The God Who
The God Who Acts Acts 2:1–2
I have pinpointed the two verses above, but we shall be considering together the first twenty-one verses of Acts chapter 2. We are going back to this book of Acts because it is the only authoritative account that we have of the beginning, the origin, of the Christian church. Let me remind you that I am calling your attention to this because I believe that the most vital need of the world today is the need to know exactly what the Christian message is. And that in turn leads us to seek to know what the church is, the church that delivers this message.
There is a real confusion today about Christianity and about the Christian church—her nature, her task, and her message. This is a great tragedy. Think of the problems harassing people today, individually and collectively. Think of the unhappiness, the heartbreak and the cynicism and bitterness in life. We are all aware of these human problems, as they are called. But if only people were truly Christian, most of those problems would immediately be solved. And it is the same with our international tensions and difficulties. Hate and war and strife are due to the fact that men and women are in a wrong relationship with God, and they will only find out how to enter into a true relationship by knowing, believing, accepting, and submitting themselves to the message of the Christian church, the message of the Gospel.
We have seen that the great message of the church is, as Luke puts it here at the very beginning of Acts, a message about the Lord Jesus Christ. This is Christianity: “all that Jesus began both to do and teach”—what He is doing and what He is yet going to do. So now we continue from there because we see that our Lord addressed these men, these apostles of His, and gave them a commission. So we come, in this second chapter, to the origin of the Christian church. This is what throws light on the nature of the church, what it has been commissioned to do and how it does it. And here it is emphasized that the whole thing is the action of God. This is not something that was done by this handful of people. We are told so often about them and so often they say about themselves that they were nobodies. We never tire of hearing how they were dismissed by the learned people, by the authorities, as “unlearned and ignorant men” (Acts 4:13), and that is what they were.
It seems to me to be simply ludicrous to suggest that such men, without learning, without any influence or authority, without any money behind them, with none of the means of propaganda that we are familiar with today, that such men by their own efforts and abilities could succeed in doing what we read of in the pages of this book. How did it come about? There is only one answer. The world was turned upside-down not because of what they did, but because of what God did to them, in them, and by means of them. And that is the essential message concerning the Christian church—her meaning, her function, her message, her purpose.
So here before us is the beginning, but if you take the trouble to read the long history of the Christian church, you will find that it has continued in the same way. Indeed, I want to show you that the history of the church has been a great fight between two ideas: the false human idea as to what the church is, and the true one, which is God acting in the church.
So let us look at all this in the light of what we are told in these first twenty-one verses of Acts 2. What is Christianity? What is the church? First of all, we must remind ourselves of what it is not, and oh, how urgently this reminder is needed today! I am more and more convinced that the masses of people are outside the Christian church because they have a totally wrong conception of what it is. Hear me—I want to be honest—I do not blame them. They just believe what they are told, and that is the false view that I shall put before you. If they only knew what the church really is, if they only knew what is being offered them in the Gospel, they would not be outside. Like the people at Jerusalem, they would come crowding to listen.
First, Christianity is not dead religion. The greatest enemy of true Christianity has always been religion, and this is as true today as it has ever been. It is religion that confuses the minds of men and women. They would be right to reject Christianity if it were a religion. But it is not. Christianity is not a state religion; it is not an official religion in any sense at all. But that is the idea that many people have of it. They identify the church simply with what happens on certain great ceremonial occasions—a wedding or a funeral. They did not think about Christianity at any other time; but when things go wrong and we were losing every battle, then there is need for prayer. But that is religion; it has nothing to do with authentic Christianity.
I almost feel like summarizing it like this: Christianity is not what the media seem to think it is. I am second to none in my admiration of human greatness, but a man is not necessarily a Christian just because he is a great man. And the Christian church does not revolve around any person, however great and distinguish. That is religion, something entirely different.
We must get rid of this notion that the church is a national institution or any other form of human institution. It is not a club or a society where people meet together and do certain things. I never like to hear people referring to a building as a church. “I’m going down to the church,” they say. But the church does not consist of a building; it consists of people, living souls with the Lord in their midst. We must get rid of this external notion, this idea of just paying a kind of formal visit upon God and then forgetting all about Him. That is religion, the very enemy of the Christian faith.
