“A great wave of persecution began that day, sweeping over the church in Jerusalem; and all the believers except the apostles were scattered through the regions of Judea and Samaria.”
Now it’s interesting to note that on the same day Stephen is stoned Saul begins to lead this great wave of persecution against the church in Jerusalem. It’s like he couldn’t wait to get to work in stamping out what he was mostly convinced was a heretical sect which threatened the Temple and Judaism itself. He is overzealous and so over the top in how he moves that he appears to be like someone stifling conviction. He had just witnessed how Stephen was killed and it strikingly resembled the reports of how Jesus died on the cross. For example, Stephen prayed for the forgiveness of his enemies just like Jesus did. But then astonishingly Stephen testifies to have seen Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father right before he falls asleep in death. Saul must have been wondering if Stephen was telling the truth, so in order to silence the voice of his conscience he makes the choice to immediately start persecuting the church. And at this point you may rightfully be asking why God would permit such persecution to come upon His church, yet it was this very thing that pushed the scattered believers into Judea and Samaria, in direct fulfillment of what Jesus said in Acts 1:8! You see, what we’re learning here is that God shifts us from the comfort of complacency into the momentum of mission by...
PERMITTING A DANGEROUS DISRUPTION.
Please notice I said permitting and not causing. God is not the author of evil. The complexity of what God is dealing with is that His character of love inherently means He truly gives the freedom to make choices even when they aren’t good for us or others. The church in Jerusalem made choices that amounted to maintaining the status quo, which was keeping the Gospel from going to the world and Saul made the choice to reek havoc on the church by persecuting it. Satan and his agencies were also at hand making choices to influence these actions in order to discourage and destroy the church, thus keeping it from spreading the Good News about Jesus. And though God is always present, on the ground, preventing bad things from happening, sometimes the collective hardness of hearts, their poor choices, and particular circumstances in which His immediate intervention would result in Satan rushing in to justify, before the onlooking universe, his age old accusation that God is not love and cannot be trusted because He’s a selfish, controlling dictator that doesn’t truly give His creatures free will. Therefore, God is sometimes pushed, by a series of human choices, into an emergency in which, He painfully permits something to happen that He doesn’t want, but that He’s also planned beforehand to turn around and override for good.
Just like the church experienced a dangerous disruption in the death of Stephen and the subsequent persecution that immediately broke out, so the 21st century church has experienced a dangerous disruption in the COVID-19 pandemic, those that have gotten sick and died from it, and it’s immediate interruption to the status quo of how we’ve been doing church. Several of you during the pandemic, that weren’t able to gather together in the way we were used to, felt scattered throughout the surrounding area like the Jerusalem church. During the periods of strict quarantine restrictions, we had here in the building, during our live worship services, a skeleton crew including the pastors, elders, deacons and a few serving participants, much like the apostles who stayed behind in Jerusalem during the persecution. And though God is not the cause of COVID-19 and suffers deeply along with those who’ve suffered from it, we also need to be asking the penetrating question of what is God saying to the church when He’s allowed such a dangerous disruption to completely interrupt our status quo! I believe He’s saying normal wasn’t working to effectively fulfill the mission and it’s time for us to shift!
You see, in permitting this dangerous disruption, God was also mysteriously accomplishing another purpose in Saul the persecutor, that one may not immediately see at this point in the story. After some devout men came and buried Stephen, which was illegal to do at the time for someone who had died under Stephen’s circumstances, Saul tried to destroy the church not by finding them all gathered in a large building called “the church”, but from house to house in Jerusalem, dragging out both men and women, and throwing them into prison. You see, though the church had settled into the comfort of complacency, Saul found them still doing the foundational thing Jesus modeled and taught them to do for effective mission, which was relationally multiplying disciples in small groups from house to house. The church has always been intended to exist in multiple small gatherings in the spaces where people do life throughout a city or metro area. What’s so amazing about this is that while Saul sought to destroy the church from house to house, God was exposing him to a core part of the method he would use to plant churches after converting to Jesus Messiah! Unbeknownst to him and the church, God was already providentially putting the shift into effect by transforming Saul the persecutor into Paul the preacher of the Gospel to the Gentiles!
Family, instead of bemoaning the loss of the normal that was, we should be moving with the Spirit into the shift that is! This is what movements do; they move! Some of us need to move into a fully surrendered relationship with Jesus Christ. Some of us need to follow the method of Jesus for making and growing disciples and get into a small group, which we call Grow Groups. Some of us need to quit spectating from the pew and join a ministry where you can serve based on your spiritual gifts. And all of us need to be prayerfully and organically building relationships with people in your spheres of influence so they can be discipled within your Grow Group. Let’s stop making excuses and shift!
So with the Apostles still in Jerusalem, what were these scattered believers going to do now in the regions of Judea, Samaria and beyond? We find out in verse 4, which says…
Stay tuned for Part 3…
CJ Cousins
Follower of Jesus, Husband, Father, Associate Pastor for Younger Generations at Vienna SDA Church and Speaker/Author for Living For Him. CJ’s passion is to live, preach & teach the Good News about Jesus and multiply disciples for His Kingdom.