The Second Person of the Trinity BECAME A MAN and walked the earth! Divine Life spent 33 years on our planet as one of us, fully man and fully God. (As a pastor told me once, “don’t try to figure it out.”) This is an astounding development in the human race!
He showed us what God is really like while He was here by his words and, more importantly, by his actions. He refused to fight back or defend Himself to the point of allowing Himself to be murdered by both religious and government leaders. He really died instead of “standing up for his own rights.” He died to show us that there is no limit to the love that God has for us. If we understand this, we can never logically doubt God’s immense love and affection for us. In dying on the cross, he took death and sin into the grave with Him. Three days later, Jesus rose from the dead, leaving death and sin in the grave! Divine Life, risen from the dead, walked the earth for about 40 days, appearing to over 500 people. He ascended into heaven and told those watching to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit.
Ten days later, Divine Life entered our world again — this time into the spirits of 120 people waiting in a room in Jerusalem! Within weeks, thousands more were filled with this Divine Life! A new species of human was born on our planet — men and women who not only were living natural, biological life, but also contained the Divine Life of God within them in the Holy Spirit! This is unbelievably exciting news!!! These people began living with each other in community, learning to know this God who now didn’t live far away in the heavens, but within each of them individually, and all of them collectively. Together, they experienced God in new ways and watched as this Divine Life continued to do the things that Jesus did as He walked the soil — caring for the poor, healing, sacrificing, giving, and loving.
For eight years, they remained in Jerusalem, being formed together more and more into the image of God as they gazed upon Him together, learned how to know Him together in community, rubbed up against each other and figured out life together and how to live this new life.
After the stoning of Stephen, the first person to die for his allegiance to Christ, persecution broke out against the people following this new Way. God used this for good as the followers went back to their homes or other places together and continued living in the Way of Jesus together, establishing sprouting seedlings of this new “Tree of Life” in each city or town they entered. At first, these were mostly places in Judea and Samaria, and the communities formed looked a lot like the one in Jerusalem. They still followed the laws that had been established in the Jewish community. A church in Capernaum would look strikingly similar to one in Cesarea Philippi, which would resemble the gathering in Jerusalem.
Last week, Cari shared that God gave Peter a dream in which he told him not to call things (or people) unclean that God calls clean. Then he proceeded to enter into a Gentile man and fill him and his entire Gentile, uncircumcised family with the same Holy Spirit with which He had filled the followers of Torah and the Kosher laws! This was a monumental shift in how God’s followers saw the world.
This week, we begin a shift in our story as Divine Life begins to unfold in areas that are not steeped in Jewish law and tradition.
How will this life unfold in places in the world that do not have the traditions of Judaism?
What does the Life of God do in the Roman world — the Greek world?
What form does it take?
How is it different and how is it the same?
These are important things to ask and notice as we seek to allow God to unfold here among us at our little church in Denver in 2026. Get ready! It’s going to be a very fun ride together!
With joy,
The Teaching Team