Everyone was amazed by the many miracles and wonders that the apostles worked. All the Lord’s followers often met together, and they shared everything they had. They would sell their property and possessions and give the money to whoever needed it. Day after day they met together in the temple. They broke bread together in different homes and shared their food happily and freely, while praising God. Everyone liked them, and each day the Lord added to their group others who were being saved.
Acts 2:46-47 (CEV)

“Everyone liked them!” Or, as other translations put it, “They enjoyed the favour of all the people.” Considering that only a short while before this time, the crowds were calling for Jesus’ crucifixion and the apostles were in hiding for their lives, the turnaround in public opinion is amazing. While not everyone accepted their beliefs about Jesus Christ, they did respect his followers, the first Christians.

What strikes me as a message for the church today is that the ancient church was able to preach the truth without compromise and yet win the favour of the people by how they lived. If we could but do the same today!

The Obstacle: They Made No Compromise

You would think that the key to popularity would be to preach a nice, agreeable, non-offensive message supported by good deeds that people would appreciate. But this is not what the ancient Christians did. They performed good deeds, but their message was anything but nice, agreeable, and non-offensive! It seems very strange that the public held Christ’s followers in high esteem in spite of some pretty blunt preaching. Peter certainly didn’t pull any punches in his sermons, saying,

Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know….And you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross….Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified.¹

The ancient church did not compromise or sugarcoat its message to win people to Christ. In those days, death on a cross was clear evidence that Jesus was not the Messiah, because everyone in that society knew that the Messiah would not die but would be victorious over Israel’s enemies. And no true Messiah would surrender to an execution so horrible that it was reserved only for slaves and outcasts. There couldn’t have been a bigger obstacle to public acceptance than the cross!

But the ancient Christians didn’t avoid talking about the cross, the very thing that the public believed most powerfully argued against the Christian faith. The church countered that argument against Jesus’ messiahship with their own much more powerful argument based on his physical resurrection and the hundreds of people who had seen the risen Christ. Their preaching didn’t cater to the audience but seriously disturbed them to the point that “they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

We need to speak to our audience in a way they can understand, but we shouldn’t downplay aspects of our faith which we think they might find troublesome.

For example, in today’s culture:

• The idea that there is only one way to God and it runs exclusively through Jesus Christ is offensive to most. They want to find their own way to God.
• The idea that there is a personal god is rejected by many, because that brings accountability into the picture. They’d rather have an impersonal force or principle that they can manipulate to their liking.
• The idea that there are moral absolutes offends many people today who believe there are no absolutes, everything is relative. Moral relativism allows them to justify their own morality. We need to remember that we don’t have a better way to offer, we have the only way to offer.

A fellow elder at my church heard a pastor leading people in a sinner’s prayer at a seeker-sensitive evangelical church. The prayer completely avoided mention of sin and the cross and effectively made Jesus not much more than an inspirational person we aspire to be like. If people make a decision for Christ under those pretenses, they may later feel they were the victims of a bait and switch when they find out the whole truth of Christian faith.

Like the ancient church, the church today needs to speak truth, not avoid it. There are wise and unwise ways to preach the Gospel today, but the whole truth needs to be preached.

So, be unabashedly evangelical in proclaiming the Gospel!

A Powerful Attraction: They Practised What They Preached

As a community, they lived such attractive lives that they enjoyed the people’s favour. They preached love for one another and they demonstrated it. They preached a new way of living with justice for all, and they lived it.

At that time, they expected Christ’s return in the very near future, so they weren’t thinking long term. This led at least some of them to liquidate assets to care for each other, something that is not sustainable over the long term. (Or maybe that’s a sign of our lack of faith that our Father will provide us ‘our daily bread’ as we need it.) Nevertheless, Christians as a group are still the most generous people, who are ready to share their resources to help others, often non-Christians, who are in need.

As part of their spiritual growth as a disciple of Christ, Christians today should ask themselves how they could demonstrate more of their faith in their lives. What have we received from God that we haven’t personally given as fully as we could to others?

• His unconditional love?
• His provision?
• His integrity?
• His willingness to sacrifice for others?
• His constancy?
• His kindness?

What could you do to demonstrate God’s traits in your life so that others could see them at work in and through you? What could your ministry do? If we believe something about God, then we should find a way to act on that belief and pass the fruit of the belief on to others.