Any notion that Christianity is mainly the result of something that we do is always completely, fatally wrong. We must cast off any idea that the Christian church is the result of our action and that we are perpetuating some tradition. If that is our view of Christianity, it is false. That was the curse of the Jews who finally crucified the Lord Jesus Christ. They were traditional religionists, and such have always been—and are today—the greatest enemies of the true church and of the true Christian faith and message. But how much of so-called Christianity is just this!
Let me ask you a serious question: Why do you attend a place of worship? Have you thought enough about it even to ask that question? Are you going simply because it is a tradition? People, you say, have always gone to church on Sundays. But church attendance is something you do. You are simply perpetuating a tradition. Large numbers of people have gone to church out of a sense of duty, hoping each week that the service will not be too long. Each week they have felt nothing at all; the service has been absolutely lifeless, the singing miserable, the reading of the Scriptures boring.
There has been no power, no vigor. And because they have thought that is Christianity, they have turned their backs upon it. And they are perfectly right to do so. That is the logical step. God knows, I myself did that many years ago. And I would not be in a Christian pulpit now but for the fact that I saw through that false view. You cannot fit that into the book of Acts. That is traditional, formal religion, whatever form it may happen to take and in whatever denomination it may appear.
Let me be still more specific. There are some people who seem to have seen through the formality and who compensate for it by producing an exciting kind of worship and have stunts and entertainment to make services lively and bright. But that does not make the slightest difference because it is still men and women who are organizing it. True Christianity is always the activity of God. “Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind”—God. So, bright services and an entertaining and varied program is not Christianity either. It is livelier, but the life is not the life of the Spirit. Anything controlled by us, whether lifeless or lively, is not Christianity. Christianity is that which controls us, which masters us, which happens to us.
My second negative is that in Christianity the God who is worshiped is not an unknown God. But the God of religion is always an unknown God. A classic description of this is given by Luke in the seventeenth chapter of Acts where he describes the visit of the great apostle Paul to Athens. Paul saw the place cluttered with all sorts of temples to Jupiter, Mercury, and the rest, but he came across an intriguing and fascinating altar that had a most peculiar inscription over it: “To the unknown God.” Having accounted for the gods of love and war and peace and so on, the philosophers felt there was still another power they could not overlook. They did not know him, so they said he was the unknown god, and he seemed to be the most powerful of all. And Paul said, (Acts 17:23). “Whom therefore you ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you”
The god of religion is always unknown. There are many people who have never really thought about God at all. I do not usually adopt the language of people whose views I totally dissent from, but they are perfectly right when they say that large numbers of people are worshiping a “father figure,” making some idea of fatherhood their god. It is possible for us to say our prayers mechanically without even thinking about God and who God is. And to many people he is entirely unknown, some kind of superstition.
But there is another group of people who are very popular, even notorious, and it is most interesting to observe them. They are great critics of the first group who, they agree, are worshiping religion and tradition. What, then, do they say people should worship? Here we come to what one may call the god of the philosophers. “God,” they say, “is the ground of all being.” Or they describe him as the “Absolute” or the “Ultimate.” He is the vague power that is somewhere behind the universe; he is a “force.” God, they say, is love, and by that many of them really mean that love is God, and wherever you find love you find God. So they tell you not to go to a church to find God, but to go out into the world, into the bars, and there you will find kindness shown by one person to another, and that is God.
So God becomes something abstract, some general benevolence, some vague activity or power, and this, we are told, is what we must substitute for that old superstitious notion of God. This is up-to-date religion. This is down-to-earth; this is honest-to-God; this is the truly intellectual view. God is the ground of all being; so do not talk about a person. But you cannot pray to such a god; you cannot pray to goodness or to love or to power. But that, we are told by so many today, is the living truth and real Christianity, and the result is that we are left not only very much in the same position as those people in the first group but perhaps even worse because it is almost impossible to follow their intellectual arguments and almost impossible to know what you believe; and certainly everything is left up to you.
