Acts 8:4
Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.
So, there I was, minding my own business, when Parker, one of the 11 year-old twin-wonders who belong to me, asks me if I want him to say the Declaration of Independence. Not typically what you’d expect to hear as you finish up a bowl of brown sugar and maple syrup oatmeal, so I said sure. You can image my face as I read along and heard my son say it, word for word, line by line, all the way down to the part about “throwing off such government.” It was pretty impressive.
Of course, something else caught my eye as I was reading along, and it was the line that says “…all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer…than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Wow! There it was, in black and white (and the yellow highlighter that Parker had been using). Even back in 1776, people did things – even things that made them suffer – because it was more convenient than change. Shoot, they might as well have included the line “because we’ve always done it that way” in there, too!
People don’t like change. Acts chapter 8 tells us that the early church was no different. They had received the Holy Spirit, had seen thousands of souls come into the kingdom, and were enjoying a nice little round of applause for their brand new church growth paradigm. We don’t know for sure, but I suspect that they may have even been in the early planning stages for a church growth conference at which Peter would have been the keynote speaker delivering “3 Steps to Adding Thousands to Your Church Daily.” Everything was going along as planned, when suddenly, persecution broke out. Not just any persecution, mind you, but a great one. And not just against anybody, but against the church. It was massive and it was direct, and I’m sure it left the planning for that conference in shambles.
Not far removed from the heyday of Peter’s pentecostal altar call, the leaders are now burying Stephen and hearing the screams of men and women being dragged off to prison. Verse 4 tells us how they responded to it: they preached the word. It didn’t matter to them where they were dragged, because they were preaching the whole way to the people doing the dragging. Verse 1 tells us that this great persecution drove them all to Judea and Samaria, places that Jesus had already told them to take the gospel way back in chapter 1, verse 8. It kind of begs the question, doesn’t it? If they had gone willingly to those places in the first place instead of planning that conference, perhaps a persecution wouldn’t have been needed to get them there?
At any rate, these first century believers had a lot in common with the guys writing the Declaration of Independence, didn’t they? And we have a lot in common with all of them, too. Because of our propensity for the status quo, sometimes a little kick in the pants is what it takes to get us preaching again. That’s not great news if you think a kick might be coming, but it’s wonderful news for those of us who are under a bit of attack and think that maybe we missed a turn on the way to that conference about how the faith is all butterflies and rose petals.
So, if you went to bed in a good place and woke up in a bad one, take heart! There’s a little scattering in the forecast for you, but God is in control and He will put you right where He needs you to preach, because you’ve got something that someone you haven’t met yet needs to hear. You can find hope, too, in knowing that you’re not alone. There’s a whole bunch of us getting the boot to Samaria with you!
Let’s meet up and do some tag-team preaching. I’ll see you there.
