We are nothing unless We are everything

It's the way it all goes down in Luke part 2. The acts the Apostles do see a dynamic community established. The new followers first response is to be an everything people. Everything for everyone, in no small amount. You need it and I’ve got it? Then you can have it. You are poor and I am less poor? Then I will choose to become poorer so you can become richer. My home is your home, your home is my home, lets share a meal of bread and wine.

This new life-doing people were incendiary, this wasn’t the Temple or the Synagogue. No, this was a whole different thing, a gathering of Me Temples living out the new Kings message as the echos of their Saviour still ring in their ears. This was the early church. Not an afterthought, or a response, but something planned from before the ages began. This wasn’t God’s new strategy, a means of dealing with the thousands that were joining up, this was an old strategy, an eternal strategy, set in motion before a single word of creation was breathed. Now being propelled into the cities and villages of the ancient middle east. This was the church.

This was a people of a different kind of agreement, not one that required a specially appointed man to engage with God on your behalf. This was a new deal, brokered with a beaten, bruised and tortured thirty-something man suspended by three seven inch nails from a secondhand cross. A deal that would see the Trinitarian God of community, three in one, different but the same providing the means for His people to come back into an everlasting community with Him.

And the response? A people brought back into community with God living out that transaction as a gathering of ordinary people.  Living under the influence of that life changing, community forming relationship is reflected in a new transformed community transforming their community. This is the only response. A people once out of community with their God experiencing the relationally restorative grace, going on to show that grace in simple yet explosive ways to others.

As a body of ordinary people working out an extraordinary purpose in ordinary places we need to recapture the dynamism of the community that we have been welcomed into. We, as a gathering of followers of Jesus really are nothing unless We are everything.

Comments

There are no comments for this article yet.

Write Your Comment