Acts 8:1-8 – The Church persecuted and scattered plus Philip in Samaria.
- “Why God shakes the tree”.
- Sometimes God shakes the tree to see what falls out.
- Little is sacred to him, including our local church.
- More important to Him is His kingdom. If that means persecuting a church or destroying a iconic temple so be it.
- In this case when he shakes the tree, some very encouraging things fall out.
- Philip – not the disciple but a Grecian Jew – shares his faith wherever he goes.
- God will often strip away our comfy systems when there is a danger of us relying on them too much.
- For many followers of Jesus, our local church although the world’s greatest invention, can become that comfy system.
- Reliance on the system means we ignore the Spirit.
- Jesus had told them to reach to four corners of the earth and had given them His Spirit to empower them. Until this point however, they had not it seems took Him seriously.
- I wonder why the Apostles were not scattered. Could it be they served the Kingdom better by staying in Jerusalem? Not sure.
- Will pray today that I will not rely on my systems.
- I would rather be supple than broken.
It seems as humans we are prone to constantly making things more "comfy", until no desire for anything exists. We even pass this on to our children by giving them an inhertance of money, as if money was the greatest thing we had to give. The more we tune into the Holy Spirit, the farther away from Comfy he takes us, the more we are apt try and make things comfy again. But the question for me is "Why am I not more excited when God takes me away from comfy?" I think he is trying to show the world his power and not my power, which should excite me. I think of Gideon and wonder what he thought after 33,000 men left his army and he had just 300. I could be wrong, but I don't think he was saying "Sweet, this is gonna be awesome how we take them out!". He was probably thinking more like me "God, uh, I don't know if you have noticed, but I only have 300 guys here...was that what you were trying to do?"
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