[Modified transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube[1], May 2020]
What made the Good News of Jesus Christ so infectious? Why did the Christian church grow so quickly? Can we recapture that infectious faith?
I don’t know about you but I’ve been watching the daily updates from the government about coronavirus and just checking to see how things are going on. They’ve been talking a lot about an ‘R’ number. Now probably before the outbreak most of you didn’t know what an R number referred to but it’s the effective reproduction rate of a virus. The way it works is it measures how infectious a virus is if it’s R-1 then that means one person can infect one other person with the virus and if the value is over R-1 then what you’ll get is an exponential growth of a virus. It will spread quicker and quicker and more and more people will get infected with the virus. If it’s less than 1 then it’ll slow down, it will gradually decline, the virus will hopefully eventually die out. Fortunately at the moment, due to a lock-down, we’ve managed to get the R value of COVID-19 down to less than 1 so we’re seeing a slowdown in the rates of infection.
01:21 Now I’ve been reading with some friends through the book of Acts in the New Testament in the Bible. It tells a story of those first few years of the church and how it grew rapidly in the Middle East and beyond, in the Roman Empire and even further than that. At the beginning of Acts we find the disciples emerging from hiding after the death of Jesus, full of the excitement of Jesus’s resurrection and also full of the Holy Spirit. In Acts chapter 2 we find Peter, one of disciples, telling everyone who could hear about the good news of Jesus Christ. After he told them this, three thousand people believed and gave their life to Jesus Christ.
02:18 Now that is highly infectious, that is an R number of 3,000 where one person spread the good news of Jesus Christ to 3,000 other people. To give you an idea, COVID might get an R value, if left unchecked, of between two and two and a half so the good news of Jesus Christ was massively infectious. All those 3,000 people who came from all over the known world to Jerusalem for the Pentecost festival then went home and told people about Jesus. It spread more and more and quicker and quicker, and no wonder Christianity spread so quickly in the known world.
03:01 Why was this story about Jesus Christ so infectious? Well, Jesus sums it up at the beginning of his ministry with these words “The Lord’s Spirit has come to me because he has chosen me to tell the good news to the poor. The Lord has sent me to announce freedom for prisoners, to give sight to the blind, to free everyone who suffers” (Luke 4 v18). Unsurprisingly, it was massively good news for people that the life and Ministry of Jesus Christ had made a difference and that, through his death and resurrection, Jesus had freed us from suffering caused by our slavery to sin, the consequences of which would be death
04:07 In the Western world in recent years we kind of built up an immunity to the good news of Jesus Christ. It no longer seems to have it’s impact, it’s no longer as infectious. In fact, it’s R number has been lurking below 1; we’ve seen a church which is in decline, we’re seeing less interest in Jesus and Christianity. Yet my hope and my prayer at this time when so much has changed and so many of our foundations have been shaken is that people once again will become susceptible to the good news of Jesus Christ; that they will start to be open to the fact that Jesus really is good news, and that through online church services, conversation with friends and family and by Christians letting their light shine, that people will start to hear the good news of Jesus Christ and realise it is just as good news now as it was 2,000 years ago
[1]YouTube link: Spreading the Good News
Bible references: Luke 4 v18
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Contributed by Martin Shorey; © the Author