So, let’s make our church congregations a true community seven days a week through individual acts of love both within and without the community.

An Impressive Result: They Walked in God’s Power

Miracles and wonders accompanied the apostles as they did their work because God’s power flowed through them. The results were impressive, as the book of Acts records. Their secret was that they believed Christ would be active in their world through the Holy Spirit, and they expected to see things happen. So they did! They were bold and confident as they went about their daily business, sharing the Gospel and doing good to others.

Are we as bold and confident today? We will develop boldness and confidence when we have our own personal, life-transforming, meetings with Christ. When we know what God has done in our own lives, we will have faith and boldness to tell people what he can do in theirs. This is why we should be doing everything we can so that every Christ-follower is alive to the spiritual, theological, and missional components of Christian life. When they are plugged in to God spiritually and understand who he is and what he is about in this world, they can then express their faith in word and deed to the world around them.

So, be open to and expect the power of the Holy Spirit to be at work in and through you each and every day.

Conclusion

Let’s take our faith to heart and make it real in every aspect of our life and being, so that others will be drawn to the beautiful difference that Christ makes in each person.

Key Thought: The church needs to fully live up to Christ’s intent for it and walk as his disciples walked – in love and in power and in community.

The post And Everyone Liked Them… appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 The Message

The point of this beloved passage of Paul’s is that of all the things we could do, loving people is the most important. Why?

• Because God is love, and we are to be like him.
• Because Jesus demonstrated love to the marginalized and outcast, and as his disciples we are to be like him.
• Because God searches for people after his own heart to work through and we want to be vessels used by him.

Love & ‘The Other’

There was a time in the recent past when many Christians did not show much love, but relied on power to do God’s redemptive work. As we saw in my post Note to the Church: Mistakes Not To Make Again!, as a community we made bad decisions how to respond to social and cultural change from the 1970s through to the 1990s by choosing to limit our engagement strategy to what we thought would be the supportive power of public opinion, the courts, and politics. What was lost in those years was our witness to God’s incredible love for all humanity.

Christians cannot be carrying out the redemptive work of Christ when they are treating ‘The Other’ (people not like us) as an enemy to be defeated. The enemy is not other people. The enemy is the evil power of this world that seeks to pull people away from God and life the way he designed it for us.

So, given that God is love, when there is no love evident in us for ‘The Other,’ we have to ask what that says about us. There is a place for speaking prophetic correction to society, but as Paul writes, “If I have the gift of prophecy…but do not have love, I am nothing.”¹

But do we really have to show love to people who absolutely reject Jesus and even curse his name? For sure there are lots of verses in the Bible about loving “one another” (that is, people within the church), but do we really have to love those other people as well?.

Well, yes! When Jesus said that one of the greatest commandments is to love your neighbour, he was asked, “And who is my neighbour?” His answer was the parable of the Good Samaritan, which makes the point that we are to love the person who is not like us — ‘The Other!’

Okay so we have to love them, but how much? There can be only one answer: as much as Christ loved us before we loved him. Paul is very clear about the depth of Christ’s love for us: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. We should likewise love sinners even while still in their sin.

Love and Power

It is true that God works through whomever he pleases. The Bible shows us God working through pagan kings to chastise Israel. He worked through Jonah with smashing success even though Jonah did not love the Ninevites. But the point of the book of Jonah is the point I’m making here. Jonah should have loved the Ninevites. He should have seen them the way God sees them – people who need to repent and who can be redeemed. We know from the history of King David that God looks for men and women after his own heart, people he can trust to use his power wisely. So while there are exceptions, we are safe to assume that we will more likely be used powerfully by God when we make ourselves look more like him by loving people as he loves them. I don’t think we can go wrong with the following principles:

1. If we want to walk in God’s power, we need to walk in God’s love.
2. If we want to have God’s power flow through us, we must first have God’s love flow through us.
3. Power without love is a recipe for abuse, and exercising power without love is no witness to God’s relationship with humanity.

How might our current relationship with the secular world be different had we engaged differently a generation ago using these principles?

When it comes to the law and politics, there are times when (like Paul) we should make use of the civil institutions which have been provided to us for our protection. But it is a terrible mistake to think that these should be our primary tools for change! The real power of our faith will for sure be manifested when we love all people, while standing up to those who would misuse power against the less powerful.

