What do we Christians really have to offer the world? One man suggested that the church should just focus on charity. Our world would settle for less than the church has to offer. In Jerusalem, after Pentecost, the new followers of Jesus devoted themselves to the Apostle’s teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Their winsome witness won the city over. They served God and grew more like Christ for the sake of others. This is still the plan for God’s people: we give our Jesus to the world. He is still all we have to offer and everything the world needs. Message based on Acts 2:42-3:10.
Quotes:
Eugene Peterson: It’s not easy to convey a sense of wonder. Let alone resurrection wonder to another person. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent our expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged. It can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there, some sense of engagement.
Malcomb Muggeridge: Lord, help me to never lose the wonder.
Karl Barth: To clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.
E. Stanley Jones: I am better or worse as I pray more or less.
Duane Brooks: Prayer gives us the vision of human need. If I look at the face of my Father, I will also see the people created in his image.
Mother Teresa called the poor of Calcutta: Jesus in his distressing disguise.
Yogi Berra: You can observe a lot by watching.
Steve Green: Every day they pass me by; I can see it in their eyes . . . empty people filled with care . . .headed who knows where . . . on they go through private pain, living fear to
fear, laughter hides their silent cries. Only Jesus hears. People need the Lord. People need the Lord. At the end of broken dreams, he’s the open door.
Albert Camus said, “What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear in such a way that never a doubt never the slightest doubt could arise in the heart of the simplest man.
John McKenzie: If the church were to lose its hierarchy, its clergy, its vast collection of buildings, its stores of learning amassed over the centuries, even the text of its sacred books, and had to face the world with nothing but the living presence of the Risen Jesus and its mission to proclaim the Good News to all nations and people, it would be no less a church than the church of Peter and Paul was. Perhaps it might be more of a church than it is now.
Mike Glenn: When the church discovers Jesus again, the community will find the church again.
Duane Brooks: All we have is Jesus, and He is exactly what everybody needs.
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