Everyday Witnesses
Think about the people in your life right now who don't know Jesus.
A family member. A coworker. The neighbor you wave to but have never really talked to. A friend from high school you still follow online. An old teammate.
You know them. You care about them. And you desperately want them to know Jesus the way you do.
Here's the good news: God has never left the reaching of those people up to a handful of professionals. He never has. We see it right at the beginning of the church, in Acts 8.
The Day Everything Got Disrupted
On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. (Acts 8:1)
On the day that Stephen was martyred (Acts 7), a great persecution broke out against the church. That persecution was intense, as Luke tells us in verse 3:
But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison. (Acts 8:3)
Make no mistake, this was the enemy at work. Jesus said in John 10 that the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. Saul was, at this moment, doing exactly that. He wanted to end this Jesus movement and the early church before it ever really got going.
But God had other plans. Look at verse 4:
Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. (Acts 8:4)
Not the Professionals
Stop and ask yourself who "those who had been scattered" actually were.
Not the apostles.
Luke already said in verse 1 that the apostles stayed behind in Jerusalem. So the people preaching the word wherever they went weren't the men who spent three years walking with Jesus. They weren't the recognized leaders of the early church.
They were just ordinary believers, scattered out of their homes and into unfamiliar towns, with nothing left but their faith and the Holy Spirit living inside them.
And what does Luke say they did?
They "preached the word."
That doesn't mean they were standing on street corners delivering sermons. It simply means they shared the good news wherever they landed.
It's also written in the present tense in the Greek, which tells us this wasn't a one-time announcement. As they built new lives, made new neighbors, and took new jobs, they kept telling people about Jesus, over and over, in the normal course of everyday life.
A Yale historian (Kenneth Latourette) once made the observation that the early spread of Christianity depended less on trained clergy and far more on everyday men and women who simply talked about their faith as they went about ordinary life.
That's exactly what we're seeing happen in Acts 8. The mission of God didn't rest all on the apostles. It rested on the grassroots.
God was sending His people out — not through a formal commissioning service, but through persecution He allowed the enemy to use for a greater purpose.
Disrupting Our Comfortability
Before the persecution broke out, the early church was experiencing something beautiful in Jerusalem. They were gathered in homes, sharing life together, growing in the Spirit. It was good. God had real purpose in it.
But it wasn't the whole purpose. God's love was never meant to stay contained in Jerusalem. So He allowed their comfort to be disrupted so the gospel could move into Judea, Samaria, and eventually the ends of the earth.
They lost their homes. Their jobs. Their community. Their comfort. And yet Luke tells us they were still preaching the word in their new communities because the Spirit doesn't need your comfort to do His work. He just needs your availability.
Sometimes that looks the same way for us too. Maybe the Spirit is stirring something in your heart to go somewhere far from home as a missionary. If so, pay attention to that, and trust Him with it.
But for most of us, the disruption is closer to home. It might be your own comfort keeping you from what God wants to do in your neighborhood, your workplace, your friend group, your own family. And that can feel risky.
But we haven't been given a spirit of fear in Christ. The enemy loves to convince us that abundant life is found in staying comfortable. It isn't.
Abundant life is found in Christ and as we trust Him enough to step into the uncomfortable, we will experience His life working through us to reach more people and be a part of something so much bigger than ourselves.
Who Is the Spirit Leading You to Tell?
Statistics tell us that there are still 5.5 billion people in this world who don't know Jesus, and around 140 million right here in the U.S. Some of them share your last name. Some of them sit next to you at work, live next door to you, go to your gym, or spend time at the park your kids play at.
The good news is that you don't need a seminary degree or a title to be part of what God is doing to reach them. The people in Acts 8 who carried the gospel into Judea and Samaria weren't apostles. They were just people who had experienced Jesus for themselves and talked about how He had changed their lives with others.
If you’ve experienced Jesus changing your life, be open to sharing that experience with others and watch Jesus work through you to draw them to Himself in His perfect timing.
