Acts 1-20

Hello, and welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We are so glad that you have once again joined us for our next discussion.
Today, we’re going to be talking about the book of Acts.
We’re going to be talking about chapters one through 20.
And we’ll explain a little bit why that breakdown is what we’re going to go with
in just a moment.
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Welcome.
It’s a pleasure to have you listening in.
Today we begin the book of Acts,
the continuation of the gospel of Luke,
really no serious challenge to the idea that Luke and Acts are written by the same person.
And they are chapter one and chapter two for Luke.
Luke is really concerned in the gospel with the Jesus story and Jesus as a person.
And then the story continues in the book of Acts of Jesus work.
But now through the church,
what in Greek is ekklesia means the ones who are called out.
So the ones who have been called to Jesus are now called out into the world.
And Luke is very interested in telling us that story and where the gospel goes through their efforts.
Yeah. And even just to begin there,
Clint, that word itself has many different senses that apply in the book of Acts
because you have those who are called out of Judaism,
those who are Christians and or people of the way,
people who have been called out of their normal ways of conceiving of faith and
God because of Jesus Christ.
But you also have the way in which the faith is called out of Jerusalem.
Geographically, the faith actually travels from that center out into the world.
And when we come to the conversation next week,
it’s going to made it all the way to the political capital of the world Rome.
So the church, which is called out is called out of the old faith ways of doing things,
but the church is also called out of the traditional places of religious
power and religious center.
And it becomes a religion of the Gentiles as well as the Jews.
And all of that is happening here in this book.
Agreed.
And I think acts really stands as a bridge.
You have the gospels that focus on Jesus, earthly ministry.
And then really the rest of the new Testament is going to be personal
interactions and theology and advice and teaching and
acts stands in the middle as history,
a snapshot of what the church was doing,
what those early Christians before they even called themselves Christians
committed themselves to do how they lived,
how they ministered, some of the struggles they had,
some of the arguments they had.
I think this is a fascinating book.
There’s really nothing else like it.
Chapter one, it’s almost comical, the opening scene,
the ascension of Jesus,
the disciples, it says are standing and watching Jesus ascend.
And then angels presumably join them and say,
why do you stand looking up?
Jesus, who has been taken from you will come in the same way you saw him go.
And I’ve always wondered if that’s Luke’s humorous way of saying, Jesus is fine.
Time for you to get busy.
Don’t be standing here looking up to heaven.
And you no good to anyone by doing that.
There’s work to be done.
Let’s get going.
And then the next story is them replacing Judas,
filling in their number,
interesting by casting lots.
So right away we get into the kind of the mechanics of how they’re
organizing themselves and what they’re doing.
And it is fascinating that their initial movement toward ministry
is taking care of one another,
of helping those in need.
I don’t know if you would agree with this,
Clint, but I think a temptation of an early Christian would be to think
that Jesus is ascension means that the purest and most holy
and most faithful life is one which is completely oriented to the spiritual,
that we need to hear Jesus’s teaching.
We need to be transformed by it.
We need to be holy, spiritual people.
And that temptation to just look up to the clouds and to make it all about ourselves
and to make it all about waiting for the soon coming Lord
is missing half of the picture, because fundamentally,
Jesus promised throughout his entire earthly ministry,
and it’s recounted in all of the gospels,
I am going to send a helper,
an advocate,
my spirit.
It’s going to happen in Acts two.
We’re going to have that described.
And the reality is,
if we spend all of our time looking up,
we will never experience the spirit who exists here.
And towards your point,
we sometimes think of the Holy Spirit
that we’re going to be talking about.
We sometimes think about that spirit as a holy ghost kind of ether,
this sort of ambiguous thing that we can’t really describe,
but we believe exists.
And the temptation is then to miss the fact that in the book of Acts,
the spirit is always alive and at work in real and concrete ways.
And that looks like organizing.
It looks like administration.
It looks like doing the work of ministry.
And that is a natural thing to follow.
Hey, guys, stop staring off into the atmosphere.
