From a recent email encouragement and book excerpt:

What was the “church life” like in AD 30-70? It was identical, really, to the “disciples’ life” during the last three years of Jesus’ physical existence. That experience of intimate fellowship had simply been transplanted geographically to the cities and villages of the Roman Empire.

According to Luke, the gospel that he wrote described what Jesus “began to do and teach” (Acts 1:1). The book of Acts, then, was what Jesus continued to do and teach, after His ascension. This time He was “doing and teaching” through His people, the ekklesia.

First century believers, then, saw themselves as continuing the life that the earliest followers had enjoyed with Jesus on the hills and highways of Galilee and Judea. They were still His spiritual family, “seated in a circle around Him” (Mark 3:34). They still hung on His every word. They still built their lives on the foundation of putting those words into practice. Acts 2:42-49 is really only a description of several thousand people putting Matthew 5-7 into practice together.

The “religion” of Christianity is in truth only meant to be the “religion” of Jesus. It is nothing more — and certainly nothing less.

When they rebelled in the Garden, mankind forfeited a life of intimate, loving, face-to-face dependence on God. Religion — with its categorization of times, places, and people into “holy” and “secular” — proved to be a poor substitute for Paradise. When God offered a perfect religion, rich with meaning, the human race had proved itself incapable of living it. Jesus was God’s mind-blowing answer to this dilemma. For the first time in millennia, human beings had an opportunity to walk with God face to face in loving dependence. When Jesus returned to heaven, that opportunity was not lost. Far from it! “Christ-ianity” was merely the name people gave that life of intimate reliance after the ascension.

The early believers proclaimed with clarity, courage, and joy that Jesus died, that He was buried, that He rose again, that He ascended to the Father’s right hand, and that He poured out His Spirit on His followers. Jesus was not a dead hero or dearly beloved founder. He was alive and very actively involved in the lives of His people.

Christianity in those days required no religious trappings. It blew past the special time-place-man paradigm into a new Reality of relationship, both with God and with His people.

If you have been born a second time, that life is your birthright.

We’ve complicated and really polluted what Jesus really intended by our man-made religions and Ishmaelic approach. :-( The excerpt is accurate in pointing out that the early christians merely lived in and among themselves and the rest of the world just as Jesus and the disciples did. It was nothing “more” (our “more” of today is actually a subtraction of Daily Life) and certainly nothing less. It was the Jesus-life lived out on a grand scale. “Neither here nor there” as Jesus indicated. ‘The LIFE became the Light of men.” (John 1:4) The very Life of God observably lived out in a people was all the “church” that there was in the first century. And THAT is what “turned the world upside down.” :-)

Grab on to it! It’s out there!

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