NOTES for Act 2:38-43

The Church is young and full of strength—the strength breathed into her by the Spirit of the Lord. Thousands are added to those being saved, many signs are performed, all believers have received the gift of the Holy Spirit and abide in the fear of God; their life is an example of the fullness of Christian life (see Acts 2:42). It is simply not a life, but a dream... Yet a dream is, for the most part, something unattainable, something invented to ease one’s conscience. One says that it is an ideal incompatible with reality. But what the first Christians live is precisely the true reality, more real than the one in which we live now. And in His conversation with Nicodemus, the Lord speaks precisely about this new mode of being, about the Kingdom of God that is within them and among them (see Luke 17:21, Matt 18:20). Through repentance, through baptism by water and the Spirit, through birth from above, we can enter—or, more precisely, we allow Christ to bring us into—this other life (see John 3:13). Perhaps we ourselves have not yet noticed it, but He has already done everything. All that remains for us is to believe in this as in nothing else, to believe so that we may gradually understand what has happened to us...