Last week I spent a little while trawling the Internet in search of an out of print book.  I did find one or two copies available, but exceedingly expensive!  It was the title of the book that prompted my interest, it is called “Christ the Fountaine of Life” and was written almost four hundred years ago by John Cotton a Puritan minister who, after a period preaching and serving in Lincolnshire sailed across the Atlantic to New England where he and others like him had liberty to declare the gospel as they had come to understand it.  Perhaps the quaint spelling ‘fountaine’ catches our eye but it should be the importance of the whole phrase that captures us.

Although open to other interpretations, Revelation chapter eleven contains (what could be) a powerful vision of the church.  There we see two witnesses who prophesy in the midst of much adversity.  Described as two olive trees and two candlesticks they stand before the God of the earth and yet in the midst of adversaries.  Their career is a mixed one, it includes a season when nothing and no one can stop nor silence them, after this they are overcome by their enemies and lie dead in the street of the great city where they had lived and ministered.

Acts fifteen is an important chapter for a number of reasons, not least because we learn how to deal with an emergent false doctrine.  The church was quite young; enjoying the freshness the Spirit of God always brings, yet even in this blessed atmosphere an emphasis rose that threatened to work like an acid and cause the decay of faith, hope and love.