Yesterday, we launched into the end of Acts 2, perhaps the most challenging part of the chapter because it shows us not only what the people accepted to be true, but how that truth was lived out within the newly formed community. Welcome to the daily post for Thursday, April 30, 2020, my name is Paul Capps, pastor of Peachtree Baptist Church.

Last Thursday, I asked you all if you would share some of your struggles as well as strategies you’ve used to help you get through this difficult time. No one was willing to ‘go public’ but I know through phone calls mostly that many of you are indeed dealing with a number of hardships, from the seeming impossibility in applying for unemployment to deaths in the family due to Covid-19. I would simply remind each of you reading or listening that though it feels like we are on our own desert islands, we need to reach out to and be reached by our friends and our fellow members of the body of Christ. If you need a phone number or address of someone in the church or if you need to pray or talk to someone, call or text me at 843.271.3024, email me, [email protected], set up a zoom with me, facetime me, find me on Messenger, but reach. Remember that we are to be like little Christ’s and through Jesus, God is always reaching to forge and grow loving relationships.

It’s clear from scriptures that the early followers of Jesus, though there were already thousands of them just after that one day, felt the great need to be together. Luke tells us that they devoted themselves to fellowship. God was doing miracles through them. At the core of their community, they shared their possessions, even sacrificing their own comfort for others in the community. They had daily worship together. They had daily meals together. And God added to their number daily.

Right now we cannot physically practice this kind of communal living. And It wasn’t long before the early church stopped as well. It wasn’t long before rebellion against its ideal crept in and it was corrupted. But the ideal remains. Craig Keener describes it as “modeling the ideal, proleptically eschatological lifestyle of the kingdom,” which is a big worded way of saying that the earliest Christians were living like God intends for us all to live when Jesus returns. And that kind of lifestyle is part of the purpose of Pentecost - it is one of the ways that multicultural mission is meant to be lived out. He says, that this ideal church “affirms that the new life of the Spirit experienced as a norm by the earliest Jesus movement epitomizes God’s plan.”

Right now, as economies cannot save us and boundaries and politics only seek to get in the way of God’s plan, we are brought to our knees by a microscopic force that reminds us of the kind of life to which we are truly called. To prayer, to looking for signs of God’s activity in the world, to eating meals with loved ones, and to sharing our possessions with the community. In whatever way that challenges you today, act on it by the faith you possess. Maybe it means reaching out for help. Maybe it means helping in whatever you know how to. Breathe deep the Spirit and breathe out the work of the Spirit in you to perfume and season your home and this world with God’s love until Jesus comes again.