Yet we are told that this is the religion for twentieth-century men and women who in this scientific age think in terms of “the ground of being” and talk about “the absolute.” They dismiss traditional Christianity by saying, “Of course, it’s all right when people are ignorant and unintelligent. Primitive peoples have always been superstitious, and therefore they’ve always been religious.” So they dismiss Christianity by saying that it is for ignorant people and therefore has nothing to do with them. Real Christianity is for the philosophers, for the specialists, for the thinkers, those who can read scientific journals and have understanding.
The basic notion is that the Christian faith is something one arrives at as the result of one’s own reasoning processes. You do not accept any tradition or teaching, but, starting with your own reason, you examine everything. That is the method followed in the realm of science, so why not here? So you apply your mind and only believe what you can understand. As the result of your own reason and effort, you arrive at a knowledge of the truth. You inquire, you do your research, helped by others who are on the same quest, and at last you arrive at some satisfaction. You say, “I’ve got it! God is the ground of all being!” With your great mind you have arrived at this saving formula.
But this is only for certain types of people. I am almost tempted to say that if I had the power of dictatorship in these matters, I would compel everybody to read some of the latest books on this whole subject because, I tell you, they will not understand them. So the masses of people are not interested; they are not concerned. They see these clever men bringing out their books and arguing and debating with one another, and their verdict on it all is, “I couldn’t care less. No doubt they make money out of it. No doubt it helps to keep their jobs going.”
I am telling you what the man in the street is saying, and this is one of the greatest problems facing western Christians today. Our Christianity has become a middle-class movement; the so-called working classes or lower class are not touched by it. But this is wrong. A message that only appeals to a certain type, a certain class, is not the Christian Gospel. There is something wrong somewhere. Christianity, by definition and by the example of history, is not confined to a certain type, a certain class of person.
So much for the negatives. Now let us turn to the positives. What is Christianity? What is the Christian church? What is her message? How did it come into being? How has it acted? How has it persisted? The first thing that should strike anybody who reads the Bible, a chapter such as Acts 2 or any other, is that the starting point is the living God, the Creator, and not human beings. The first verse in the Bible is, “In the beginning God created …” God! The whole book starts with God and is dominated by God. I am convinced that the trouble with the world today is that it does not believe in God. And so much of our evangelism goes wrong because it starts with the Lord Jesus Christ. But you must start with God the Father, God the Creator, one whose glory fills the heavens, who is over all. With reverence I say that you cannot understand the Lord Jesus Christ, and indeed there is a sense in which there is no meaning to Him and to the message about Him, unless you start with God the Father.
Christianity puts this before us in this way: “God in three Persons, blessed Trinity”—God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. God—a God who is personal, a God who can say, “I am” (Exod. 3:14) and “I will …” (Exod. 3:17). He is a God who, because He is a living God, reveals Himself. Contrary to modern teaching, God is not an abstraction. He is not the mere “ground of all being.” He is not “the absolute.” He is a God who thinks, a God who speaks, a God who makes proclamations. Or, looking at it the other way round, He is a God to whom we can pray, a God whose help we can seek. This is the message throughout the Bible.
I could give you many illustrations. As we have seen, this was the very message that the apostle Paul preached to the people in Athens. We are told that “his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry” (Acts 17:16). Paul said in effect, “I can’t stand this. I must tell these people they’re worshiping nothing. They’re worshiping idols they made themselves, mere projections of their own minds. There are no such gods. These people know nothing about the living, true God.” This is what he said to them:
You men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.
—Acts 17:22–26
In Thessalonica Paul proclaimed the same message. In his letter to the Thessalonians, he later wrote, “You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thess. 1:9). Christianity is no dead religion; we serve a living God.
But God is not only a living God, He is a God who acts, and this is the point I want to make. Here it is again: They had come together and were praying together; they were wait“When the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.” ing. And in the end, people can do nothing but wait. “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.” Now that is the truth about God. This is the special point about the Christian message, the thing that differentiates it from every other message. Every other religion worships a dead god. Take the so-called great religions of the East. Their adherents have no living God to turn to, no God who acts. They talk about Nirvana, about being absorbed into the absolute, and people think it is intelligent to believe in something like that. All is dead and a matter of passivity.
