The Fourth and our celebrations often involve fireworks that have our faces fixed to the skies. In Acts 1, the disciples were doing the same, fixed on another spectacle: Jesus being taken up into the clouds at his ascension precipitated the formation of a heavier fog. Did you see it? It was a fog that settled squarely on the disciples’ faces. They were flummoxed:
“Whh…whh…well…wait a second, Lord. We thought this would be the time you’d take the lead. We assumed you’ve returned to roll up your sleeves and start renovating. Uh, in case you didn’t realize, Rome still rules, and a kingdom still needs constructing. Is now the time? And if it is, how can you perform a new work in the world if you’re presumably leaving it?”
But before we bang the gavel in judgment of their shortsightedness, it behooves us to look in the mirror. Aren’t we guilty of the same? Turn the pages of the recent or distant past and recount the occurrences that you stared aimlessly into the skies, hedging your hopes that someday soon your state would change as a result of God somehow showing up and changing your situation—almost like an episode of HGTV’s Property Brothers.
While it’s certainly not beyond God’s capacity to change circumstances and therefore change us, I’m just saying it’s much less popular to pray that God change us and therefore transform our circumstances.
But here’s the thing: When everything else matters, nothing else changes.
At one point in time for the disciples, everything else mattered:
The threat of Rome and its politics.
Concern over what others might say or do.
The fear of persecution and its pain.
Confusion of purpose and feelings of inadequacy.
And then there was that dreaded fear of death.
If the above represented everything else, then everything else mattered. We have a lot of “everything else’s” as well. I won’t list them here, but nothing else changes when everything else matters. We don’t change and neither does the world around us.
However, with the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost there was a major shift in the lives of what now is “the church.” It was a shift as unassuming as a change in words, but it was as significant as a change of heart:
When nothing else matters but God, everything else changes.
Rome still ruled. There was still dissension to deal with, believe it or not. Persecution and pain came repeatedly. The disciples were still ordinary…and death was always knocking at the door. But everything changed for those early Christ followers because nothing else mattered but God. His fire works. It still does.
