dead, but He is alive forevermore. That such a thing could be was intimated by the miracles of restoration which our Lord performed during His earthly ministry. The widow's son was brought back to life for a brief time; at our Lord's gentle call Jairus's little daughter rose from her bed of death; and Lazarus, at Christ's command, came forth bound hand and foot. These were but vague disclosures of what was to come, and were at best only temporary suspensions of the inexorable law which demands that death shall always follow life?death complete and final.
For these all died again, and the rule of biography was upheld. Each ended in a sepulcher at last. And that sepulcher was the period at the end of the last chapter. What a perpetual wonder it is, then, that the biography of Jesus had to be resumed. Luke added not merely another chapter, but a whole book. The book of Acts was a logical necessity. "He showed himself alive after his passion," writes Luke. The rest of the New Testament gives us some idea of what He is doing now, and prophecy reveals a little of what He will be doing through the ages to come.
thought
What was it like for Lazarus to be dead four days and then be raised to life again? Did he want to return? There is nothing recorded concerning Lazarus after that experience. The period became a comma. Lazarus would die again but he would be raised forever.
prayer
Thank You, Father, that for the believer the period becomes a comma. From here we go home through Christ. Amen!
We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
— Romans 6:4
Matthew says, "And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new tomb." Mark says, "And he [Joseph] bought fine linen, and took him [Jesus] down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock." Luke writes, "And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid." John says, ". . . There was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, . . . There laid they Jesus." They all agree: Jesus was dead. The life about which they had been writing was gone, The biography was ended.
Then for the only time in this history of human thought, a biographer adds to his book a new section which is authentic biography and begins to write a chapter to follow the last chapter. This time the story did not end with a funeral. The Subject, whose story should have ended at death, was once again back among men to challenge new writers to try to find enough paper and enough ink to write the rest of the story of the life that can never end. Whatever is written of Him now is written of a living man. He was dead, but He is alive forevermore.
thought
What if Christ had not risen? That demonstration of His post-resurrection power would be absent. Those promises of His unfulfilled?the coming of the Holy Spirit, the presence of Christ with us, His intercession for us, His coming again.
prayer
Forgive me, Lord, for failure to live in the experience of Your resurrection power. You declare that I died with You and may know new life just as You were raised from the dead.
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.
— 1 Corinthians 15:17-18
The four Gospels tell the story of the life and ministry of Jesus, and in so doing, they follow accurately the ordinary course of biography, giving the facts of His birth, growth, work, death and burial. That is the way with biography: the very word itself suggests it, for it comes from bios, life, and graphein, to write, and means the written history of a person's life. So says Noah Webster. Now, when we look at the Gospels we note an odd?and wonderful?thing. An extra chapter is added. Why? Biography, by its own definition, must confine itself to the record of the life of an individual.
That part of the book which deals with the family tree is not biography, but history, and that part which follows the record of the subject's death is not biography either. It may be appraisal, or eulogy, or criticism, but not biography, for the reason that the "bios" is gone: the subject is dead. The part that tells of his death is properly the last chapter. The only place in world literature where this order is broken is in the four Gospels. They record the story of the man Jesus from birth to death, and end like every other book of biography has ended since the art of writing was invented. . . . They all agree: Jesus was dead. The life about which they had been writing was gone. The biography was ended. Then, for the only time in this history of human thought, a biographer adds to his book a new section which is authentic biography and begins to write a chapter to follow the last chapter. . . .
thought
If Christ had not risen from that tomb of death our faith and that of millions of believers over the centuries would be utterly futile. There would be no hope, absolutely none.
prayer
O Risen Christ, my faith looks up to You. Because You live so may I. Hallelujah!