Christianity is the exact opposite. The people in Jerusalem, Jews from Crete, Arabia, and all the other places, were astoniitd and exclaimed, “We do hear them speak in our tongues”—speak of what?—“the wonderful works of God” (Acts 2:11). This is the whole message of the Bible and of the Christian church. These men, filled with the Holy Spirit, were not protesting against the tyranny of the Roman Empire; they were not deciding what resolutions they should send to the Emperor or to their representatives, their senators and others; they were not expressing their opinion on current affairs. No, no: “the wonderful works of God.” The Christian message is a proclamation to men and women fumbling and stumbling, even at noonday, trying in the darkness to solve their problems and understand the mystery of life. It is a proclamation that this is God’s world, that God has made it. It has not just evolved. “In the beginning God”—He created.
But God not only made the world, He owns it and controls it. Psalm 104 tells us how He gives breath and life to everything and how, when He withdraws the breath of life, all creatures collapse and die. God is over all—not men and women, not even the greatest of them, but God, who has made everything and who gives every gift. Even the greatest people have nothing to boast of; they have nothing but what they have received. They have not generated it or produced it. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights” (Jas. 1:17).
Furthermore, God is actively interested in this world. He is not some god in the distance, in the vagueness of impersonal religion. No, no! He looks down upon the world He has made and is concerned about it. The great message of the Bible, the immediate message of the early Christian church, is to tell men and women something about “the wonderful works” God has done upon this earth.
Let me emphasize some of these works for you. God has not abandoned this world. It is in a terrible mess; it has been in a mess since Adam and Eve rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden. All our troubles have come out of that. But the message is that it is not men and women who will redeem the world and lift it up again. They have been trying to do that for many centuries, and that is the story of civilization and of political activity. I am not here to criticize them. Let them do their best. They are meant to preserve order as far as they can in the chaos, but they will never redeem this world.
But the God that Christianity preaches came down into the garden in the cool of the evening. This is a God who is concerned. He came down and spoke to the man and woman, exposing their evil and punishing them, but also giving them a promise, and if I did not have this promise I would not be a preacher. The promise reveals that God is concerned about this world and its affairs and is doing something about it.
The Bible is the book of God, the history of the activity of God. After the account of the Fall, we go on to read that men and women turned their backs upon God and sank so deeply into sin that they were living not only a materialistic, immoral life, but an amoral life, and God visited the world with the punishment of the flood. And that is exactly the sort of world we are living in now.
And then later on, in their cleverness, men and women said, “Let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” (Gen. 11:4). That is the time in the Old Testament that seems to me to correspond most clearly to the twenty first century: “We’ll build a temple, a tower that will reach to heaven. We’ll do it with our scientific knowledge. We’re going to get right into heaven.”
But God acted. He came down and confused it all. The same God acted in Sodom and Gomorrah, and in many a similar society, and in Babylon too. All these great places have come to nothing; they all turned to rubble.
But, thank God, that is only one side. There is another—He is the God of Abraham. How did the great Old Testament story of the Jews ever come to pass? The answer is that God looked on a man called Abraham, living in paganism in Ur of the Chaldees. He spoke to him and called him out, and Abraham went out, “not knowing where he went” (Heb. 11:8), simply obeying the call of God. It is all of God. This is the essence of Christianity, this is the true message—not you and I dragging ourselves to a church service in which we do everything and feel nothing, while God is some abstraction, away in some infinity.
There was also a man called Jacob, a pretty poor character. He had a twin brother called Esau who, as a natural man, was much nicer and a better fellow. But Jacob, disguised as Esau, received the blessing that his dying father had intended for Esau. So Jacob had to run for his life. On the first night of his escape, he lay on the ground and put a stone under his head as a pillow, and there he had a most amazing dream. God spoke to him. This is it! God interfering in a man’s life, God addressing him, a ladder sent down, and traffic between heaven and earth—between God and man. Jacob awoke, astoniitd and amazed, and said, “This is none other but the house of God” (Gen. 28:17). “I didn’t realize it,” he said in effect. “I thought I was in a wilderness, and I put my head upon a stone, but I’m in the house of God, at the very gateway and doorway of heaven. I’ve met with God.” And he had. This is Christianity.
