CHAPTER 2
WAIT
They waited . . . for power . . . and waiting is the hardest thing to do.
He ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait . . .
LUKE (ACTS 1:4 ESV)
Satipo: “Let us hurry, there’s nothing to fear here.” Indy: “That’s what scares me.”
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
The fedora. The whip. The khakis. The revolver. The silhouetted stance of Indiana Jones holding a machete conjures the iconic Spirit of Adventure. But decking yourself out in the aforementioned gear, rushing in where angels fear to tread, hacking and slashing, gets you killed pretty quickly. Despite purchasing the accessories, you’re no Indiana Jones. Before Indy’s brief vine-slashing jungle adventures, there were years of painstaking research into Mayan archaeology that informed and equipped him once he got to the enshrouded ancient temple. Without the patient years of preparation, Indy would have been quickly impaled on the booby traps that Alfred Molina’s character, Satipo, sprung in his haste to escape the temple with his stolen idol. Among his final words to Indy before double crossing him and becoming a human kebob, “You have no choice. Hurry!”
But hurrying to accomplish our mission may be the greatest hindrance to accomplishing it. Over 100 years ago, William Booth, founder of the frontline ministry The Salvation Army, warned that the chief danger confronting the church at the turn of the century would be “religion without the Holy Ghost.” A century later, we are more in danger of that being true than it was when he uttered it. In our rush to accomplish the mission that Jesus gave us, we’ve forsaken the power that propelled our movement into the world. Worse still, our lack of awareness has rendered us as impotent as Samson springing from his chair, shorn of his hair. We rush out to whup up on the Philistines and instead receive yet another kicking. Samson recovered his strength only after getting back to his roots, and it will be no different for us.
What Jesus told his first followers in Acts 1 holds the secret to getting back to our roots. And that starts with the hardest word in the world.
Wait.
GO ON WITHOUT ME . . .
Thousands of years ago, an argument traveled on the back of the hot desert wind, which was blowing sand and scrub in the twilight. The spectacle of Moses’ tent pitched in the distance outside the camp appeared all the more bizarre because of the one-sided argument Moses seemed to be having with the night air, his voice atypically desperate and tinged with anguish. God had given Moses the passport for Canaan and given Moses the “Go on without me” line. God would still give them the land. He’d still fulfill the promise to get them there, but God himself wouldn’t be going. For Moses, this wasn’t good enough.
A plea.
“I’m not going unless you’re coming with us!”
A pause.
Silence.
Exasperation. “Show me your glory!”
Once you have basked in the glow of the face of God like Moses had, it is impossible to go through the motions anymore or feign business as usual. After speaking with God face to face as “one speaks to a friend” (Ex. 33:11), the words “normal” or “usual” no longer have any meaning.
Moses had gotten a pure draught of God himself, and that limited taste of God’s glory had killed his appetite for anything else. For days his skin cells irradiated celestial after-burn into an atomic tan. To spare people a visible reminder of God’s diminishing presence, Moses covered his face with a veil.
For Moses, a veil was sufficient to conceal the fading of God’s glory, but in this media-fueled age, we have devised ingenious ways to compensate for our lack of God’s presence. We pump up the volume, play faster rhythms, and skillfully smooth the transition between sets. We manipulate the atmosphere, adjust the lights for a sexier ambiance, and make the sermons funnier and more entertaining, believing that if we can produce enough sound and fury, we might be able to drown out the sound of silence. Instead of addressing the silence, we continue pulling all the gears and levers every Sunday for an hour, attempting to convince the crowd that Oz the Great and Powerful is in our midst. But should our elaborate light system burn out, and the sound system short out, we might be confronted with our loss of true power. Radiohead once sang “When the power runs out, we’ll just hum.” We’ve been humming for too long.
