All Whose Faith Had Drawn Them Together

A Brief Devotion written in 2021

ARC GUIDE LEVEL 1
Ideal for those getting acquainted with our thought process at Ammi Ruhama Community.

They met constantly to hear the apostles teach, and to share the common life, to break bread, and to pray. A sense of awe was everywhere, and many marvels and signs were brought about through the apostles. All whose faith had drawn them together held everything in common: they would sell their property and possessions and make a general distribution as the need of each required.

Acts 2:42-46a The New English Bible, Cambridge & Oxford 1961

Sometimes reading old(er) translations of the scriptures brings to mind interesting concepts of which, perhaps, even the original translators were not aware.

Drawn Together

How do we generally think about people who are “drawn together”? In our churches we generally divide people into classes of learning based on demographics: gender, age, marital status, employment status, etc…we do this for various pedagogical reasons but does it negate how we were originally drawn together–our common faith?

Now, the word “faith,” can conjure many concepts to our minds, from the overarching systematic religion of Christianity to a, perhaps, more biblical definition of a belief and hope in unseen things. The faith that drew the first believers together had not yet formed into a systematic religion and so we must assume that, as the first mention of unity in the scriptures, we are to be drawn (and kept) together on the basis of our faith in Jesus alone.

Kept Together

The Apostle John in his final letters seems to indicate that if what drew us together was anything other than our common faith in Jesus (He adds qualifiers to the phrase including love [read: obedience] and fellowship with the Father) then it will not be enough to keep us together (See 1 John 2:19). Extrapolated these passages come to mean that if we think that by our organization we can form under another unity other than the drawing and keeping nature of true faith, then we are greatly mistaken and will lose a great many who never truly belonged because it was not our common faith that drew them in the first place.

Editor and Writer for ARC Online. Daniel lives in Northern Ireland with his wife Sonya and two daughters.

Daniel L. Bacon