“The Unfinished Church”
(Act 2:47) Praising God, and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.
If the Lord is adding to the church daily it is because the church is not finished. As a matter of fact, the church will not be finished until Jesus returns for His bride. Our text simply shows the progression of the church and not it’s conclusion. The reason the church is not finished is because folks are still being born again and added to it daily.
The same thing is true with each of us, we are also unfinished works. Our spiritual growth develops the same way that the early church was developed, and that is though the “testing of our faith” (James 1:3). Testing is never fun, but there doesn’t seem to be any other way of maturing us apart from testing. The fact is, one never stops growing, changing or being tested no matter what their age. According to Ephesians 4:12, our being tested is “perfecting us for the work of the ministry”
San Antonio is blessed to still have some of the old Spanish missions that were built back in the early seventeen hundreds. I went by one recently and noticed that its construction had been started but never finished. Work on the old mission had started and stopped over a fourteen-year period of time and then finally stopped altogether.
The thing that sadden me most, was them giving up their vision when they were so close to finishing it. The rock walls were very strong and thick and would have been able to withstand any invasion. However, the construction was stopped just prior to the roof going on … and with that a great vision was abandoned. They turned what was to be their sanctuary into a graveyard that lasted for the next two hundred and fifty years until it was excavated, and the bones removed to another grave site. Abandoning a great vision like this was very sad to me.
No high school graduating class plans to fail in life … they are sure their ideas will make the world better, their politics will unite the country, their science, business, and inventions will be a pattern for future generation to follow.
However, things don’t always turn out the way young minds plan. In far too many cases their visions begin to die soon after graduation. Some lost their lives, some took their lives, many are divorced, others spent their life just barely getting by. But thank God there are others who never lost their vision and completed it in style.
My encouragement is for those who reads this meditation to go back and pick up those unfulfilled visions and prophetic words that are on the shelves and complete them. Don’t be like the Spanish missionary who stopped his work just prior to putting on the roof. Don’t allow your vision to end up being nothing more than a graveyard, or another unfinished church.
Father,
Help us to be completers and not stoppers. Help our stickability to be something to be emulated. Help us to be an encourager to others who are prone to lose hope and grow weary in well doing. We want to be known as a completer just like our Father in heaven.
Amen
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