Busting Barriers

When my son Will was very, very small, he and I went to visit my Mom and Dad one day.  We played outside in the country, and I did my best to get him good and tired so he’d sleep well in a different bed.  That night, I took him into the bedroom, where my Mom had set up a little portable crib.  I read him a story, said a prayer with him, and tucked him in.  I breathed a sigh of relief and walked down the hall to the den to sit in peace and quiet with my parents.  After maybe a minute, I felt a presence right at my shoulder.  I turned around and saw Will standing there, with a huge grin on his face.  He said, “I back!” He had never climbed out of a crib before, and he was so proud of himself.    

As we’ve been saying for over a month now, what the world needs now is reconciliation with the God who made us.  Our job as the Church is to reconcile man to God (2 Corinthians 3:18).  We’ve been studying the book of Acts, seeing what it looks like when a church accomplishes its God-given mission.  And as we showed last week, you can see Acts as the story of the Devil putting up barriers, trying to contain the good news about Jesus, and the church continually knocking those barriers down.  A Church with Jesus in charge is like little Will; they just climb out of whatever barrier the enemy sets up and say “I back!”

This week, we'll look at some of the barriers the Church overcame in the days of Acts.  We'll see an amazing story of God pushing through a barrier no one thought would ever fall.  And we'll talk about the main barriers we face today.