By Brian
Mitchell
As has been said before “sometimes to get to
where we want to be, we need to remember where we came from.” This, I think, is
especially true in striving to be the kind of church that God wants us to be.
To figure out what God expects of us as His people, and how we can be
successful at meeting God’s expectations it can be very beneficial for us to go
back to the beginning of the church. So that we can find out: what kind of
people the early Christians were, what kind of activities they busied
themselves with and how they were successful at meeting the challenges of
Christianity.
To answer these questions, we must go back to
the NT book of Acts. It is there in Acts ch.2 that we read of the establishment
of the Church on the Day of Pentecost, just as had been prophesied by the OT
prophets. While there are many things that we could say about the beginning of
the church, 2 things in particular stand out as being especially relevant to
the topic under consideration today—How the Church can prosper today. The Church
was established through the preaching of the gospel. The Church grew because
people with honest hearts, who were seeking the truth, obeyed the gospel. When
it comes to the growth of the church today, these are two factors which can
easily be duplicated by faithful Christians and those seeking the truth.
With
the combination of these two factors, the Church experienced an explosive
beginning and tremendous early growth. Wayne Jackson reports in His commentary
on Acts “that by the close of the first century there were approximately
100,000 Christians in the city of Rome alone.” This is a staggering statistic,
but it leads me to a conclusion that I have long held. If we will be as
faithful in fulfilling our duties, as the 1st century Christians were in
theirs, then we will once again begin to see the kind of growth that they did.
Is
the Church as prosperous today, as she clearly was in the beginning? How do we
know? Material things cannot be the standard by which we measure the progress
of the church—Rev.3:15:17. Neither can be success be measured by the opinions
of humans, for they are unreliable at best—Rev.3:1. So how do we know if we are
striving or dying? We can measure ourselves against the successes and failures
of the early church.
To do
that we need simply to go back to the book of Acts and examine the early
disciples of Christ, and how being Christians changed their lives, and as a
result of living their faith, changed the world in which they lived. While we
certainly have a large cultural gap between Jerusalem in the first century and
the world in which we live today. I am convinced that if we will strive to
reproduce some of the essential factors critical for a growing and thriving
church to exist, then I believe that we can be every bit as successful today in
winning this world to Christ, as they were nearly 2,000 years ago.
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