After the Holy Spirit first gave birth to the church and marked the first followers of Jesus by his holy fire, the immediate results in their lives were dramatic and all-encompassing.
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42-47).
I long for that kind of church today — a unified body of Christ. And I believe God longs for this as well. This is a church unified by a clear vision of our compelling mission and purpose in this world. It is a church drawn together, as believers everywhere learn to view the lost people all around them as God sees them. And it is a church that shares with these lost souls a single, simple, unifying message — the good news of Jesus Christ.
The first-century believers began in a small room with just a handful of people, but they took that challenge, and God used their faithfulness to make an eternal impact on their culture and the world. God’s people now number in the hundreds of millions worldwide and while we may not have the same mission field, we all have the same command from Jesus — evangelize the world.
Just imagine what can be accomplished when his people move together to reach the lost. And you can be a part of this holy mandate by reaching out to those around you — your family, your work colleagues, your neighbors.
Nicky Cruz, internationally known evangelist and prolific author, turned to Jesus Christ from a life of violence and crime after meeting David Wilkerson in New York City in 1958. The story of his dramatic conversion was told first in The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson and then later in his own best-selling book Run, Baby, Run.