Rapturous & All-Consuming

"For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” Jeremiah 31:33,34

All of you reading this certainly know my passion for the Early Church, for learning the ins and outs of what made their experience of Jesus so explosive and so world-changing. And I think what keeps me up at night about it is that nothing - not Jesus' life, not His death, not His resurrection, not His ascension, not the work of the Holy Spirit - none of it has changed from back then and yet, on our end, we so often think, "Hmmm, doesn't it all seem really different back then?"

No! Again, nothing has changed! "Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever." If we want to see the Book of Acts alive in our day, this prophetic passage from Jeremiah 31 is like a checklist for the fullness of the experience:

• Since you and I now permanently live “after those days” of the Cross, Resurrection and Ascension, have we accepted the fact that our sins are remembered no more? 
• Are we so quick to confess our daily mistakes that we’re constantly bathed in His mercy toward our minute-by-minute iniquities, and are totally free?
• Then, in that freedom, is our highest delight in His ways and words that are planted within our minds and hearts by His very, holy Holy Spirit? 
• Is it becoming challenging to find any man, woman or child – any neighbor or brother – who does not know the Lord because all, by our witness, are now coming to know Him?
  
  

You see, that was the rapturous, all-consuming atmosphere that the Early Church created in the midst of the darkness of the Empire. And it so quickly became a source of fear for governors and Caesars because it had the smell of something that was unstoppable, unrelenting. 

Is that the sense of the Kingdom of Heaven as it pours through us? Through you​?