THE CUTTING EDGE
I trust the irony is not lost on you that the first thing Luke wanted you to know about in Acts is the last thing you’re likely to hear about today—the Holy Spirit. It’s also the first thing the annals of church history chronicle for us about the golden eras of evangelistic outreach. A. W. Tozer describes the night he was baptized with the Holy Spirit at nineteen years old, “Any tiny work that God has ever done through me and through my ministry for Him dates back to that hour when I was filled with the Spirit. That is why I plead for the spiritual life of the body of Christ and the eternal ministries of the Eternal Spirit through God’s children, His instruments.”1 Dwight L. Moody describes a similar experience, “I was all the time tugging and carrying water. But now I have a river that carries me.”2 And the opening of the book of Acts sets up an event at Pentecost where the Holy Spirit fell upon his church and empowered them to become witnesses that would change the world. That same empowerment for mission two thousand years ago gave the church its cutting edge. But it wasn’t just a one-time deal. That empowering happened repeatedly throughout the New Testament, and church history.
Paul said that when the gospel came to the Corinthians it didn’t come in words only, but in a demonstration of power. As a poor missionary for years, I mastered the art of hand tools until I could afford power tools. You don’t appreciate the power of voltage until you’ve been doing everything by the sweat of your own brow in back breaking work. A church devoid of the Spirit’s power is a church that has lost its grip on one of the most powerful evangelistic tools at its disposal. Despite our best efforts, we’ve neglected the empowerment that Tozer and Moody attest is still available today. Even Peter said, “The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call” (Acts 2:39). That’s you. If you’re called, then Peter says this Bud’s for you.
If this generation responded to the promise of the Spirit’s power in relation to our mandate of mission, we would be as powerful as Indiana Jones unearthing the ark of the covenant. Yet we think it necessary to don Saul’s ill-fitting armor to fell giants, when all we need to reach for is the Spirit of God and a slingshot. The enemy has known this all along and desires these promises to remain hidden away under dust, like the ark of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But the stakes are too high, and becoming raiders of the lost art of reaching the unreached is a race to save the world before the enemy destroys it.
A. W. Tozer said, “I want the presence of God Himself, or I don’t want anything at all to do with religion. . . . I want all that God has, or I don’t want any.” Moses said, “For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?” (Ex. 33:16 ESV). As Lloyd-Jones pointed out, “We can have no successes over our enemies without this great realization of God in the midst.”3 We can have our big churches, magazines that praise them, bags of cash, and not the presence of God. Moses didn’t want Canaan, with all of its richness, flowing with milk and honey. Moses wanted God himself. And that’s what made the difference.
It’s time to stop playing church and to get real.
THE KEY TO THEIR SUCCESS
Like Moses, the success of the apostles began with their willingness to “wait.”
Wait for what? God himself. He sent us out on a mission, but he never expected us to go it alone. Let’s ponder for a minute, exactly why the apostles needed to cool their heels in Jerusalem before heading out to the harvest.
The apostles had to be told to wait because, contrary to what you may have been told, they weren’t scared and hiding in the upper room. You don’t need to tell wussies to wait. Besides, Luke doesn’t even hint that they were scared. Acts 1:3 tells us they’d spent forty days with the risen Lord as he downloaded the secrets of the universe into their souls. Their hearts were burning, just as the hearts of the disciples on the road to Emmaus were! They were chomping at the bit to get out and take on the world! Nevertheless, despite the preparation of three years with Jesus and forty days with the risen Lord, they still weren’t equipped to tackle the world on their own. The best intentions of mice and men often lay to waste, and so would theirs without plugging into the right power outlet.
Years earlier, when the father of the demon-possessed boy turned to the disciples for help, they exerted themselves for hours, “but they were not able” (Mark 9:18 ESV). Doesn’t that summarize our current state? The church has been going through the motions, but despite our best efforts, technology, marketing, and antics we lack the power to reverse the downward spiral. As embarrassing as it was for the disciples to be ineffective, we suffer the same incompetence in accomplishing our mission. Perhaps the difference was that the disciples were bothered by it—they wanted to know why they couldn’t do it (Mark 9:28–29). After many failures, and abandoning Jesus at the cross, they knew their dependency upon him was a real thing. Similarly, a veteran lifeguard knows to hang back until a swimmer has exhausted their own efforts to struggle. In God’s case, we could be waiting a while for the church to give up and surrender. I don’t think it even realizes it’s drowning yet.
