God is at
work all around us and if we do not recognize God’s activity, we will have a
hardening of our heart, and find it harder to recognize Jesus and his work the
next time we encounter him at work. I challenge you to make a purposeful
decision to join what God is doing and to make the life changes required to
accommodate God’s activity.
Mark 6:52
tells us that the disciples did not understand God’s activity in the feeding of
the five thousand. Jesus raises this same issue again in Mark 8:21 when he
asked his disciples, “Do you still not understand?” Why did the disciples miss
the miracle and the working of God in Mark chapter six? Christians still
commonly make their mistake today. They had witnessed God’s activity, but they
were not alert to what God had done. You see, when we witness God at work or have a personal encounter with God, it is
extremely important that we process the experience. If we do not, it becomes
more difficult for us to see Jesus working, to understand what He is doing, and
to join Him at work.
One of the
reasons churches grow cold and uncaring is that the church seldom takes the
collective time to process the visitations of God. As a result, the member’s
hearts harden and they cease to be able to recognize the Lord’s presence and
work. God can move mountains all around the church and throughout the community,
but the church members eyes are blind and their ears deaf, because their heart has
become hardened and they no longer recognize God’s activity.
In the
early church, Christians were being persecuted, and as they fled persecution,
they carried the Gospel of Jesus to people all over the world. Since the turn
of the century, once again, God is using persecution, poverty, and hardship to
disperse millions of people. This time however, most are not taking the Gospel;
they are being dispersed in order to receive the Gospel. This is God is at
work, and Christians who are spiritually alert see what God is doing, and are
joining a growing movement to share their faith across ethnic and cultural
lines.
Just after
the turn of this century, Aero-flight airlines landed 3-4 times a week at the
SeaTac Airport in the State of Washington. At that time, there were 76 Russian
churches along the I-5 corridor. The pastors of these churches got together and
started taking the Russian pilots out to dinner and witnessing to them about
Christ. In a few short years, word came back about a new denomination of
churches in Russia called the Aero-flight churches. These Russian Pilots were
going back home and bearing witness of their personal relationship with Jesus
Christ and new churches were being born.
About that
same time, a shipping container arrived in Seattle Washington with over fifty
Chinese in it. Three were dead, and the rest were placed in the INS Prison in
the Seattle area. Chinese churches quickly requested permission from the INS
Prison and were granted permission to visit and even to share Christ with these
Chinese. Eventually all of them accepted Christ as their Savior and wanted to
be baptized. INS permitted the church to baptize the new converts. Eventually all
of these Chinese were deported back to China, but they returned as Christians.
God has
reversed the process he used in the first century, to win the world to him, but
his plan only works if we understand what he is doing and are faithful in
helping him. In the early church, God dispersed believers so that they might
carry the gospel to the far reaches of the world. Today, God is dispersing the
lost throughout the world that the lost might come to a personal relationship
with Jesus Christ. However, if this is going to happen, we must join God in
what He is doing just as the Antioch Church did in the first century.
The Antioch Church regularly
processed what God was doing. They were excited about their faith, and they allowed
their faith in Christ to transform every aspect of their lives. The believers
were so different that a “new” word had to be invented to explain what God was
doing, and Acts 11:26 tells us that this new word was “Christian.” These believers
were representatives, ambassadors of the Jesus Christ. They were the hands,
feet, and mouthpiece of the Lord. These Christians knew what it was to draw
aside in prayer and meditation and struggle with God. They were accustomed to
observing God’s handiwork and they were accustomed to contemplating what that
meant for them as the people of God.
They were
observant of what God did in Acts 2; they understood the significance of
Pentecost. They understood that God truly loves all people and longs for all
people to have a personal relationship with him. God must surely detest that
Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week, and the church the most
segregated place. Listen to me, the DNA of the church is the Trinity. The
Sovereign God of this universe is so large and so unique that it takes three
Persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit even to attempt to convey to our human
minds - His greatness. When God said, “Let us make man in our image,” he was
giving us a peek at His Trinity.
Through each
culture, each race, each nationality, we learn a little more about God. God
wants all races and nationalities to study and worship together so that we can
draw from each other’s strengths. George Barna, in his 2009 research, compared
religious beliefs of the four largest groups in the United States: Whites,
Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians to that of the early 1990s. Compared to the other
three ethnic groups, Blacks emerged as the most likely to engage in each of
five church-related activities in a typical week: attending church services,
participating in a small group, attending a Sunday school class, praying, and
reading the Bible. They were also the most likely to have made a personal
commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life and to have an
“active faith” (i.e., attend church services, pray to God and read from the
Bible during the week). Barna concluded that “While the beliefs and behaviors
of America’s white population have changed little since the early 1990s, the
new research underscored that the faith of African-Americans is dynamic,
generally moving in a direction that is more aligned with conservative biblical
teachings.”
George Barna
in his book, In High Impact African-American Churches, points out that Black
Churches are having a far larger impact on society than White churches. He
calls on White churches to observe and learn form our Black brothers. God is
calling the church back to what the Christians at Antioch already understood – we
have much to learn from each other.
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