The Covenant Life Blog – A Blog About Living With Jesus Today

Many of us have been on a spiritual odyssey.  We have gone from message to message, from church to church, from conference to conference, from teaching to teaching,each time time with renewed hope and expectation.  Each time thinking “This is it!  This is the real thing.”  And each time we have been sadly disappointed.  The new teaching only took us so far and the new experience went only so deep.  It was, and is, a poor replica of the New Testament faith we see recorded in the Scriptures.

Why do so many believers hears so many sermons, listen to so many teaching CD’s or tapes, read so many faith-building books, follow so many spiritual formulas, make so many efforts to grow and yet never seem to change?  Is this really what life in the Spirit is all about?

Let’s be totally honest with ourselves and for one moment forget about all the excuses we have heard.  When you read the New Testament, what do you see?  If you sat down and read the gospels and the Book of Acts, closed your Bible, and then pictured what would have happened over the next few centuries, would you have actually thought that 2000 years later the world would still not be totally evangelized?  Would you have dreamed that twenty centuries would have come and gone without the return of Jesus?  And if you had been told that by the year 2014 there would be hundreds of millions of Spirit-filled believers across the globe, would you ever imagine that this world would be in its present condition?

If we had the same power the early Church had the whole world would have been saved in a matter of a few years, not in the condition it is currently in two thousand years later.

What has happened to us?  Where has the power of God gone that is to be in the Church?  Do our current congregations even slightly resemble the Church we read about in the Book of Acts?  Why, or why not?