Handicapped Christians

In Acts 6 we read of a “Daily Ministration” whereby the church provided food necessities for Christian widows. I find this interesting because during this time period Christians were able to perform miracles by the power of the Holy Spirit. So why did people have to sell their lands, etc. to purchase food for Christian widows? Why not just take a fish or a loaf of bread and miraculously transform them into 1000 fishes and 1000 loaves?

The answer to this question lies in God’s purpose for his people. God wants his people to be transformed into humble selfless people. That can only occur when his people have a spirit of compassion and sacrifice.

If human beings use God’s (miraculous) power to feed the widows then that’s God doing the work and leaves the aforesaid Christians weak and underdeveloped. We become strong and more like Jesus Christ when we do our own work.

So although Jesus used miracles to provide for food and other needs, that was never the plan for the new church. In the age of the early church miracles (worked through Spiritually empowered people) would only be used to draw attention to God and his powerful word. Otherwise we would be handicapped Christians relying on the “crutch” of God’s special powers for the mundane things of life. God took away that “crutch” so we could develop into the kind of people he intended us to be… exact copies of Jesus Christ.

Even today we can be handicapped if we rely on the preacher or the elders or the deacons or our husband or our wife or other Christians to do all the spiritual work. That’s a spirit of laziness, of spiritual atrophy and spiritual ineptitude and a very poor caricature of Jesus Christ. Let’s get to work.