It’s time to get to earth and get stuff done.
That’s a place where we see the twofold understanding of the church in Luke,
that language of being called out.
We are called out of the world.
We are called to be a different substance.
We are called to deny our worldliness.
That becomes an important theme for Paul later.
But then in Christ’s name,
we are sent back into the world
and either is incomplete without the other.
If not for the initial withdrawal,
one is not ready for the reentry.
And if all one does is good stuff in the world without the sense of call
and the direction of Christ, that’s also incomplete.
So I think Luke does us a favor in helping us get there.
So we go back to Jerusalem.
The disciples are there.
They’re in an upper room where they are praying together.
They’re together with all of the key characters,
those who had been with
and lived with and followed Jesus.
And then we have those rather famous words that as they were there,
there were tongues of fire that come upon them, a rushing wind.
And we have this coming of the spirit in that place.
And I think that this is,
at least from my perspective,
one of those scripture passages that has been read by faithful Christians
in radically different ways throughout all of the years.
Would you agree with that, Clint?
A hundred percent.
Yeah, it’s important that in the book of Acts,
the Holy Spirit is not
some amorphous thing that works in the background,
but is very much the upfront power and presence of God.
We’ll see that in some of the baptism language later in the book.
But here, Luke tells us right away with Acts 2,
the Holy Spirit does stuff.
When it shows up,
things happen.
It’s not simply around.
It is active.
It is a force.
And the dominant metaphors here,
wind and fire, what happens when they get together,
it spreads,
it moves.
And so here we have that sense of movement.
They look like tongues,
which is important for proclaiming.
This is a great,
this is a great passage.
I think I would just add to that,
Clint.
I do think that as a modern person,
our temptation might be culturally to say that the spirit of God
is the good that lives in us.
We might say that the spirit of God is God’s presence.
And so when we think good thoughts and do good things,
that’s the spirit of God working in us.
I don’t think that’s the image of the Holy Spirit that we get here in Acts.
In other words,
the spirit’s not just us at our best,
which is sometimes what we think in our very positive mindset kind of culture,
where if you think it,
you can do it.
If you live into your best view,
then you’ll be good.
The spirit of God actually physically changes things like you were just saying.
The spirit of God does stuff to us and so therefore can’t be the same as us.
So don’t make the mistake of thinking that the spirit of God
is a happy, feel-good aspect of being a person.
The spirit of God is both an advocate for us,
but in some senses,
the spirit of God condemns and convicts us.
The spirit of God is God and so therefore,
though the spirit is within us and around us network in our midst,
we shouldn’t make the mistake of making that spirit
some sort of amorphous good within us that we just need to channel in helpful ways.
Yeah, and we’ve spent a couple thousand years
trying to figure out a theology of the Holy Spirit.
Luke is fairly simple in that regard in that it’s almost binary.
People have the spirit or they don’t.
They’ve been baptized in the spirit or they haven’t.
And that baptism is confirmed by what they do and how they live
and how they respond to the call of Christ.
I also think it’s significant and we read over this
because it’s a long list of countries and hard to pronounce words,
but the initial garden that the church is planted in is all Jewish.
There were devout Jews from every nation.
So it’s international, but it’s of one faith.
And that’s going to ebb and flow a little bit
until ultimately being downplayed in the book of Luke
as we move into the Gentile ministry.
But it is significant that all of the first converts,
all of the first Christians are religious people.
Christianity didn’t see itself as something independent of Judaism,
but as a fulfillment.
It wasn’t an alternative.
It was an improvement.
It was an evolution.
And I think we can easily, as Protestants,
as Gentiles, we can easily miss that.
But it’s a significant part of the story,
I think.
We might also miss the significance of language here
because you got to remember way back in Genesis,
the story of the Tower of Babel
and all of the people working together to build this tower to heaven.
God sees it.
God divides them.
And you remember that story where he confuses their language
so that they don’t talk.
Well, here you have all of these people from these different places,
Jews,
as you pointed out,
and they speak different languages.
