Week 43—Thursday Daniel 12:2-3
Week 43—THURSDAY
SEPARATING WHAT GOD HAD JOINED
We are looking at lay witnessing as the basis of our faith and the basis of the future of our faith—if it is to have a future. For the Word become word has run its course. The Word become flesh must now take over.
At Pentecost the Holy Spirit was not given to the Twelve but to the hundred and twenty. People were equal before God. So the Holy Spirit was not given to a priest, a prophet, or a pope, but to a person. The cipher added to the Twelve made a new world. And women too received the Holy Spirit on the same basis as men, and this included Mary, the mother of Jesus. The last thing we see of the Virgin Mary was that she was praying for the Holy Spirit on the same basis as the rest of us. To try to save the situation some Roman Catholic friends say that because she was there and prayed, the Holy Spirit was given in answer to her prayers! Which of course is an unwarranted assumption, just as the other “assumption” is an assumption!
When a dispute arose over the distribution of food in Acts 6, the apostles did something that has always been looked on as wisdom, but is now seen as disaster. They said, “We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (vs. 5) and appointed the Seven to look after the material side of the movement. This separated the spiritual from the material—left the spiritual unrelated and the material unredeemed. They put asunder what God had joined in the Incarnation when the Word became flesh. What happened? A strange and significant thing: the Seven became the center of spiritual power. It was Stephen, one of the Seven, who precipitated the revival in Jerusalem and brought on his own martyrdom. It was Philip who first preached the gospel outside Judea and had a revival in Samaria. The apostles sent down Peter and John to regulate what they couldn’t produce.
O Father, you have hid these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them unto babes. You have ordained that the spiritual must function in and through the material or not function. Teach me this day to let all life be the Word become flesh. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Witnessing is for the sincere, not for the perfect.