Acts - The Promise 9/13
Sermon Series: Acts – Faith Explosion
Text: Acts 1:1-5
“In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. To them he presented himself alive after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”” (Acts 1:1-5, ESV)
Acts – the Explosion of Faith
Imagine a world: A tiny blue and green dot floating in the vastness of space. Imagine a people living on this tiny spinning ball. These people are living out their lives full of the same kinds of hopes and dreams that all people participate in as they fulfill the days of their existence. There are victories and challenges that greet each day but they continue to work and live and survive each day. One day follows another and another in a seemingly endless line; a futile filling up of time.
These are a people of memory as well. They have gathered the generations of their people up and displayed them like a favorite painting that rests in the honored place of their homes. The painting fades as the years pass by though it is dusted regularly and the family gathers around it on special occasions to drink a toast of remembrance and wish in that nostalgic musty kind of way that the exciting focus of this picture would once again bring a specialness; a uniqueness which would set them apart from the rest of the teeming, boiling mass that makes up the life of this place.
One day in the midst of these lives something incredible happens, an explosion takes place which will change forever the people who decide to turn aside from the miasma of their lives and take notice of it. The Creator of the universe steps down from the vastness of His domain and inhabits this little spinning globe. As He places His foot down on the rocky soil of the people’s homeland His foot shrinks down to mortal size and He is covered in the humanity which has been designed to share His existence with Him. He has determined that it is time to pull the paintings down from their place of honor on the peoples mantles and ask the people to join Him in living out the existence which is hinted at in the painting which they worship.
Some of the people barely notice that the world has stopped in mid turn. They have filled their existence up with meaningless to the point that when real purpose confronts them with open arms they revert back to the comfortableness which is all they have known. Others stop and want desperately to join hands with Creator but they are confronted by the gap of failing and fragileness which has become the character of their existence. Then Creator does something which is so incredible that the heavens themselves gasp with the meaning of it. He allows the ultimate fragileness of death to be displayed in Him in order that the people would see that the gap is no longer an impassable gulf but has been bridged by the loving self sacrifice of the Creator.
The story of Acts is the story of the people who have been confronted by the fantastic truth of God’s narrative in the person of Jesus as the Creator made human in order to redefine what it means to be human and bridge the gulf of our failing and fragileness. It is the story of a people who, in living out this new existence, find it impossible to leave their little world simply spinning in futility. They instead share the truth of this new impossibility made possible and in so doing recapture some of their sphere for the Creator.
It is also our story. As we are confronted by the narrative of changed lives experiencing new purpose and commitment we are experiencing what it means for our own story. What it means to live out lives of purpose, a purpose so vast and eternal it could only be communicated through an actual relationship with the original author.
