Monday: The Master Imparts His Mastery
WEEK 1
MONDAY
THE MASTER IMPARTS HIS MASTERY
Luke 24:45-49
We come now to study how ordinary people got in touch with extraordinary power and did extraordinary things beyond their power of accomplishment. This account of the divine reinforcement is found in the “Acts of the Apostles,” or as it has been called, “The Acts of the Holy Spirit through the Apostles.” And yet that too is scarcely accurate; for the movement, as we shall see, transcended the apostles, was given over into the hands of a lay group that went beyond the apostles and went on sometimes in spite of the apostles. The movement used whatever instruments were at hand and sensitive to the spirit and goal of this amazing redemption.
The Acts of the Apostles is the bridge between the Gospels and the Epistles. Without it there is a vacuum. How did the Christianity of Jesus become the Christianity of Paul? The Acts tells us. It is the transition from the Jesus of history to the Christ of experience, the transition from the localized Teacher to the universal Transformer. In the Acts the ideas of Jesus became flesh; they became incarnate in a group; they walked. And they not only walked, they ran; they danced along life’s way; they sang; they shouted; they laid healing hands on the souls, the minds, the bodies, of people and made them whole, every whit whole. And in the process they quietly laid the mines of thought and idea that blew existing civilizations to pieces and turned the world upside down and laid the foundations of a New Order, the kingdom of God. This description comes in retrospect. At the time the movement seemed a local tempest in a teapot instead of a cleansing storm that would blow through the brains, the souls, the customs, the societies of people; cleansing away the miasma of superstition and cruel customs, and bringing a breath of fresh heavenly air to all life everywhere. And as in Ezekiel’s vision, this breath of God breathed upon valleys of dry bones, upon dead or decadent civilizations, and they lived.
But that universal storm came out of a quiet—an upper room where people waited in silence to receive God.
O Lord, let this cleansing storm blow through my inmost being, cleansing away all that is not of you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I, too, am an ordinary person, but I can link with Extraordinary Power.