The Church is Who We Are + Where Wherever We Go (#010)

Everywhere He went, Jesus shifted the spiritual atmosphere. In other words, He didn’t “go to church” to find God, He took the presence and power of God with Him everywhere He went.

You can too.

In Luke 9, we read the story of Jesus encountering nine of his disciples who struggle to cast out a demon. In fact, they fail. As He— with Peter, James, and John— come down the mountain and approach the crowd, the father of the demon-possessed boy greets Him (Luke 9:38-42 NKJV):

Suddenly a man from the multitude cried out, saying, “Teacher, I implore You, look on my son, for he is my only child. And behold, a spirit seizes him, and he suddenly cries out; it convulses him so that he foams at the mouth; and it departs from him with great difficulty, bruising him. So I implored Your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.”

Then Jesus answered and said, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here.”

And as he was still coming, the demon threw him down and convulsed him. Then Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the child, and gave him back to his father.

In this passage, we see two facts:

1. The disciples failed to do something they were presumably already empowered to do.
2. Jesus appears frustrated.

The shift

In the next chapter, Luke reports that Jesus empowered 70 additional followers, apparently with same empowerment as the original twelve. When they all gather back to provide a post-ministry report, we read something very different.

The disciples report that they were successful (Luke 10:17 NKJV):

Then the seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name.”

Jesus isn’t frustrated. He rejoices, noting that He sees ultimate victory (Luke 10:18 NLT):

“Yes,” He told them, “I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning!”

Assignment

Step 4 in the Transformation book is assignment— it’s where we learn to apply the lessons Jesus taught the disciples BETWEEN Luke 9 (where they weren’t successful) and Luke 10 (in which they were).

This is the “sweet spot” where we discover that church isn’t something we attend, it’s something we are…

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