E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
Duguid Turning the World Upside Down
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-4335-9897-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Lessons for the Church from Acts 1-8
E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-4335-9897-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Iain M. Duguid (PhD, University of Cambridge) is professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. He has planted churches in England, California, and Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous commentaries and articles.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
2
Acts 1:12–26
Elton John was wrong. Actually, Sir Elton (to give him his full title) has been wrong about many things, but in particular, I think that he was wrong when he sang that “sorry seems to be the hardest word.”1 Yes, it is sometimes hard to genuinely apologize for doing something wrong, but if Sir Elton had spent more time around children, perhaps he would know that “sorry” is sometimes pretty easy to say, especially if you don’t have to sound as if you mean it. In reality, sorry is not always the hardest word. A much harder word, especially for children but also for the rest of us, is “wait.” Wait until your birthday; then you can open your present. Wait until your paycheck comes before you buy that new couch. Wait for exams to be over and summer to begin. In my experience, the word “wait” is a whole lot harder than “sorry.”
“Wait” is what Jesus told the disciples to do before he left them and ascended into heaven: “And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father” (Acts 1:4). That is exactly what they do. In this passage, we see what the disciples spend their time doing while they wait. They don’t spend their time doing crosswords or playing video games; they don’t fill up their days watching television or following the sporting exploits of the Jerusalem Jaguars. Instead, we see them doing two things that are models for us to copy: praying in faith and preparing in faith.
Praying in Faith
To begin with, we are told that the eleven apostles meet together with the women, and with Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers, joining constantly in prayer (Acts 1:12–14). Luke highly values women in a way that wasn’t common in the ancient world, and so they appear regularly in his account of the early church. It is Luke who tells us the story of Martha and Mary, with Martha distractedly busy in the kitchen while Mary sits at Jesus’s feet, choosing the “good portion” (Luke 10:38–42). Here, Luke notes that even though none of the apostles are women, the women aren’t simply shoved aside to join Martha in the kitchen; they too join in the important task of prayer with the apostles.
There are two specific aspects to the prayers of the early Christians that Luke wants us to see. The first aspect is the consistency and persistency of their prayer: they are constantly found praying together (Acts 1:14). The early believers didn’t just meet together once in a while for a prayer meeting. They didn’t just open and close their meetings in prayer. Rather, they were devoted to prayer. This is a serious challenge to me personally because I don’t think that the same could be said of me. Instead, I’m constantly and persistently busy. Like Martha, I’m devoted to doing many good things, but I’m not nearly so constantly and persistently engaged in prayer, either individually or together with other believers. I’m convicted by this attitude of the first apostles and challenged to reorder my priorities, as perhaps you are. Prayer is really difficult for most of us, and few of our churches seem to be constantly and persistently devoted to prayer.
In order for that to change, we need to reorder our thinking about the church, to make our practice fit with our theory. When we commit ourselves to pray, we are reminding ourselves that what is really important is what God does in this world, not what we do. What will make or break our church as an effective part of God’s spiritual kingdom is not the number of small group meetings that we organize or the evangelistic campaigns that we run or the good deeds we do in our community. It is not even the number of great sermons that we hear. The greatest sermons in the world will have no impact unless the Holy Spirit opens the hearts of those who listen, including us. The greatest evangelization campaign has no power to convert people apart from the intervention of the Holy Spirit to bring new life into the hearts and minds of spiritually dead men and women. The best-run programs to help men, women, youth, or families will be of little value if they are simply an expression of our own efforts. But when God takes up our rather feeble efforts, he will accomplish whatever he desires. If God is at work in our hearts and, through us, in our community, then people will be changed and God will be glorified in and through our churches.
We believe that in theory, of course, but that belief is not always evident from the way we operate. We may say that we are desperately needy people who can do nothing without Christ, but then we often persist in acting as if we were perfectly competent by ourselves to accomplish anything we set our minds to. Even when we feel overwhelmed by life’s circumstances, very often prayer is quite literally the last thing that we think to do. Yet if we really believed that only God can accomplish his holy purposes for us and for our church, that conviction would commit us to far more persistent and constant prayer.
What is more, prayer is not merely a more effective way of getting through our to-do lists. Prayer brings us into the presence of our heavenly Father, who loves us and cares deeply for us. When we fail to pray, we are acting like the spiritual orphans that we very often think ourselves to be, deep down in our hearts. But if we have a loving Father who delights to walk with us through life, to delight in our moments of triumph and to surround us with his arms in our moments of pain and despair, why wouldn’t we run to talk to him all the time?
Praying Together
The other aspect of their prayer that Luke highlights here is the fact that the disciples pray “with one accord” (Acts 1:14). This means more than simply the fact that they are all praying in the same place at the same time. They are united; they are of one mind in their prayers. They do not merely pray as individuals for their own individual needs and desires; rather, they put their minds together as well as their voices to pray for their common needs and aspirations. They bear one another’s burdens together before the throne of grace (Gal. 6:2). This too is something we can imitate. Such a bearing of burdens can happen in many different contexts: when individuals meet together spontaneously for prayer, as part of a women’s Bible study or a men’s meeting, or when the whole church assembles every week to pray. We have the privilege, as individuals and as a church, to meet together and to link our hearts together regularly in prayer.
We are intensely affected by the individualism of our culture—perhaps especially those of us who are men. Men are encouraged by our society to model ourselves on the image of the rugged outdoorsman, driving our own 4x4 pickup truck across a solitary landscape, making our own decisions, running our own life without reference to anyone else. Sometimes that pattern was reinforced through our interactions with our own fathers. But we are called to be an interdependent body of believers, not an assortment of free-floating toenails and eyelashes (1 Cor. 12:18–26), and one of the ways we can express our membership in Christ’s body is by meeting to pray together in one accord. You don’t need permission from the pastor or elders to do this: find someone else within the church and plan to meet regularly for prayer so that you constantly remind one another that it is God whose work is really significant in the church.
Preparing for Mission
Praying isn’t the only thing that the disciples do while they wait, however. They also prepare in faith for the task ahead—by finding another apostle to take Judas’s place. And once again there are lessons for us to learn.
In the first place, we need to learn a godly fear from the fate of Judas. The name Judas has for us become so intertwined with the concept of betrayal that it is hard for us to put ourselves in the shoes of the first apostles and experience their shock at his demise. In the space of a few days, Judas goes from being a trusted member of the inner circle, an apostle, one with whom they had eaten and journeyed for three solid years, to a traitor who sells their Lord for thirty pieces of silver and then dies by his own hand (Matt. 27:3–8; Acts 1:16–19). Just how shocking this series of events is to the disciples can be seen from their reaction when Jesus tells them at the Last Supper that one of them will betray him (Matt. 26:21). They don’t turn to one another and say, “Well, we all know who that will be. I never liked that Judas guy. He’s a shifty character if ever there was one.” No, their response is for each of them to say, “Is it I?” (Matt. 26:22). It is more believable to them that they themselves should betray Jesus than that one of the other apostles would do it, so high is their confidence and trust in one another. But nonetheless, Judas betrays his Lord.
If Judas can betray Jesus, why not someone else? It would have been natural for the loss of Judas to have struck fear into each of their hearts. There is a certain appropriateness to that fear as well. “Why not me? Why wouldn’t I betray the Lord too? I’m not more noble of heart than Judas, and I certainly haven’t been better taught and discipled than Judas was. He spent three years being schooled twenty-four hours a day by...