R. A. Torrey said:
We think that if a man is pious and has had a college and a seminary education and comes out of it reasonably orthodox, he is now ready for our hands to be laid upon him and to be ordained to preach the gospel. But Jesus Christ said, “No.” There is another preparation that a man must not undertake this work until he has received it. “Tarry (literally ‘sit ye down’) until ye be endued with power from on high.”4
Pause for a moment. This means that many of the preachers and pastors out there aren’t ready for what they’ve been called to . . . because they haven’t waited. Yet ordinary, unschooled men, filled with the Holy Spirit turned the world upside down because they waited in Jerusalem.
I’m about to give you a snapshot of the rest of this book. All the rest of the message, all the rest of this mission flows out of that tiny word—“wait.” (Completely coincidentally, the reasons below are the outline for the rest of this book, taken from Acts 1:8). I hesitate to do this because I don’t want you to think the outline is all you need. For me, this process has been a journey. Perhaps as long and bumpy of a ride as the Indiana Jones Adventure ride at Disneyland. Incidentally, the outline in this chapter is a bit like that ride. It’s not at all like the movie, but it gives you a taste. Perhaps a taste of the journey of adventure that awaits you, as you wait on him.
What happened when the apostles waited for God’s power instead of moving out on their own? What would happen to believers if they were willing to do the same today?
Waiting empowered them to accomplish eight different aspects of their mission, and it will still do so today.
THEY WOULD BE EMPOWERED DESPITE THEIR WEAKNESS
“In a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:5).
Jesus tells the disciples that good things happen to those who wait on the Lord. In Acts 1, Jesus acts as M from a James Bond film and tells them that they’re going to need some spiritual equipment from Q to accomplish the mission. Therefore he says wait here (Acts 1:4) before you go there (Acts 1:8, Matt. 28:19).
We haven’t learned the lesson that not being ready doesn’t work against us, but for us. In our insufficiency, facing a task unfinished, Jesus supplies us with his power. Paul, the Indiana Jones of the New Testament, confesses to being as flawed as Harrison Ford’s iconic character. Because Paul knew where true power came from, he had learned to boast of his weakness, that the power of Christ might rest upon him. His weakness became his strength as he allowed his insufficiency to become an opportunity for God’s all-sufficiency to channel through him. We try too hard to be street smart and cutting edge, forgetting that in our weakness he displays his power. No matter how faithfully Paul sowed, how frequently he watered, or skillfully he reaped, God alone gave the increase. And Paul knew it, even if we don’t.
The disciples waited ten days, and their dependence upon God to make the difference made all the difference. We are fond of quoting Acts 2:42 as a template for church, but we forget that you can’t become an Acts chapter two church unless you’ve first been an Acts chapter one church.* Without a return to first-century dependence, we will never see first-century results. What were they doing those ten days? They were waiting prayerfully in dependence upon him, spreading themselves out upon an altar and asking the fires of heaven to come and consume their weakness with power. That’s what prayer is, a practical confession of inadequacy. The exhalation of surrender, and the inhalation of borrowed strength. Those ten days in Acts chapter one were the apostles learning to breathe.
THEY WOULD BECOME FEARLESS RISK TAKERS
“You will receive power” (Acts 1:8).
Don’t misunderstand me here. Waiting is not a pass for continued inaction. The apostles waited ten days, not ten years. Waiting is not permission to hide behind theological platitudes like God’s sovereignty, or a distraction while we analyze the culture. Paul’s conclusion about God’s sovereignty was that before the faith comes to others’ ears, movement must first come to our feet. Nor is waiting an excuse to mask a distrustful disobedience stemming from fear.
Unafraid to begin with (since meeting with Jesus after the resurrection), the disciples were further emboldened when the Spirit fell to break new ground, chart new territory, and boldly go where no disciple had gone before. Jesus promised they’d do greater things than he had, and when Peter fearlessly preached his first impromptu sermon about the death and resurrection of Jesus, three thousand were baptized. They defied the Sanhedrin under threats of death. They publicly healed in the temple. Their passion for seeing others liberated set them free from fearing the reprisals of others. Therefore, they risked fearlessly.
Similarly, every period of revival from the Great Awakening to the Jesus Movement can trace its roots to fearless risk-taking as men and women embarked on risky ventures not seen before. George Whitefield hit the fields. William Booth hit the streets. Martin Luther hit the Wittenberg door with a hammer. Bold faith, taking prayerful risks, has always led to a renaissance of reaching the unreached.
