Acts 6 - Friday 9th February

Today’s chapter is Acts 6

Tom writes:

Oh sweet Stephen. We should all pray for Stephens to be raised up in the church. Even better, we could pray to become a Stephen… except for the bit about the stones… Perhaps it is impossible to have one without the other? What Stephen and his pals illustrate is how God is always raising a new crop of leaders to step into service of his mission. The mighty oaks of the apostles look around and find a whole new canopy of foliage emerging around them. Our father is a farmer. He is always growing fresh crop. The big beasts of Peter and John and James had every credential. And yet God sprouts less credentialed people to do what the apostles could not have done. And the big beasts generously laid their hands on them; they made space for the new crop. That didn’t just mean waiting on tables; Stephen and Philip and Parmenas (which I thought was a type of cheese?) and the bloke from Antioch spark off a multi-ethnic, Mediterranean-wide expansion of the mission of forgiveness. Oh sweet Stephen. God raised him. Make no mistake about that. But Stephen had invested in the stuff that made him useful to the LORD. He had filled himself with a lot of stuff; the Spirit, wisdom, faith, grace and power. It is interesting that across the New Testament these are things that the church prayed into one another.

Stephen seems to have continually placed himself in environments where people prayed wisdom into him, where people prayed grace into him, where people prayed faith into him. If you feel a hint of calling to leadership. If you think you might be some emerging foliage in the mighty forest of God. If you want to be useful to the cause of Jesus Christ then I suggest you fixate yourself on being filled with these things. Place yourself in relationships and in environments where people pray these things into you. Learn all you can. Receive all you can. And then, when responsibility is being handed out, the people who have invested in you will be pleased to choose you. And - more than that - God will be pleased to use you. He will fill you even fuller with his Spirit and will use you to increase the number of disciples in the land.

Question for reflection

What are you filling yourself with?

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