Walls and Hurdles

I'm helping teach the adult discipleship class at Grace.  Getting to be one of the teachers for this class is a great joy.  Teaching adults is such a source of learning for me.  There is in that room a great wealth of wisdom and I, being a young man, often get much more than I could ever give.

I also learn so much from my time teaching that class because I put myself under the Word and under the guidance of great teachers.  Currently we are going through the book of Acts.  This means I learn from the teacher's guide materials written by a group led by Tim Keller and John Stott's commentary on Acts.

The book of Acts can be split into two main parts.  Part one is chapters 1-12 and highlights the growth of the early church and part two is chapters 13-28 and it follows the ministry of Paul.  We've just finished part one of Acts.

Throughout the first section of Acts we see God working mightily.  In this portion of Dr. Luke's book we see several cultural/racial walls and several hurdles placed before the church.  We read of God smashing through every wall and jumping every hurdle to grow His Church.

I've often said that much of the first twelve chapters of Acts can be summarized like this: "They can be Christians, too?!"  In the first part of Acts we see God at Pentecost bursting through the dividing wall of language to get His Gospel to His people.  We read as God sends people to bring the Gospel even to those the Jews hated: the Samaritans.  We read as God brings the Gospel to a seeking Ethiopian and a rebelling Saul.  We see God grant repentance that leads to life "even to the Gentiles" (Acts 11:18).  And we read as brave, maverick missionaries go to cosmopolitan Antioch to bring Christ to so diverse a group that when those who want to describe them place a label on them they call them Christians because Christ was their only unifying characteristic. 

There wasn't a type of person that the Gospel wasn't for and there isn't a type of person that the Gospel isn't for today.  This isn't a statement of universalism or one that speaks against the idea of limited atonement, it is plainly to say that God has ransomed every type of person in the world to Himself.

In Acts we see many hurdles jumped in the first twelve chapters.  God not only scaled hurdles in the book of Acts, but He used them as part of His master plan.  We see God scaling the hurdles of disease, injury, hypocrisy, selfishness, massive persecution, institutional unfairness in food distribution, stoning and beheadings.  Through all this mad raging of Satan and the other opponents of the Gospel Acts 12:24 tells us: "But the Word of God continued to increase and spread."

Walls and hurdles.

What walls have you set up in your heart that God must break through?  What barriers of culture or race have you erected in your mind?  What types of people do you have a hard time believing the Gospel is for?

What hurdles do you have in your life that you think are too difficult for God to scale?  What obstacle have you decided was a hindrance to your walk with God?  What prayer seems too big for you to pray?

Every wall can and must be broken down.  Every hurdle can most definitely be scaled and will certainly be used for His glory and your good.  Section one of the book of Acts tells us that God is in the business of hurdle jumping and wall smashing.  Join with Him is smashing the walls of division and praying for the hurdles in your life to be scaled and used for His glory today.