Or take another illustration, this time from the third chapter of the book of Exodus. Here was a man who had been a itpherd for forty years. His name was Moses, and he was a great man. Because of something he had done in Egypt, Moses, too, had had to escape, and he was apparently destined to spend the rest of his life as a simple itpherd. But one afternoon he took his itep to the back side of a mountain, not expecting anything at all, and “The angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed” (Exod. 3:2). We would never have heard the story of the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt to Canaan but for this. It was not an idea that suddenly occurred to Moses. He did not plan and scheme and order it. Far from it!
God appeared to him, and poor Moses stammered, hesitated, and did not understand. When Moses first saw the bush, he said, “I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.” He was going to investigate. He was a modern man, you see, a scientist. “What is this? What is this phenomenon? I’m going to understand it.”
But God called out of the middle of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses … Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.… I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exod. 3:4–6). Then we are told that Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God—and rightly so. And the Lord said—if this were not true, there would be no message, no hope—“I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt.” God is not some ground of reality, not some impersonal force or idea or mere love or goodness or kindness. He is personal—“I have seen … and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows [He is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” (Heb. 4:15)]; and I am come down to deliver them” (Exod. 3:7–8). And He did.
Then the great story follows. Let me urge you to read your Old Testament. Go on to the fourteenth chapter of that book of Exodus, and there you will find that Moses and the people, having gone out of Egypt, found themselves with the sea in front and the hosts of Pharaoh behind. They felt they were at the point of being annihilated. Then Moses turned to God, not knowing what to do. And God said, “The Lord shall fight for you.… Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward” (vv. 14–15). They went—and God acted! Then God went on to speak to Moses on Mount Sinai, revealing His character, giving the Ten Commandments and the moral law.
I feel like the author of the epistle to the Hebrews. Time would fail me to tell you all these great stories—David, the prophets, Elijah on Mount Carmel in the great trial. There they were, the 850 false prophets with one true prophet—Elijah, the man of God. He challenged them and said, “The God that answers by fire, let him be God” (1 Kings 18:24).
The false prophets said they had a god, Baal. “Very well,” said Elijah in essence. “We’ll test our gods. We’ll see which of them is God. Kill a bull, cut it in pieces, put the pieces on a pile of wood on an altar, and ask your god Baal to send down fire to consume the offering.”
So they began, the 850 false prophets, with Elijah watching them. He knew the result before they began. He spoke to them now and again and said things like, “Why doesn’t your god answer you? Perhaps he’s gone on a journey, or perhaps he’s asleep and can’t hear you. Shout a little louder!”
That is the way to deal with false prophets. Let them produce their god, let them show the results of their “living” god—where is he? That is why chapels and churches are empty. People are not worshiping the true and living God, but mere projections of their own minds and philosophies.
On Mount Carmel nothing happened. The prophets cut themselves with knives and went into a frenzy. But they failed completely. Then Elijah stepped quietly forward and offered a simple prayer to God. He began, “Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel” (v. 36). And God answered by fire. He is the living God. He is the active God. He is the true God.
In one way, the story of the New Testament begins in Luke 3: “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee”—what happened?—“the word of God came unto John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” There had been no word from God for about 400 years, not since the prophet Malachi, but now here was John the Baptist. He was in the wilderness, and the word of God came to him. That is the whole story. It is always God acting and sending His word. But the climax is this: “When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law” (Gal. 4:4). “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, sent into the world, appearing among men—God sending, God acting.
