Tuesday, February 11, 2014

W.W.P.D.?

If "following Jesus" was the whole of the Christian faith, the New Testament would be a whole lot shorter.

The early Church's normal practice was devotion "to the apostles' teaching" (Acts 2:42), and the Church is "built on the foundation of the apostles" (Ephesians 2:20; cf. Revelation 21:14). God the Holy Spirit has given the apostles (and their writings in the New Testament) as His gifting to the Church (1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 4:11).

Merely "following Jesus" or "being like Jesus" or W.W.J.D. alone is not biblical Christianity.

*In addition to being missional and evangelizing often, Paul also planted churches, spent lots of time with churches, exhaustively taught doctrine to churches, and worked hard to make them organized and even - gulp - institutional.

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