Tuesday, December 14, 2004
It's amazing how quickly you can get 300 college men to change their plans on a moment's notice. It happened several times when I was in school. Okay, it's late at night. We're all up in our rooms studying, or sleeping, or goofing off (that was the other guys), and we're certainly not planning to go out. Yet, within a matter of minutes all 300 men are out of their rooms - out of the dorm. It is amazing what one fire bell can do, isn't it? There was no fire, just an occasional fire drill. But the call summoned us from whatever we were buried in, brought us out of our rooms and out into the night.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Call To Leave Your Room."
You can't read the book of Acts without marveling at the explosive impact of those first Christians. They rocked their city; they saw thousands come to Christ. They saw people come to Christ daily. They made such an impact, that it spread across the world and 20 centuries, and they had the same Savior we have; the same Holy Spirit living in them! So what happened? Let's look at one of those keys to life changing, city changing, world changing Christianity.
Our word for today from the Word of God, Acts 4:31 says, "And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the Word of God boldly. All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions were his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the Apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all." If you compare this chapter with chapter 2, it says in just three verses, they were together, together, together - three times. These people had a life-or-death message to deliver. They realized the urgency and the enormity of getting the Gospel out to an area that was unreached, and they knew they had to work on it together.
C. S. Lewis suggested that Christianity is like this big house. (I'm going to borrow from his example and add to it a little.) Everybody enters the house through the same long hallway. In that corridor you've got the cross and the empty tomb. We all went there to get our sins forgiven. That's how we all came to Christ. Off that hall are many little rooms. Not long after we come in the center corridor we find one of those rooms we like and we go in it and we stay there - like college students on a busy night of studying. In one of those rooms off the central corridor they're sprinkling people to baptize them; in another room they're dunking them. In another room they're speaking in tongues; in another room they're talking about people who speak in tongues. In one room they're praying with hands in the air; in another room they're praying with their hands in their pocket. In our rooms we spend a lot of time on our group's distinctives - the things that make us us, and that tend to divide us from the folks in the other rooms.
There's one call that has the power to do what the fire alarm did in our dorm that night and summoned us from our individual rooms to go out together. It is the call of Jesus to seek and to save the lost. They need to be brought to the center corridor that we all claim, to get to the cross to have their sins forgiven and the empty tomb to meet their living Savior.
While we've been busy building our Christian sub-cultures, we lost our culture. Two-thirds of Americans don't know who did the Sermon On The Mount or even half of the Ten Commandments. Most of the people around know almost nothing about our book or our Savior. Could it be because we've lost one of the power words of the early church - together?
It's time to look out the window and realize the enormity of reaching the lost and get out of our rooms, and join in urgent prayer together for the lost and aggressive plans to reach them. The Lord's sounding the alarm. If we hear His cry for harvest workers, we'll be out of our little room and pulling others out of theirs to rescue the people who are dying just outside.