SCRIPTURE: Acts 14:21-28

OBSERVATION:
After a successful disciple-making journey, they go back to encourage/equip the disciples already made.
Paul’s encouragement involves strengthening, being challenged to stay true, and preparing them for hardship; he also appoints elders (more spiritually mature believers) to help them.
Paul describes the kingdom of God as something that disciples are still entering, and its path is not easy.
Paul goes back to those who commissioned them for their work and reports on what God had done through them.

APPLICATION:
The ‘many hardships’ is a reminder that the path of following Jesus is not easy.
Just acknowledging that Jesus is King, that this world is His Kingdom, will not make things easier but harder.
Somehow this experience of ‘church’ seems more unstable, yet God works in/through it powerfully.
Have we structured the life out of the ‘church’, we have lost this dynamic, organic atmosphere.
As haphazard, unorganized and inexperienced this early church was, God worked powerfully; they made more disciples than we do with our experience, our structures, our programs.

PRAYER:
Lord, something in the experience of the early church is missing today, something big. Help us to see it and seek it and find it. Amen.