Even when the apostles’ courage flagged after being beaten, they hunkered down in the bunker to pray for even more boldness. The Spirit empowered them again in what Dr. Walter Martin called “The Baptism of Boldness.”5 They prayed, “ ‘Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.’ After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly” (Acts 4:29–31). For our friends that write off the activity of special empowering as a one-time event to the church, it is significant that this filling happened after Pentecost. If the early apostles needed a top up, how much more should we be challenged to seek God for valor in taking the necessary risks for a mission accomplished?
THEY WOULD BE CONTAGIOUSLY CONSUMED WITH HIM
“When the Holy Spirit comes on you” (Acts 1:8)
When the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles, he chose the form of flaming fire instead of a dove. This was no gentle spark. This was a wildfire consuming the apostles, and the wind that blew in the upper room meant that the Holy Spirit intended this fire to spread. If the church is the fire that sets the world ablaze, what is to be done when the coals barely smolder? If the church is God’s force for revolution on earth, what can be done when the church itself is in need of a revolution? The church is out to save the world, but who will save the church?
There once lived a generation of men and women who knew the answer to that question. They kept their lamps trimmed and burning for the next generations so that the light of the gospel wouldn’t go out. They fell on their faces and cried out to God for him to take back his church. They were too impressed with God to be impressed with themselves or bothered with whether anyone else was. They abhorred spiritual “selfies” and shifted the eyes of the world back onto Jesus. Like prophets of old, they waved the giant foam finger pointing to heaven so that the crowds could celebrate the true champion of the game. They were players, but they knew who had truly won the victory. That generation may be dead, but is the power they knew gone forever?
No. But we must wait for it, long for it, pray for it.
Spurgeon said:
We have in this age but few giants in grace who rise head and shoulders above the common height, men to lead us on in deeds of heroism and efforts of unstaggering faith. After all, the work of the Christian Church, though it must be done by all, often owes its being done to single individuals of remarkable grace. In this degenerate time we are very much as Israel was in the days of the Judges, for there are raised up among us leaders who judge Israel, and are the terror of her foes. Oh, if the Church had in her midst a race of heroes; if our missionary operations could be attended with the holy chivalry which marked the Church in the early days; if we could have back apostles and martyrs, or even such as Carey and Judson, what wonders would be wrought! We have fallen upon a race of dwarfs, and are content, to a great extent, to have it so.6
Giants walked the land in those days, the likes of A. W. Tozer and R. A. Torrey. Though they attracted the crowds, it wasn’t their goal because it wasn’t the game they were playing. More importantly, it wasn’t the way they kept score. But the team was winning. We’ve been winning at the wrong game, our goal to fill a room. But we haven’t scored. If the apostles filled a room, it was to turn them out again, so they could create more rooms of people who also got turned out. They didn’t spike the ball in the end zone and dance the victory jig after their ministerial touchdowns. Torrey locked himself into his room for three days, determined not to come out until he’d wrestled with the angel and received the blessing of God, the filling of the Holy Spirit. These men sought power. Perhaps if we threw our lifeless corpses onto the bones of these men’s lives as the Israelites threw a stiff onto Elisha’s bones, and prayed like they prayed, we might spring to life, ready to receive the Spirit’s power in these dark days. People who pushed out beyond the camp like Moses did, laid hold of the kingdom of God violently, and witnessed the kingdom come with violent force. The church was revived, reformed, renewed, and revolutionized.
In an age where talk is cheap, and the world is tired of hearing it, actions speak louder than words. The apostles modeled the power of a life consumed with the Holy Spirit, and they fully lived for God, which shouted louder than their words. Lives like that cannot be underestimated, or ignored, like the early church who lived out Acts 2:42, so that they enjoyed “the favor of all the people” (Acts 2:47).
And the Lord added to their number.
Daily.