The fact that they are speaking languages of the place
where they came from actually goes all the way back to the prophets.
And the idea that the people being deported from Jerusalem,
the Jews losing some of their ethnic heritage in that sort of deportation,
actually has significance here.
Because you have all of these different divisions,
even if there is one faith,
and with the coming of the Spirit suddenly harkening back
to all of these different points and moments
in the people of Israel’s life,
suddenly they can now hear and understand one another again.
God is able to unify by the power of God’s Spirit
the thing that this people of faith have experienced
as God forsakenness in the past.
Yeah, and that even at the outset,
while there are huge responses to the Gospel
in the early part of Acts,
we see these incredible numbers,
3,000, 2,000, 5,000, but we also see they’ve been drinking wine in the morning.
So, Luke is aware that wherever faith grows,
there is also opposition,
that it’s never one or the other,
that there are always converts and there are always critics.
And as we move forward in the story,
Luke is going to show us that some of that ability to get it wrong
finds its way into the church.
One of the things that stuck out to me very early in my reading in Acts
was how in these sermons that you hear,
sort of like overhearing some of the earliest reflections
on what Jesus’ ascension and resurrection meant to the early church,
you hear the early church fathers and mothers
making the direct connection to the people of Israel’s story.
And it makes it abundantly clear
that the faith that,
as you’ve already said,
Clint, we will see in Acts turning more and more and more gentile in its language,
from its very inception,
is rooted in the garden of Jewish identity and history.
So,
we as Christians are always connected to the family tree of Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob.
These towers of Israel remain the towers of Christianity.
In fact, the earliest Christians couldn’t make sense of who they were without them.
And as people who are reading the New Testament,
we may be tempted to think that those Old Testament scriptures,
as we even call it old,
that may sound like that’s a statement on quality.
It’s not.
We are rooted and grounded in that garden.
That’s the place in which the tree of Christ,
the vine of Christ has grown,
and the church will always live in it.
But we do see this sort of growth and change and transformation
by the power of the Spirit
that we and even the earliest disciples were surprised to see, “Hey, wait,
the Gentiles are grafted into this thing too.”
Which is why I also think,
Michael, that as we move through the book of Acts,
an increasing focus gets put on Paul’s work.
Paul is uniquely suited to carry that forward.
Paul is a Pharisee.
Paul is a devout Jew.
Paul has a background in scripture,
an intelligence in Jewish thinking,
and yet he has this incredible conversion experience of Christ
that integrates all of that with this new faith
that Jesus is the Messiah,
that Jesus is the Son of God, the risen one.
And Paul, therefore, it seems is uniquely qualified
to make that bridge from Jew to Gentile
and offer a gospel that does justice to both the old and the new.
I think as modern readers,
we may not be immediately drawn
to the significance of some of the early church debates
about what to do with Gentiles.
That was a really significant problem.
What do you do with people who literally dress differently,
who conduct themselves differently,
who don’t share the same theological understandings,
who don’t have the same history
and connection to a people group?
This is a significant problem for the early church,
and it isn’t just big theological pastoral leadership kinds of issues.
It was literally on the ground,
issues like these widows are being fed,
these widows are not.
And the early church had to wrestle with,
“That’s not right.
We need to fix that.”
And within that conflict,
I do think we see a little glimmer,
a glimpse of what happens as the gospel grows.
It requires us to change.
It creates conflict.
It creates moments where what we thought we knew
and what we need to know are different,
and we have to humbly and faithfully lean into the spirit’s leading,
because this book shows us in clear detail,
growth,
change,
adaptation,
all of that stuff is hard.
Yeah.
I think the Jews of that early Christian movement
are in a tough position as regards the Gentiles,
because the Gentiles on one hand simply aren’t them,
aren’t us.
But they aren’t us because they don’t conduct themselves according to the Torah,
the law, which is the fundamental definition of who us is, who we are.
And so what do you do with people who are proclaiming Christ, but aren’t circumcised,
who eat the wrong things?
