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Week 6

Day 36 (Saturday)

Today’s Big Idea: Keep, Give, or Toss? Now we start the process of sorting things out and putting them back in order. To do this in an actual house-cleaning situation, organizational experts will ask the homeowner to divide their items into three stacks: Keep It, Give It, or Toss It.

Since everything in your church has now been hauled out of the cupboards and onto the floor, metaphorically speaking, we’re going to use the Keep-Give-Toss filter on them so we can arrive at Decision Day this coming Saturday with clearer minds and hearts. To do that, we’ll spend the entire week walking through a single passage from the book of Acts in which the early church faced a problem and used the Keep-Toss-Give filter to simplify and solve it.

Key Verse: “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them” (Acts 6:2–3).

Passage of the Day: Acts 6:1–7

Thoughts to Consider: The first group of leaders in the early church were known as the Twelve. They were the disciples who had been closest to Jesus when he walked the earth (minus Judas, plus Matthias; Acts 1:23-26). Their primary assignment was to pray and teach the Word. It was a singular, narrowly-defined task that guided everything they did. 

Every church needs believers focused on tasks with narrow parameters. We must know what we’re called to do, then narrow in on our assignment with a laser-tight focus. Unfortunately, the problems that inevitably come along can cause us to lose that focus. Then, after years of problems, challenges, and the constant drumbeat of everyday life, the mission can get lost in the mess.

This week’s passage shows us one of the church’s earliest challenges. It came in the form of a problem that threatened to divert the attention of the apostles from their primary assignment. They weren’t tempted to do anything wrong or sinful. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The leaders were being called on to fill a need the church was supposed to keep as one of their primary emphases—the care of widows.

The Hellenistic widows (Jewish Christians who spoke Greek and were called from Jerusalem to reach Gentiles) complained that they weren’t being treated as well as the Hebraic widows (Jewish Christians who spoke Hebrew and lived in and around Jerusalem) in the daily distribution of food. This problem needed to be solved, so the apostles proposed a solution. Pick seven people “who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom” and assign this important task to them. In this elegant solution, we see the principles of Keep-Give-Toss taking place. The apostles Kept true their mandate to pray, study, and teach God’s Word, Tossed the task from their personal to-do list, and Gave this important assignment to people better suited for the task.

Like the early apostles, your church does something well, or it can. But sometimes it takes solving a problem for that mission to come into clearer focus. That was true for the early church, just as it’s true for your congregation. Let’s pray today, as the early apostles did, that we will approach this important week wisely so we can make our decisions as well as the early church did.