But wait...there's more!

"Gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, "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 1:4-5

In the verses before the one's I've highlighted here Luke was clear that Jesus had given orders for His people. These orders where to make disciples as we read in Matthew 28:19. It's our call as believers to make disciples as the Church. While Jesus was clear in what He wanted done He says to his disciples "but wait".

Wait? That didn't make much sense to me the first time I read it. Jesus has risen from the grave and gives them a mission and now is about to leave so they can get busy doing the work of God and instead He says to wait? I, being a man, am not a professional at waiting. I hate it. The microwave takes much too long for me. Why in the world is Jesus giving me an order and then telling me to wait??  

Well I think it's important for us to understand that Jesus knew who the people He was working with.

In verse 2 of chapter 1 Luke talks about the disciples and refers to them as those " ...whom He had chosen." Jesus knew these men. He spent time with them and He loved them. That should be so comforting to us as believers to know that the Lord really knows His people because as believers we are His people too!

It's because He knew His disciples that knew that they could not change the world by themselves.

Jesus had walked through life with His disciples and taught them what it was to be a true follower of the Lord. A crash course from the Creator of the universe on how to live life but now He was leaving. He had finished His mission and now it was time for His disciples to be His hands and feet but Jesus never planned from them to do it on their own. Jesus was sending them the Holy Spirit and through Him they would continue to reach the world and leave His fingerprints behind them. Jesus viewed the Holy Spirit very highly and even said in John 16 that it was better for Him to leave for the Holy Spirit to come for the disciples! 

We as believers have the this same Holy Spirit and are not expected to do the work of the Lord by ourselves! We are called to rely on the Holy Spirit and through it, give the world a picture with our lives what it is to be a believer.

3,2,1 Action!

"The first account I composed, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach,

until the day when He was taken up to heaven, after He had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom He had chosen."
Acts 1:1-2

I will always remember what I felt like when I was first saved. I can remember saying to myself "This is great! I'm not going to hell!...now what?". I think the book of Acts starts off the way it does to address that very question of "Now what?". In verse 2 Luke writes " after He had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom He had chosen.". The first thing we should identify is that the Lord had given orders. He didn't leave this world without telling His people exactly what He desired for them to do but rather gave them clear instructions. Jesus had lived life with His disciples teaching them through His actions and giving them a picture of what is was to truly follow Him. In the very last chapter of Matthew we find these words of Jesus, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations..". This is command of every believer! Not just Pastors and not just people in ministry but all believers! 

When Jesus was crucified some of the disciples went back to what they knew. We find Peter and he is back to fishing and that's the very tendency we have as people when we become believers. My nature when I was saved was now trying to fit God into the life I already had but that is not what the Lord is looking for at all! He's looking for us to fit our lives around who He is and our relationship with Him! Even Francis Chan remembers back when he was first saved, the thing he prayed to God about was not losing any of his friends now that he was a Christian. See we have a default setting of just going back to whats familiar to us but we are called to a completely different life. Our lives should look radically different from when we had no idea who Jesus was compared to calling Him "Lord, Lord". Paul using the analogy in Ephesians of the difference is as big as being dead and then being alive. That's as different as something can be when you really stop and think about it and that's the picture Luke is painting to start of the book.

Jesus did not leave this earth without giving His marching orders to His people in a very clear way. 

Learning

"I can do all things through Him who strengthens me."

Philippians 4:13

One of the most quoted verses in all the Bible. Paul was using it in the context of being "content in whatever circumstances" because the one thing he could always relay on was the Lord. No matter what he had, a lot or a little, it didn't matter because the one constant was the Lord. Paul learned this lesson but by no means do I believe that he learned it the way he expected to. 

See the more and more I learn about the Lord it becomes painfully obvious that He rarely, if ever, teaches me things the way I expect Him to. 

To take that even further He rarely teaches me the way I want Him to. 

In my mind my life would be so much "better" and so much more "fulfilling" if God would just teach me lessons the way I want. Nothing painful, nothing too difficult, nothing that shakes my world or breaks my heart but that's rarely the way the Lord brings truth into our lives. He can but I think C.S Lewis put it best when he said "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." The very things we try our hardest to run from and escape from in this world, such as heartbreaks, trials and pain, can be greatest tools the Lord uses to reach our heartstrings.

I've prayed to the Lord countless times to teach me more about what it is to truly follow Him. To truly be completely surrendered in every aspect of my life. Do we really mean what we pray? Even when His answer is in the form of extreme pain or heartache? Growing to look more and more like Him rarely is a process we have control of and Paul learned this in a way he probably didn't ever expect to. Paul certainly had to question what God was doing at multiple times in his life but all those things, the good and painful, led Paul to write down this verse.