The primary goal of Christian leaders, particularly pastors, therefore, is to disciple those within their sphere of responsibility to live as excellent representatives of Jesus Christ expressing his love for all people. When we live like that, we are most useful to God and most likely to walk in his power to accomplish his purpose.

To Change the World

Our ‘go to’ tools for changing the world must be those used by Jesus: love, prayer, spiritual discernment, and deep engagement with people who need to experience God’s love and care.

To use these tools well, we need to be mature Christians, which brings us to the topic of discipleship. If we were really serious about changing the world, we would be really serious about discipleship.  Before trying to change the world ‘out there,’ let’s first do a better job changing the world ‘in here.’ Discipleship should have the goal not just of personal growth, but of mobilization – helping rank and file Christians engage the people around them with love, prayer, and discernment.

Discipleship and Spiritual Formation

The problem, according to some, is that discipling Christians isn’t thorough enough. We have faith, but our lives are formed much more significantly by our secular culture than most realize, which weakens our witness. James Davison Hunter wrote about discipleship in the church today in To Change the World:

If, for whatever reason, the culture of a local parish and the larger Christian communion of which it is a part does not express and embody a vision of renewal and restoration that extends to all of life then it will be impossible to ‘make disciples’ capable of doing the same in every part of their lives. In formation, it is the culture and the community that gives shape and expression to it that is the key.” ²

So the church should model living faithfully in every aspect of its life and train its members to do the same in theirs. If Christians are to be true Christ-followers, effectively representing Christ to their world, we must preach in our churches what salvation is for during our present life here on earth.

What the Church Can Do

Here are some elements of a robust discipleship program.

Formation

• Help people learn how to think as a Christian. As already mentioned, many Christians are being formed more by our culture than by our faith. We must learn how to discern which aspects of our culture to affirm and which to challenge. This is NOT a list of “do’s and don’ts”, but understanding the principles that apply so Christ-followers can independently reason for themselves which is which.
• Teach people what God’s vision is for human society in the present world. What should society and culture look like and what can we, as individuals and as a group, do to move our world closer to that vision? Resources related to God’s mission and Christian ethics would be helpful. One book that addresses both is Let Justice Roll Down.
• Help people confront their own resistance to living a Christlike life. There is a cost involved. We all need to do the right thing, even when we want to do something else. For example, it is costly to invest yourself in relationships when you’d rather use your time for your own purposes. A helpful resource about making personal choices is Andy Stanley’s book The Best Question Ever, which I’ve blogged about. There are all kinds of Bible studies on submitting our lives to Christ and giving him full reign over us.
• Teach people how to make full use of Christian spiritual practices and discernment. My series Hearing God Speak and the category Spirituality of Leadership both have helpful posts in this regard. Christians must be able to discern God’s leadership if they are to live as faithful Christ-followers.

Mission

• Teach Christians how to help other people for the other person’s long term good. So often we respond to immediate needs and do things that we really should be helping them do for themselves. There is a dignity in allowing others to play a significant part in overcoming their own problems. Often, by doing it for them, or giving aid that is only a short-term solution, we create a dependency on aid. When Helping Hurts and Poverty Inc. are two resources that have many principles that can be applied in any helping situation.
• Train people to share their faith in a natural way. Propositions are not likely to work with most people today. People will respond to hearing your story after they have experienced compassion, love, and mercy from you. One of many helpful resources is Just Walk Across the Room.
• Get people to practice engaging others. This is what the local church is ideal for. In the world outside our churches, we are in the midst of ‘The Other,’ those people who are not like us. How do we prepare for meeting such people? Fortunately, Christ gave us the church. Because the local church is open to anyone who wants to attend, we have ‘The Other’ right among us. We need to practice loving them and drawing them into our lives. Who are they? Well, depending on your own demographic, they might be:
  • the young or the old
  • the rich or the poor
  • the immigrant or the multi-generation Canadian
  • the employed or the unemployed
  • the single or the married
  • the one with doubts or the one who has resolved their doubts
  • the well-educated or the less-educated

If We Were Serious…

We need intentional discipleship programs to develop church members into mature Christians who know how to relate to, and love, the people whom God has placed in their sphere of influence.

Key Thought: When Christians love ‘The Other’ as Christ loved us while we were yet sinners, then we will walk in God’s power and change our world.

The post If We Were Serious About Changing the World… appeared first on CCCC Blogs.