Living an 'ACTS' Life

Some time ago a friend pointed me to Francis Chan’s sermons on YouTube.  Being the gifted communicator that he is, most of his sermons make you want to immediately go and change the world! But one in particular struck me.  In this talk he uses a balance beam as a prop.  After sharing a bit of his life history, he lies on the beam, hugging it.  No jumps and twirls (which, after seeing this live at the Commonwealth Games 2010, I’m much more impressed with), no cartwheels, no flippy dismounts.  Then, mid powerful monologue, he simply climbs off and does the Olympic hands in the air ‘thank you’. 

His challenge? When our lives are over and we stand before God, many of us will want credit for the great performance our lives have been, but all we’ve done is hug the ‘balance beam of Christian life’ and dismount.

“I want my life to fit in this,” Francis Chan says in another YouTube video, holding up his Bible.  Implicit in this is the question, If we were to hold our lives up to the radical lives that we see in the early church (especially in the book of Acts), would our lives fit, or would we be “living on the bearable surface of things,” as one writer pens? 

When I first saw this balance beam YouTube, I was living in Nth India, working with the poor.  Maybe, just maybe, on a good day, if I held my life and my work up against the Acts church, it wasn’t too different.  But I’m now back in Australia.  What about now?  What about you?  Rather than ‘normal’ being modelled by the culture around me, I want to have the radical nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ as my standard. For that to be my normal. 

What’s your normal?

For more information, visit: www.pioneers.org.au

Next blog: What’s it like living an ‘Acts’ life in the youngest nation on earth?