The Book of Acts – Examples of Faith
Living Hope has just started a 10 week series studying through the book of Acts at our weekly house church. This is an important study for us as we come from a movement of churches that strives to emulate the faith and reliance on God that we see in the first century as recorded in Scripture.
In addition, as a new church plant, we get to see first-hand the challenges of taking the gospel into a new area. Now in the book of Acts, Peter and Paul really take the gospel to entirely new frontiers where Christ had never been named. Rochester Minnesota is not unreached, but yet, as we’ve surveyed people and talked to leaders of other churches there seems to be a large portion of the community who have no regular contact with the church or Christians. This leads us to feel a sense of connection with those early Christians as they stepped out for Christ.
We can learn a lot from the example and the patterns that we see in Acts. For instance there is a large emphasis on community and working together in the book. The new believers in Acts 2 shared everything in common and the Apostle Paul waited for others to join him before moving on in Acts 17. We feel that this focus on community and working together is a model for how the church could and should strive to live in cooperation and harmony.
Finally, I feel that the Holy Spirit’s role in the book of Acts cannot be understated. He is present and active throughout the book and should likewise be apparent in our work today. We focus on the fruit of the Spirit in our lives and displaying love for one another as the miracles that he performs in our daily lives. As we strive to be a loving, grace-filled, and outwardly focused family of believers we can expect the Holy Spirit to continue to work in and through us in similar ways to how he did it in the first century. We don’t feel the need to expect fireworks-style miracles, but instead look for the radical transformation of each individual life as God does his work.
The book of Acts doesn’t contain many commands like the Epistles do, but it instead provides examples and patterns that we can look to in order to guide our young church in following the path God has for us. This study is going to be great!