An Acts 8 Awakening
May/101
I'm reading through the book of Acts right now. Never noticed this until today.
In Acts 8, the Bible says, "On that day a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria." (Acts 8:1b, NIV)
Everyone except the apostles were scattered. That's significant when you skip ahead to verse 4.
"Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went." (Acts 8:4, NIV)
The apostles were the "church staff." They didn't leave Jerusalem when the persecution broke out, but the people of the church did.
Here's what jumped out at me when I read these verses. It was the people who were doing the ministry. The members of the church were the ones preaching the gospel wherever they went.
It was the people. Not the leaders. Not the staff. The people of the church were empowered to do ministry. They were the ones sharing the gospel. They were the ones winning people to Christ.
We need an Acts 8 awakening in the church. The trend today is to look to the church staff as "professional Christians." We get paid to do ministry for you.
Wrong.
We get paid to empower you to do ministry yourself. That's what happened in Acts. The people had been empowered by the apostles do take the gospel to people who had never heard it before.
Something else to think about…the people in Acts 8 hadn't been in the church for decades because the church hadn't been around for decades. They hadn't spent their lives in Sunday School because Sunday School didn't exist. They didn't have Bible College degrees because there was no such thing.
You know what they did have? A passionate love for Jesus. And that's really all you need.
When these believers ran into someone who needed Jesus, they didn't say, "I really don't know enough. I'm still a baby Christian. We should really call one of the apostles. He'll help you."
They loved Jesus. They had been changed by Jesus. And they were willing to tell people that story.
And in doing so, they changed the world.
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10:27 am on May 13th, 2010
Nail on the head man. You might have just changed my sermon topic for me on a Thursday…thanks a lot! Ha ha.
I think it's also noteworthy that some of the Apostles left Jerusalem to preach the Gospel as well (i.e. Acts 10 Peter at Cornelius' house), but the lay people of the church had a much larger role than we often give them credit for. I think we all, in some ways, picture Jesus and the Apostles doing all the heavy lifting and everyone else just standing around being amazed. When our churches experience this kind of "awakening" there will be no boundaries on the Gospel in this country and no limit its influence in the world.