THEY WOULD BECOME CHANNELS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
“You will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8)
When Jesus poured his Spirit out at Pentecost, it was an all or nothing investment of supernatural power mediated through natural humanity. The life of God, manifested as gifts of the Holy Spirit, coursed through every believer as they were empowered to carry out the mission of Jesus. When Peter spoke of the happenings of Pentecost to the crowd, he told them Joel has prophesied that they too were a part of this. They would see visions, have dreams, and experience prophesy. This wasn’t a spectator sport, but a participatory one. The promise was that Jesus would pour his power out on all flesh, sons and daughters, wrinkly old men, and prune-skinned women would all receive gifts. Everyone was a participant. Pentecost was an all-inclusive, crowd-swelling revolution that changed the way people were reached. Nobody was excluded. Earthly revolutions chant to restore power to the people but when the Holy Spirit is on the move, it’s a restoration of power through the people. As the Holy Spirit is channeled through people, his outlet is their gifts. When I was a firefighter, we were taught that a person who’d been electrocuted had an exit wound because the energy needed to exit their body. The energy didn’t just dissipate; it created an outlet. Your spiritual gifts are an expression of what Jesus’s power looks like through you. It’s Jesus with you-skin on.
Through our gifts, the world sees Jesus in action. The gifts are what help fill the world with the presence of Christ (Eph. 4:10–13). Unfortunately, we’ve seen church become about one person’s gifts, as the crowds watch and forget they have gifts themselves. As a jealous Monarchist, the Holy Spirit is consumed with the single aim of bringing worship and glory to Jesus, rather than calling attention to the individual being used. When we merely pay lip service to this, and we focus on running a show, amassing wealth through drawing crowds, and building bigger barns, the Holy Spirit is grieved and withdraws his presence. He’s not in the business of glorifying people. Becoming a channel of the Holy Spirit means that you are not the focal point, but God is. You hold treasure, but are a feeble jar of clay. You’re God’s practical joke to the world, that he can use anybody. He can and does, and we’re proof.
THEY WOULD IMPACT THE UNREACHED IN THEIR OWN NEIGHBORHOODS
“In Jerusalem” (Acts 1:8)
When the apostles received the empowering of the Holy Spirit, they got busy in their own backyard—Jerusalem. The missional movement is tapping into nothing short of a rediscovery of what happens when you . . . actually . . . get . . . around . . . people. But with that revelation comes the embarrassing confessional that perhaps we haven’t been mixing with the people we talk so much about reaching. Our neighbors. Coworkers. Friends. Jesus didn’t talk much about reaching people. He simply modeled it by mixing and mingling with them like a holy cocktail.
We always think of mission “over there,” but sometimes it’s harder to get us to cross the street than it is to cross an ocean. When God starts moving, he moves in our local surroundings before he moves us anywhere else. We first become witnesses in “Jerusalem” and become driven inevitably outward to the surrounding concentric circles—to our Judeas, Samarias, and eventually, to the ends of the earth. It’s often us that need to change as much as our neighborhoods do. Once the Holy Spirit got ahold of the disciples, the mission field started as they stepped out the doorway of the upper room.
When 9/11 hit, I was a missionary evangelist serving in Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s legendary Sandfields in Port Talbot, Wales. Charitable giving in America dropped by 50% and our mission took a hit. When that happened, I became a walking statistic and was forced to work in a factory to pay my bills. I worked alongside the rough-necked blue-collar workers I’d been trying to reach in the dockside industrial town where I’d gotten my beatdown. After a year of fruitless laboring as the full-time “evangelist,” I saw three conversions within weeks of working at the factory! The recurring pattern in my life has been that I’ve never really been effective in ministry until I’ve left full-time vocational ministry. What if our ideas of “ministry” are keeping us from reaching the people right outside our doors?
The key to success for Paul was that he got out there. Paul didn’t have the luxury of rolling up to a city with a sexy logo, flashy website, and rented space. He buried himself in the marketplace, immersed in crowds of people, not in a clandestine cell lined with books, cloistered away in a drywall fortress, guarded by receptionists, secretaries, interns, and associates, like ministerial royalty. For over ten years planting churches as an ordained minister, I’ve worked day jobs as a barista, window cleaner, psychiatric nurse, firefighter, and university lecturer in order to get close to the people I was trying to reach. Sometimes the busyness of our church tasks makes it impossible for us to carry out the one task Jesus asked us to complete. Instead of spending the majority of our time crafting the best sermons on Acts, we need to live the book of Acts.
