In The Light of Eternity

I am currently reading another great book by K.P. Yohannan entitled Living In The Light of Eternity. In the very first chapter, there are a few paragraphs that are so powerful and true that I wanted to share them with you all. I pray this excerpt will begin to stir within your heart as it did mine.

taken from Chapter 1: Living For Another Kingdom

"The curse on our lives as modern Christians is that we have carefully divided the spiritual from the secular parts of our lives. On certain days we feel holy and wonderful. Our emotions are elevated and we feel ready to face any trial that may come. We are going to conquer the world for the Lord! On other days, back on the job and in the world, we say to ourselves, 'How can I do all that for the Lord? I'm doing the best I can.'

Somehow we have become comfortable with living a divided life. When we read about the uproar over Paul in Thessalonica, we have a difficult time relating to the treatment the believers received. But for those New Testament believers, normal, everyday living for Jesus brought on persecution. These people lived in a community and worked faithfully at their jobs every day. Nothing about them stood out, except the fact that they took the words of Jesus seriously and they followed Him.

...It is as if the first-century believers were living in the midst of a whirlwind. Wherever they went they caused some kind of commotion or turmoil or trouble -- simply because they lived what they believed.

We do not read passages like this in the book of Acts:

And they gathered together for the committee meeting, ten people with long faces drinking black coffee with no sugar because they all were watching their diets. And one spoke up, saying, "Brothers and sisters, God is telling us to do such-and-such."
Yet another responded, "I'm not sure. We should think about it some more. We're so much in debt right now, maybe we should vote on it."

So it goes in the lives of countless churches today. We are so intent on finding the hidden meanings behind the mandates in the New Testament that we forget to look at the mandates themselves. We are so organized that we make it difficult for the Holy Spirit to direct and use us to change the world around us.

We find no committee meetings in the book of Acts. We find long hours of prayer, fasting and waiting on God to move. The believers of Acts were common people like us, but wherever they went, things happened. As these men and women moved out in the marketplace, into their neighborhoods and workplaces, they turned their communities upside-down. They were revolutionaries who had heard the call of God."