Acts 11:19-30 – The Church in Antioch
- “Tips to Playing Catch Up”
- The movement begins to form organically
- The growth of the Church was not a pre-planned organized event.
- It is a story of the followers of God desperately trying to catch up with what God’s Spirit is doing. It is a story of the leaders quick response to seeing the new things God was doing.
- After the small story of Cornelius, suddenly the Gospel spreads to the wider Gentile world.
- This is not planned: it is the result of Stephen’s persecution.
- Apostles are sent out to find out and help the new churches to grow.
- This was not planned: it is the result of new sparks of God’s move catching amongst seemingly random groups of people.
- The people of the movement are given a name: ‘Christians’
- This was not planned: Jesus never instigated it, neither did the newly named Christians. It was given to them by non-believers and was meant to be derogatory. Christian means ‘little messiah’ or ‘little Christ’. It was meant as an insulted but was adopted by us because it made sense.
- [Interesting how the world can sometimes summaries who we are better than we can – maybe we need to realize that the truth is sometimes best represented by what they see and less by what we want to present.]
- Bill Gates in his book ‘The Speed of Thought’ prophesied that as the key to success in the 80’s was quality and the key in the 90’s was innovation/re-engineering, so the key to the naughties would be velocity. How quickly a business could react.
- Amazing how quickly the world can want to react to the Holy Customer and how slowly we can react to the Holy Spirit.
- What does a move of God in my life look like?
- It is not planned by me because it will look different from what I expect.
- It can happen at any time.
- It needs my quick response and participation.
· Praying that I will be sensitive to the Spirit and try to respond quickly to Him.
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