The Rest of the Story

In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach…

Acts 1:1

Many people think that the incarnation of Jesus Christ began at the first Christmas and ended when Jesus was taken up into the clouds. But in fact, that was only the beginning of the incarnation of Christ. The process of the incarnation is still going on.

God's program for reaching and healing a broken world has always involved incarnation. The word incarnate means to take bodily form. When God chose to demonstrate to mankind His love and the new life He offered us, He did so by incarnating Himself — by taking on our form, sharing our human experience, and living among us. God became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God, the God-man, God in human flesh.

But we make a great mistake if we think the incarnation ended with the earthly life of Christ. The life of Jesus is still being manifested upon the earth, but no longer through a single physical body, limited to one geographic location. Today, the body of Christ performs the work of Christ around the globe. It is a corporate body, comprised of millions of individuals like you and me. This body is called the church.

The writer of Acts, Dr. Luke, tells a young man named Theophilus that he had previously set down in his first account (the Gospel of Luke) all that Jesus began to do and teach. In Acts, the sequel to his Gospel, Luke continues the record of Jesus's work among mankind — yet Jesus Himself only appears in the first eleven verses of Acts! Later, Jesus ascends into heaven. Yet the story of His work on earth continues for twenty-eight more chapters. How can that be? Because the rest of Acts is the story of the work of His new body, the church! When it lives in and by the Spirit, the church is nothing less than the physical extension of the life of Jesus to the whole world. The physical life of Jesus began at the moment a Jewish virgin named Mary conceived, and it has continued without interruption right up to the moment you are reading this page — over two thousand years! What happened on a small scale in Judea and Galilee twenty centuries ago continues on a worldwide scale today, permeating every level of society and every aspect of human life. Once we discover and lay hold of this amazing truth for our own lives, our outlook on life is powerfully transformed. Our relationship with God becomes dynamic. Our lives become powerfully effective for God.

It is a thrilling adventure to rediscover the pattern by which God has designed His church to influence the world. On the other hand, there is nothing more pathetic and barren than a church which does not understand God's program for operating the body of Christ on earth. The church which fails to grasp this concept is doomed to substitute business methods, organizational procedures, and pressure politics as means to influence society. This is not the church as God intended it to be; it is merely a religious-sounding extension of the dead systems of this world.

Father, I thank you that the church is the physical body of Jesus Christ in the world. Thank you for making me a part of this body that changes everything.