Title Acts 04:32-37 One Mind Community
Contents Acts 4:32-37 / Community of One Mind
Last week, I had a good time on the East Coast with your consideration. There are some people who stay at home fighting the heat, but on the other hand, I feel sorry for them.
While feeling the sea breeze, I thought of my hometown. I lived by the seaside until I was 7 years old. It was a time when there were not many things to play with like children these days, so if you didn't play on a swing with a rope on the branch of a pine tree in the back mountain, one game was to pick up eggs from the salt farm on the seashore.
If you live in a seaside town, you will often see geese flying in the sky.
What do you say? I don't know if it varies from region to region, but I remember saying, "The wild goose, the wild goose go to the service." Then the geese actually take the shape of a geese and fly away.
In fact, it is not a matter of listening to a sound to make a geese, but when the geese fly in the sky, it is a habit to fly in the form of a ceremonial geese.
According to ornithologists, geese fly in a V-shape rather than a geese. It is said that the reason geese fly in a V shape when migrating is because they form an air belt and can fly up to 70% longer than flying alone.
If the geese flying ahead are having a hard time, they change positions with the geese following them and fly towards their destination together. (It turned out that it wasn't about making fighters by listening to the sound, but about forming ranks while doing duty shifts.)
And it's not that it's hard to keep squeaking while flying together, but it's a sound to let family and co-workers know where you are and to encourage each other. Even more interesting is the fact that if even one geese is injured during a trip, three or four of them stay with the stragglers.
Even if they seem like flying beasts to ignore, there is something we can learn from their world.
1. A spirit of cooperation and consideration for others.
2. It is the heart that knows how to encourage colleagues.
3. It is a sense of community that can bear the misfortunes and pains of colleagues.
If you are looking for a time in the history of the church that this sense of community was most intense, this is the text we read together today.
This is the best way to know what the church community looked like in the early Christian society. All the believers were of one mind and one mind and shared according to each other's needs, so no one went hungry.
This appearance was a natural result of the faith of the church, which has become one body with Christ as its head. Each person had his or her own property, but it was the power of the kingdom of God and at the same time the result of God's grace that he could give whenever he felt the need of the community rather than claiming ownership of it.
The words of this text well teach the uniqueness of the fellowship of the church. It's not just about getting to know each other or getting used to it, it's about getting to know the needs of the saints with the spirit of stewardship and sharing the fellowship of love.
Joseph is recorded as the representative of this act of faith, and it is also true that people of faith like Joseph are desperately needed in the modern church.
It is saying that we do not necessarily need someone who sells rice fields, fields, and houses to share, but we desperately need an act of faith that can participate and share, even if it is a small thing.
The modern church must now have eyes that can see every corner of the world beyond the walls of the church. There are still many people in this world who suffer from hunger in shady places. From within the church near, to other peoples with different languages, skin colors and environments, and even beyond the walls of faith, the Christian's hand of love must be extended.
Seen in this way, the tasks that Christians have to do are piled up like a backlog of homework. These are challenges that everyone must tackle together. Responding to each other's needs transcending regions, ideologies and races is one of the ministries that the church must undertake along with the gospel ministry as a sense of mission.
In order to undertake such a ministry of sharing, the sense of community must be clear above all else. As mentioned earlier, the sense of community is
1. A spirit of cooperation and consideration for others.
2. A heart that knows how to encourage colleagues and neighbors.
3. It refers to the spirit of being able to bear the pain of brothers and neighbors.
I think it's time for Christians to exercise a sense of community with one heart in a world that is becoming desolate as love grows cold.