If you spend the majority of your time in a theological cloister oyster, somebody has sold you bad clams. One of the biggest reasons leaders don’t make a dent is because they don’t interact with people. My mentor Peter Jeffery used to say that the congregation attending his church on Sunday would interact with more people by lunchtime on a Monday than he would in a week. Have a job working among the people you’re trying to reach? You’re already one step closer to being as effective as Paul was at reaching lost people.
THEY WOULD STEP OUTSIDE THEIR COMFORT ZONE
“In all Judea” (Acts 1:8)
Judea represented leaving the place where the apostles were comfortable and getting outside of their church walls. After all, they didn’t want to leave. I mean, why would they?
You’ve got the apostles? Check!
Miracles? Check!
Thousands of people? Check!
Programs?* Check!
Money? Check!
A holy huddle? Um . . . check?
Houston, we have a problem.
The kingdom can’t advance when we’re in a holy huddle. Enter Saul of Tarsus. He unloaded on the early church like Bruce Lee playing Ping-Pong with nunchucks, scattering the church far and wide. Even the early church found that God had ways of scattering them if they wouldn’t move out willingly.
Where are the places you don’t want to go with the gospel? Where are the places that take you outside of your comfort zone? Have you ever considered doing an open mic discussion in a gay coffee house? Starting a spiritual reading group in a Starbucks? Throwing down an open-air church service in the projects? What about training prison inmates to disciple others inside the prison walls? Using the church parking lot to build community in the neighborhood through block parties and community yard sales? If you want to reach the ones that nobody is reaching, you need to go where nobody else is going and do what nobody else is doing. Now more than ever, reaching the world requires us to think outside the box to reach those who won’t fit inside it.
The first-century church was all about expansion. But don’t forget that it took God three times to visit Peter in a dream to finally convince him to push beyond his comfort zone and into the Gentile world. Initially, it was persecution that forced the early church to leave the comfortable confines of Jerusalem. Similarly, the current spiritual climate will force us to go to the unreached. In case you haven’t noticed, they’re not leaping over each other to join our Sunday services. Although culture is described as post-Christian, perhaps people themselves are more aptly described as post-church. They still consider themselves to be spiritual, but Christianity no longer makes sense to them when they come to our churches and then witness our inaction outside of them.
People scratched their heads when Francis Chan traded away his career of megachurch minister, bestselling author, and well-paid circuit speaker for the obscurity of working in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco. What Francis knew is what the church still fails to grasp. You can have the coolest church building, loaded with a Starbucks and the latest gadgets, while still failing to reach the world around you.
I imagine pastors on their commute to church. As they pull out of the driveway, perhaps none of their neighbors know the gospel. They drive past houses with people that don’t know their name, and they drive across a city they never serve. They pull into a neighborhood where their church is nestled, but they don’t know how to reach the neighbors. All the while, the community diverts around the church like a stream bypasses a rock. The water wears down the rock over time, but the rock does nothing to affect the water, except divert its course to pass by. Ignored. That’s the word to describe how our communities react to us. We’ve taught them to ignore us. They never hear from us except for strange “It’s hell without Jesus” memes and anger expressed on Facebook. When Francis Chan left his big church, it was because he knew we had to do better. He knew that the church wouldn’t follow its mission unless it was modeled from the front. A guy standing up on stage and preaching to a room full of Christians isn’t the pattern of the New Testament, nor does it model how to reach the unreached. Chan’s greatest sermon to Cornerstone church was the day he left to become an urban missionary.
Being witnesses in Judea propels us outward from the safety and confines of our churches. Paul and the apostles preached in the synagogues, but that usually didn’t go well. Have you noticed that nearly the entire book of Acts happened outdoors? So did the gospels. In fact, the first effect of the Spirit coming in power was, they went outside. They went to the people, instead of waiting for the people to come to them. They went where it’s at like they had two turntables and microphone.
Every movement of the Holy Spirit resulted in the church getting turned inside out. Most of what the missional movement has focused on is getting around lost people, but as long as we’re still inviting them to come to us, it’s just not missional enough for me. The apostles mastered taking the gospel to where the community already was. They found the marketplace. And they penetrated it with the gospel. Where can we go together that we’re not currently going?
THEY WOULD REACH THE ONES NOBODY WANTED
“And Samaria” (Acts 1:8)
After Pentecost, the apostles reached the marginalized people on the fringe of society that nobody else was reaching. Just like Jesus. It was a slow burn at first, and took them longer than you would have thought to catch on to what God was up to, but they got there in the end.
