All jacked up

I've been reading through Acts again with a friend of mine, and it is jacking me up. Seriously, it blows my mind! It amazes me that each time I read through this letter how I see the stories from a new perspective. A couple of thoughts from what I was reading today.

What kind of 'rules' do we as Christians place on people? We might not say these outright, but we tend have a lot of unwritten 'expectations' of someone who is following Christ. It was interesting to me that as all of these new people were finding their way in following Jesus that the leaders basically boiled it down to four of those 'rules' to keep. The Jews had tons of rules, but for the new followers they thought if they could get these four down that they would be good. (Those four seem strange to me today, except the one to stay away from sexual immorality.) Could we do that? Narrow down are list of rules to agree on the basics someone needs to chase after Jesus.

Another thing that struck me was that I often hear churches say they are an 'Acts' or new testament church. Really? It seems to me that these churches were leaning into God and trusting the Holy Spirit to lead them. By doing that, they were throwing out a lot of the old rules and making it up as they went along. I mean they didn't have an 'Acts' example to follow. They had to trust God and not rely on what had been done before (the old testament way of having a ton of rules hadn't worked out so well because no one could keep them all). Are we trusting God and looking for the ways he wants us to go even though it may have never been done that way before. Definitely a lot more risky, but also the chance to be remarkable in the world today. Why do you think so many people were being drawn to this new church? They were obviously turning things upside down and meeting people's needs. Do we as the Church do that today? Are we leaning so heavily into God's direction or trying to keep up with what we have always done?

Final thought, the church back then had problems also. We tend to avoid the problems and pretend they aren't there a lot of the time. I read today how Paul and Barnabas had such a huge disagreement that they split company and went their separate ways. Barnabas had been the one to take a young Paul under his wing and now they can't agree on who to take on a trip. There was jealousy that some widows were being taken care of while others were being neglected. Some said that certain things needed to be done (circumcision anyone?) while others said that it was irrelevant. The interesting thing was that God still moved through this imperfect, messed up group of people. Gives me hope for us today. We are just as messed up and imperfect today. Think if we are pursuing Him that he still might be able to work through us and accomplish some incredible things? When somebody reads about us 2,000 years from now will they be trying to base their lives on our example? Or do we become a footnote or worse yet totally forgotten because we didn't do anything remarkable? Hope God is jacking up your world today as well.