Week 23: Unstoppable Kingdom - A Journey Through Acts
June 20, 2021 - Acts 11:19-30
Ordinary believers. Forgotten people. Folks whose names history had never written down. These are the people who became a gospel-germ in the ancient world, spreading the message of Jesus far beyond Jerusalem…far beyond the comfort of their homeland and their own familiar ethnicity and culture. They had been made alive by the Spirit of God. They had no tamed, siloed, quarantined, socially acceptable category for the faith that we have today. They had been swept up by the kingdom of God. Everything had changed. They were now Jesus-people, a new kind of ethnic group that was set apart as a signpost to the renewing and unstoppable power of God. This meant they would be irreversibly distinguished as peculiar to outsiders. Yet, the message spread. Rapidly. They shared their lives. They loved the poor. They worshipped the one true God who made this world and in whom life can only make sense. It was thrilling. It was scary. It was an adventure. These ordinary people are often obscured by the shadow of the heroes we read about — Peter, John, Barnabas, and Paul. But it was these people — the church — that God used to advance his gospel in ways that only one man or one woman could never do.