The Hand of The Lord - The Hand of the Lord for Evangelism and Church Growth (Daily Devotional)

Greetings and welcome to Living Supernaturally. Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to minister God’s word and spend a few moments in prayer. This week, we have been talking about the hand of the Lord and today, we look at the hand of Lord for evangelism and church growth. Acts chapter 11, verse 21, ‘And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord.’ God actively intervenes and works with the lives of His people and in the church to bring about spiritual growth and expansion. History has shown that often when the church is being persecuted, it has only led to increase. While the early church was growing rapidly at Jersualem, it also began to spread widely, as people scattered from persecution preached the word wherever they went in the surrounding territories and their hometowns. Many churches are growing but most of the growth is in transfers from probably one church to another. Rotation of saints doesn’t lead to adding to the believers in the church. The new church in Antioch was healthy, filled with people of real and deep faith. Its members were radically generous, they were encouragers. Something amazing was happening with a great number of people being brought to the Lord. The Greek here is ‘prostithemi’ often translates in the book of Acts as ‘added to.’ Church life can sometimes be static or stale for many of us. We may look at it as routines, we may even it in the same chair/ place week after week. Though Christ has intended His church to be a community that is always growing, the hand of the Lord will enable us as a church to grow. The hand of the Lord also sends Philip in a certain direction and he soon meets the Ethiopian eunuch who was reading from the book of Isaiah. The man doesn’t understand what he was reading by God sent Philip at that moment and a new disciple in born out of this encounter. The Spirit of God soon took Philip to another place and the Ethiopian man went back home bringing the good news of Jesus with him. Though this man was a eunuch who could no longer have children, the church in Ethiopia today, points back to him as the spiritual father. We see the hand of the Lord providing divine support and blessings on the efforts of the believers as they share the gospel. As a church, let us ask for God’s hand upon us and we will see the kingdom of God advancing in our churches.

Let us pray, Father, we thank you for this wonderful promise that you will build your church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. We thank you that even as we go about ministering, evangelizing and reaching out, that your hand will be upon us and we will see the fruit of our labor in our lives. We thank and praise you, in Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

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