Sunday, March 13, 2011

Sharing the God-Life Together (Acts 16)

Read Acts 15:36-16:15.

    100 years ago, deep in the jungles of Africa, there was a small clearing.  In this clearing was a single village made up of a single tribe.  The people lived off the jungle, eating its fruits and animals.  They had some good times, when there was plenty of food and plenty of peace.  They also had bad times when other tribes took their food and killed their men.  But amid this struggle for life, another enemy rose up. 
People began to get sick.  It started with an itchy throat.  Then, came a mild cough.  It ended with deep, horrendous body shaking coughs that lasted through the night, with their bodies shaking wildly in fits of coughing until finally they moved no more.  The whole village was kept awake at night to the sound of people literally coughing up their lungs.  And as the people got sicker, they also got meaner and sadder.  Fathers began to hit their children.  Women began to lash out at people trying to help them.  Throughout the night, between the coughing, were mournful wails or angry shouts at the dark sky. 
    The people began to call this sickness the dark-death.  Soon, nearly everyone in the village had the dark-death, and it seemed to shut the light out of the people who caught the illness.  The dark-death hung like a dark cloud over the village, shutting out the light from the sky.  No one knew where this disease had come from or how it was spread.  They only knew that it was destroying them, and they had no cure.  Many began to lose hope.  Some abandoned the village to take their chances in the jungle.
    But one group, one small group, the prophets, called the people to hope. ...



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