Acts 2:32-33

Acts 2:32-33

The Church's witness for Christ:

I. Christ hid in heaven needs a body as well as a spirit by which to manifest His living rule. He needs a body through which He may make Himself intelligible to men, and even to unbelieving men; make Himself felt, certified, effective, enduring. This body He must have, and that body He has with pain secured Himself. And now into that prepared body His Spirit issues from Him, to gather it up into organised life, to inhabit it, to unify its capacities, to regulate its aims, to quicken its impulses, to fix its offices, to direct its gifts, to build up its intercourse, to feed and govern its entire frame. The Church is the witnessing body: it proves Christ's case, it testifies to His victory: and this it does first before God the Father. It manifests His glory by justifying His method of redemption; it bears witness before God that He has not sent His Son in vain; and secondly, it has to witness in the face of men, to prove, to convict, to convince, that even an unbelieving world may believe that the Father did send the Son.

II. And in accomplishing this conversion of the world it has two points this Church to prove and testify first, that Christ is alive and at work now today on earth, and that He can be found of them that believe, and manifest Himself to those who love Him; and secondly, that He is so by virtue of the deed done once for all at Calvary, by which the Prince of this world was judged and the world was overcome, and man given access to God. What proofs can the Church offer for these two points? It has three proofs to give. (1) Its own actual life. This is its primary witness that Christ is now alive at the right hand of God the Father. Its one prevailing and unanswerable proof is, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Christ is alive, otherwise I should not be alive as you see me this day. (2) This personal life of Christ in His Church verifies and certifies to the world the reality of that old life on earth, of that death on Calvary, of that resurrection on Olivet. The living Church bears a book about with it, the Gospel book, the Apostolic witness, the witness of those who so beheld, tasted, handled the Word of Life. (3) Again, the body carries with it a third witness, not only the Apostolic record, but the Apostolic rite, the act commanded by the dying Christ to be done for ever as a memorial and a witness until His coming again. The present life, the unshaken record, the memorial act these are the three prevailing witnesses by which the body testifies to the resurrection of the Lord.

H. Scott Holland, Family Churchman, June 30th, 1886.

References: Acts 2:32 , Acts 2:33 . Clergyman's Magazine, vol. i., p 189. Acts 2:33 . Bishop Barry, First Words in Australia, p. 195.Acts 2:33-36 . Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 480.