And here in Acts 2 God is starting the Christian church: “And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.” God was continuing, acting in them and through them. It is quite certain that we would not be considering this now were it were not for the fact that God has continued to act. Men and women in their blindness and sin have done their very best to ruin the Christian church. If it were our creation, it would have disappeared long ago, like many other institutions. People have misunderstood, they have gone wrong, they have preached error, and the church would have died. So why is there still a church? There is only one answer: God comes in revival. God sends His Spirit again. Look at the Protestant Reformation. God, just as He sent his word to John the Baptist, sent it to Martin Luther; and when God sends His word even to one man and gives him great power, He can awaken a great church with fifteen centuries of blind tradition behind it. Only one man—but it was enough. Martin Luther, called of God, given the message and filled with God’s Spirit, overthrew a church that had become quite pagan in its teaching.
God, the living, active God, sent the rushing, mighty wind. Why does He do it? It is for salvation. “It shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Acts 2:21). Everyone needs to be saved, however great, however illustrious. We are all sinners. We are all born in sin, “shapen in iniquity” (Psa. 51:5). “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). The wrath of God is on us all. “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away” (1 Pet. 1:24). The greatest lose their faculties. Final illness and decay come to each of us.
Oh, there is no hope in humanity. The only hope is that God is, and that He is the God who comes down, the God who offers salvation. He sent His only Son into the world, even to the cross, to die, His body to be broken, His blood to be shed, so that “whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
This is Christianity: It is the message that you need to be saved and that God has provided the means whereby you can be saved. It is all His action. It is a supernatural action, a miraculous action. I am not telling you to be good, for I know you cannot be. I am not telling you to read books of philosophy in order to arrive at a knowledge of God and learn how to live—I know it is all useless. My message is that God “hath visited and redeemed his people” (Luke 1:68). It is no use anyone telling us to pull ourselves together—that is the one thing we cannot do. We are mastered by lust and passions and evil desires. We are victims; we need to be delivered. And thank God, He does deliver us. That is our message. It is a surprising one. Like the visitors to Jerusalem, people today ask, “What means this?” (Acts 2:12). We cannot understand. It is powerful. It was a mighty rushing wind, and it is a transforming power. It changes people. It changed these disciples so that rather than being weak, frightened, alarmed, helpless, and useless, they became mighty men of God.
But above everything else, Christianity is entirely beyond understanding. “What means this?” they asked. Of course they did. If you can understand your religion, that is proof it is not Christianity. If you are in control of your religion, it is not Christianity. If you can take it up in a bag on Sunday morning when you go to church and then put it down again, that is not Christianity. Christianity is a miracle. It is a marvel. It astonishes people.
When Blaise Pascal, the French thinker, had a great experience of God, he said, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. not the god of the philosophers and seers and thinkers.” That is the contrast. The God of the Bible is the God who reveals Himself in all the glory and the wonder of His miraculous, eternal power. Thank God for such a message, such a Gospel. It made the church. This is what it preached, and on the day of Pentecost 3,000 men and women were added to the church.
But, finally, because all this is true, Christianity is a message for all people: “Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Acts 2:21). You will need to be very clever to understand most modern books about God, but thank God, you do not need to be clever to be a Christian. “The common people heard him gladly,” wrote Mark (12:37). “Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called,” says the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 1:26). Rather, “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty … and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are” (vv. 27–28). There is a hope for all who realize their need and cry out to Him.
Is that your idea of Christianity? Do you know this living God, this true God, this active God, this God who intervenes and comes? Have you ever met Him in any shape or form, as Moses met Him in the burning bush, as Jacob met Him at Peniel, as Elijah met Him on Mount Carmel? Have you ever felt the touch of God upon your soul? Are you aware that you have been dealt with, that God has entered into your life and has done something that you could not do? Do you know that you are what you are by the grace of God? Do you say, “I can’t explain it—all I know is that God has done something to me in Christ”? If you can say that, you are a Christian.
But if all you have is what you do and what you think, I am afraid you are not a Christian. God’s coming to you need not be the rushing, mighty wind, but it is always the power of God. It is always the hand of God. It always brings the knowledge that God has had pity upon you and has come down in the person of His Son to enter into your life, to save you and set you free. Oh, that men and women might know the living God and His power unto salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord! Amen!