Sunday
Sunday
God’s Vision for His Church
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Acts 2:42
What is God’s vision for his church? Luke tells us. Having described what happened on the day of Pentecost, and having supplied an explanation of it through Peter’s Christ-centered sermon, Luke goes on to show us the effects of Pentecost by giving us a beautiful little cameo of the Spirit-filled church in Jerusalem. Of course, the church did not begin that day. It is incorrect to call the day of Pentecost the birthday of the church. For the church as the people of God goes back at least four thousand years to Abraham. What happened at Pentecost was that the remnant of God’s people became the Spirit-filled body of Christ.
What, then, are the distinguishing marks of a living church? To answer this question we have to go back to the beginning and take a fresh look at the first Christian church in Jerusalem. At the same time, it is essential that we are realistic. We have a tendency to romanticize the early church. We look at it through tinted spectacles. We speak of it in whispers, as if it had no faults. Then we miss the rivalries, the hypocrisies, the immoralities, and the heresies that troubled the early church as they trouble the church today.
Nevertheless, one thing is certain. The early church, for all its excesses and failures, had been deeply and radically stirred by the Holy Spirit.
So we come back to our question: What did that first-century church look like? What evidences did it give of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit? If we can answer these questions, we will be well on the way to discovering the marks of a living church in the twenty-first century.
For further reading: John 17:6–26