WHAT HAPPENED WHEN this division between the sacred and secular took place in the Acts? The so-called laymen took over in large measure the Christian movement. The Seven became the center of spiritual power. God seemed to tip His power in the direction of those who held the material and the spiritual together. It was Stephen, one of the Seven, who precipitated the revival in Jerusalem and brought on his own martyrdom—he was the first Christian martyr. It was Philip, another member of the Seven, who first preached the gospel outside Jerusalem after Pentecost, winning the whole city of Samaria. “So there was much joy in that city” (Acts 8:8). Then the apostles sent down Peter and John to regularize what they could not produce. They were the rear guard of an expanding movement, trying to keep up with it.
It was Philip who first preached the gospel to an Ethiopian and who was the probable founder of the Ethiopian Church, the Coptic Church. He also founded the ministry of women, having “four unmarried daughters, who prophesied” (Acts 21:9), the beginning of Christian spinsterhood!
It was the lay group who, scattered under the persecution of Stephen, went as far as Antioch, preaching the Lord Jesus. “And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number that believed turned to the Lord” (Acts 11:21). It was out of the Antioch church, founded by these laymen, that Paul and Barnabas went on their great missionary journeys to Asia and Europe. Paul, belonging to the lay group, sent forth by the lay group, and representing the lay group, became the center of the Christian thrust into that non-Christian world. The Acts is called the Acts of the Apostles, but after the first few chapters the apostles drop out and the lay group take over. The apostles still held an authority, but the lay group had the initiative and the power. God was plainly lending His grace and power to those who made the spiritual and the material one.
O Father, Thou art speaking still in the same terms. Thou art giving Thy power to those who manifest it in terms of life—spiritual and physical. Teach me this day to do every little and every big thing in a spiritual way. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I ask not for authority, but for power—and the power becomes the authority.
