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Everybody loves an underdog – the unlikely hero, the one nobody believed in, the classic Cinderella story. In sports (NCAA tournament, the Masters) and in life, who doesn’t like to see the little guy succeed??
When you think about it, the Bible has some wonderful stories about underdogs and unlikely heroes. The most famous in the Old Testament is probably the shepherd boy David killing the Philistine giant Goliath. But there are many others:
- Old crazy Noah building a boat and saving the world.
- Abram, wandering the desert, having a son in 90s!
- Gideon, going from hiding in a hole to defeating the Midianites
- Moses, from living in obscurity in the wilderness to defeating Pharaoh!
The truth is that God seems to like doing things this way (1 Cor. 1:27). “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, the weak things to shame the strong.”
There is a sense in which our whole faith is a kind of underdog story – a story of an unlikely hero, born in a manger, in obscurity, to a poor family, lived a wandering, homeless existence, had no military background, wrote no books, founded no schools or political institutions.
And when we come to the story of the church, that may be the biggest Cinderella story of them all. Think of it. Only 120 confused and isolated Christians, uncertain about what to do (Acts 2 - Pentecost). The contemporary secular view of the church is usually the opposite: huge institution, wealthy, controlling, often corrupt, hardly an underdog.
But even secular historians marvel and wonder at how this tiny insignificant group of 1st century Jews could grow into something that would shake the Roman Empire and form the foundations of Western civilization.
How did this happen? What caused the rapid and explosive growth of the early church?
Former Yale Professor of History, Kenneth Scott Latourette:
“The more one examines the various factors which seem to account for the extraordinary victory of Christianity, the more one is driven to search for a cause underlying them all. It is clear that at the very beginning of Christianity there must have occurred a vast release of energy virtually unequalled in history. Without it, the future course of this religion is inexplicable. Why this occurred may lie outside the realm in which modern historians are supposed to move.”
He is pondering a question which simply cannot be answered from a purely historical point of view. And the book of Acts gives us the answer.
- Acts 2:4 – “Filled with the Spirit”
- Acts 2:17 – “Pour out my Spirit”
- Acts 2:47 – “The Lord added to their number”
God is in their midst! God is doing something! The Spirit is on the move! “The cause underlying them all” is the Holy Spirit. That same Spirit lives in us today! We are a part of this remarkable story that God has been writing throughout history by His Holy Spirit.
Jeff Frazier
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