Holy Disturbances
Not finding them there, they dragged out Jason and some of the other believers instead and took them before the city council. “Paul and Silas have caused trouble all over the world,” they shouted, “and now they are here disturbing our city, too.” - (Acts 17:6)
G. Campbell Morgan said, “Organized Christianity which fails to make a disturbance is dead.”
It seems like wherever Paul went, there was either a conversion or a riot. There was never a dull moment with the apostle. Their critics in Thessalonica said that Paul and Silas had “caused trouble all over the world.” Then they added, “And now they are here disturbing our city, too” (Acts 17:6).
That is what we need today: a holy disturbance. We need to get back to the way the early church did things. The church was not perfect two thousand years ago, just as it isn’t perfect today. We can see as we read the book of Acts that the early church had all the challenges the church faces today. They had hypocrisy. They had division. But at the same time, it was the church that turned their world upside down.
Indeed, all the things we read about in Acts happened—but they didn’t happen every day. They happened over a period of time. Acts is a record of a thirty-year period, from AD 33 to AD 63. There were interventions of the Holy Spirit, but we also see people living out their faith in a practical way. It was the Spirit of God working through the Word of God in the hearts of the people of God. So we don’t need to re-envision the church. We don’t need to rethink the church. Instead, we need to rediscover the church. It is the only organization that Christ himself established.
In a way, the book of Acts is still being written today. I am not suggesting that we add new pages to the Scriptures, but I am saying that we can add new chapters to church history. And we are writing our own right now.
Copyright © 2013 by Harvest Ministries. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
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