It wasn’t an accident that Jesus’s enemies accused him of being friends with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. What about you? Do your neighbors think you’re bringing the neighborhood down? Every movement of the Spirit has hit society around the edges, not the mainstream. When the Spirit moves, the marginalized are reached. The Samaritans in Acts. The impoverished during the Moravian Movement. The list goes on. The marginalized flocked to Jesus because he was different than the religious leaders of his day. Unlike many of our modern leaders who compromise the truth itself, Jesus didn’t alter the truth. True, he was the God who demanded holiness, but how would the one who would fulfill all righteousness on behalf of others treat those who were unholy? He got the balance right, yet still scandalized the religious elite, as did the apostles by receiving Samaritans, women, Romans, and gentiles as equals. A church that doesn’t scandalize religious people just isn’t reaching the unreached.
THEY WOULD BECOME MEN AND WOMEN OF ACTION
“To the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8)
Once Jesus thwarted the disciples’ immediate after-breakfast-plans to embark on an eternal, all-expense-paid cruise to heaven, they rolled up their sleeves, got their hands dirty, and muddied their boots. The church instantly shifted from being an insular, exclusive club, to the only insider movement on earth that exists for outsiders.
I’m a huge advocate for interaction within the church walls, but I’m an even bigger advocate for action outside of it. It’s not enough to simply be fascinated by what the disciples said, according to the Bible. Outward expansion won’t happen unless we’re committed to doing what they did.
There is no other way.
You can read.
You can theorize.
You can preach.
The world was turned upside down in the book of Acts. Not the book of Thoughts. Or the book of Plans. Or the book of Missional Strategies. Acts.
Action.
Here’s a commercial to make it simple. If you’re over forty and you picture me saying this while cracking an egg into a frying pan, it’s a lot more effective.
This is the church.
This is the church in action.
Any questions?
IT’S NOT THE YEARS, IT’S THE MILEAGE
It’s not too tall an order to see the church spiritually empowered once again in our time. Each believer has the potential to light a spark that sets the world ablaze. That’s why you’re dangerous. That’s probably why it’s easier, less messy, and more convenient to stay packed like lemmings into predictable rows of pews week after week. Acts is the story of the Spirit of God raging like an out-of-control forest fire in a people who have been consumed with what consumes him. As the Spirit rips through communities, it often rips them apart, transforming them into something beautiful, but destroying what was there in the process, like the torn yet beautiful chrysalis after the butterfly emerges. This also applies to churches. What if God moving in our midst is the end of church as we know it?
For this reason, Jesus contrasted the wild dynamic of the Holy Spirit with the rigid, hardened, and inflexible religious system of his day. He used terms like “new wine” and “old wineskins.” In Jesus’s metaphor, the Holy Spirit must be poured into a new wineskin because it needs to stretch and yield under the expansion. Fermentation is too radical a process for churches that have become old, inflexible, dried up, unyielding containers that are unwilling to expand. As the kingdom expanded throughout Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Rome, it destroyed as much as it renewed. Old systems were threatened as the new wine of the gospel threatened established centers of power. The Ephesians feared they would lose their temple. The circumcision group feared they would lose the traditions of their fathers. Rome feared it might lose its iron grip of power on subdued people and slaves. The Sanhedrin feared they would lose their credibility. Tragically, churches can resist the Holy Spirit because they are afraid to lose what they have.
Thankfully, God is not interested in preserving our wineskins or maintaining our systems. He’s concerned about reaching the lost, even at the cost of our systems, structures, and traditions. John Piper said, “Mission exists because worship doesn’t.”7 The Holy Spirit is ruthlessly committed to bringing worship to Jesus, and he has repeatedly caused massive upheaval of the religious status quo in order to bring him glory. Always faithful to his task, the Spirit’s power busts loose in different epochs in history, like a solar flare unleashed from the sun, and the church’s reach becomes elliptical, thrusting outward beyond its standard borders. These epochs of punctuated equilibrium are marked by things suddenly speeding up, as the kingdom propels itself forward, and the church advances chiefly through individuals desperate enough to take risks as they allow him to take charge.
The church is older than she looks. She’s been through a lot, and like Indy said, “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.” She’s seen a lot of changes, renewals, revivals, and reawakenings. During the Great Awakening, The Holy Spirit worked through Whitefield to the shock of the Church of England. Yet ask eighteenth-century Anglicans what they thought of the early Methodist preachers. Ask Rome what they thought of the upstart monk, Martin Luther. Ask any denominational leader during the sixties what they thought of Chuck Smith and the shirtless, blue jean, hippie preachers in Southern California.
When the church was powerless to make a dent in the youth culture during the hippie era, Chuck Smith sparked the Jesus Movement by pitching a tent in a bean field and opening the doors to half-naked, stoned hippies, which led to the creation of Calvary Chapel. Thousands of youth were transformed as they embraced Jesus and flocked to the beaches to be baptized. Time magazine dramatically captured the baptism scene on one of its covers! Eventually, Calvary Chapel morphed from a movement to a denomination. Throughout history, denominations were formed in the wake of the Holy Spirit’s moving, but when his presence waned, and the revival flames cooled to embers, the movements calcified, ironically, in an attempt to preserve the forward momentum. Alas, every new wineskin eventually becomes an old wineskin given enough time. That’s not to say that denominations can’t rekindle the flames, or recapture what made them dynamic, but church history demonstrates that renewals tend to occur outside of the establishment more often than not. Perhaps the lack of complex structures, hierarchies, and infrastructures make it easier, as it was in Jerusalem.
Yet each of these denominations marked renewals throughout the history of the church like tree rings in a bisected log; seasons of fresh life punctuated by the eventual drying out and hardening of the wood over the centuries. Inevitably, over time, the Methodists, Lutherans, Calvary Chapels, and others ran the risk of becoming brittle, rigid, and dry despite once being on the cutting edge of reaching the unreached in new ways.* The church that does not evangelize will fossilize, but God always has a plan.8 The process begins again as a new movement expands the borders of the kingdom further than before as a new wave of risk takers steps up and steps out. This can happen within any movement when God recaptures the hearts of his children. The Welsh revival of 1904 started when one young man and six teenage girls began to pray for weeks for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Welsh Calvinistic Methodism probably wouldn’t have been your first pick for a wineskin to hold new wine, but God is faithful to meet anyone where they’re at when they’re desperate enough.
The rallying cry of Great Britain is “God save the Queen!” but in the kingdom of God we need to cry, “God save the church!”
But we must wait. We cannot control the work and mission of God, although it’s in our nature to want to. We simply can’t. We never could. But there is a better alternative. What if Jesus was ready to show himself to be the same God of the book of Acts to the church and to you personally? Would you be up for it?
There’s something that happens to a person who reads Acts. Who really reads Acts. They become like a climber deciding they want to take on all 29,029 feet of Mount Everest. The Everest picture book had always looked good on the coffee table, but now there’s that tug to climb it.
That pull . . .
That beckoning to go on that journey, though it might be the hardest thing you ever do.
Feel it? Follow it.
And keep reading.
The greatest adventure beckons.
Discussion Questions
(For Dr. Jones, the Princeton professor in you)
1. Describe a time in your life when God made you wait, trust, and depend on him. What made this difficult? What was the lasting fruit of it?
2. Which of the eight results of waiting on God for his power and help most excites you? Why?
3. Which of the eight results of waiting on God for his power scares you? Why?
4. Which of the eight results of waiting on God for his power challenges you?
Adventurous Actions
(For Indiana, the Temple Raider in you)
1. Make a list of the unreached lost people in your life you would like to reach.
2. Spend five minutes a day in prayer for that person every day.
3. Get around one lost person from your list this week. Take them out to coffee, lunch, or spend time doing a hobby with them.
4. Pray an additional five minutes for that person directly before you meet up with them on the day you meet.
*I owe this quote to a friend named Brian who had a supernatural experience in prayer where this was driven home to him. He’s never been the same since.
*They had an awesome food closet, and a swap meet collective to die for.
*This is not to suggest in any way that these denominations are not valuable, or that the churches within them are not following God in faithfulness. I personally embrace and love the entire body of Christ and trace God moving in all branches of it. I am merely explaining the process of extraordinary movements.