And those aren’t cultural issues.
Yes, there are cultural issues,
but fundamentally, that’s a faith issue.
They don’t follow our law.
What does that mean as they embrace the gospel?
And that is a huge hurdle for the early church to navigate,
and it is fascinating to see how they did that.
And to be honest,
Michael, I don’t know.
I mean, we’re guessing it thinks historical.
Had the church not opened itself to Gentiles,
had it not been guided by that vision and passion,
had Paul not picked up that mission,
it is likely that Christianity would have been a footnote
in a temporary movement within Judaism,
as there have been many.
But committing itself to reach the outsider
defines Christianity in a way,
I think, that allows it to survive, humanly speaking.
We should never forget that Acts is a living connection to Luke.
In other words, another way of saying that is,
the story of the early church is always connected to Jesus and who he was.
What does that look like practically?
Practically, Jesus looked at the centurion who said,
“If I say to one person,
do this, it’s done.
All you need to do is say the words,
and my servant will be healed.”
We remember that story from Jesus’ ministry.
Here, we have Roman soldiers becoming believers.
We have the people who the Jews have always conceived of as the occupiers,
the military force that needs overthrowns coming into faith,
proclaiming the good news.
And what do the early believers do with that?
The reality is that Jesus,
from the very beginning,
proclaimed the gospel big enough for the Gentile.
But the earliest Christians had to wrestle with the realities of what that meant.
Wait, even the Romans can have faith?
Our preconceived ideas of what the dress and what the food
and what the legal expectations of being those people now has to change.
And you can imagine that that caused a great deal of strife
and struggle amidst the early church leaders.
And we have certainly not always lived up to it,
but that characteristic of embracing the outsider.
That has been the impetus that has literally sent the church around the world,
that has moved the church in racial and ethnic ministry and mission in social justice.
It, I think, undergirds the church with this deep sense of inclusion and outreach
that at our best has defined who we are.
And we haven’t always been at our best,
but at our best,
the Christian church, the people of the way,
have believed that Jesus Christ
came for everyone, even those who aren’t us.
And when we get that right,
we are, I think, living out that calling that we see in the book of Acts.
And that requires humility.
The church has to be humble enough to recognize that we get it wrong.
And I think a great example of that comes towards the end of our reading here,
when the council of the church sends a letter to some of the believers in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia,
and they say there,
you know, it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us
to not burden you,
you being the Gentiles,
to not burden you Gentiles with anything beyond
the following requirements.
And then they give them some here markers of how your behavior should be different,
because you are a follower of Christ.
And I think that sometimes we forget that our job is to get out of the way,
to not be a burden that is to make faith an invitation that is joyous
and is full of opportunity and possibility.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t have expectations.
These people did, they were clearly communicated with,
this is what it means to be a disciple.
But that being said,
Christians are far too tempted and we have too long of a track record
of putting burdens between people in Christ, putting barriers,
than we have been breaking them down.
And at our best towards your point,
Clint, at our very best,
we are those who do not inflict burdens on other people’s faith,
but we invite them into the burden lifting presence of Jesus Christ.
Yeah, there’s that wonderful story where Peter experiences faith
and the confirmation of the Holy Spirit in Gentiles.
He’s seen that vision of the food and he says,
“No, I wouldn’t eat that God.”
God says, “Don’t call anything unclean that I’ve made clean.”
And immediately he’s then called across the river to the Gentiles house
where he goes in and eats with them,
which is a break of his tradition.
And then when he sees God at work in them,
he moves to a new understanding.
And then he testifies to the counsel of those events.
And in the aftermath,
they have the wisdom to say,
“We see God at work.
Let’s not hinder it.”
I don’t know if this is moving ahead too far,
Clint, but I was struck in this reading how Stephen,
the first martyr, the first Christian whose life is recorded being given up for the faith,
is immediately paired with Saul,
who becomes the proclaimer of the good news to the church,
to the Gentiles.
It’s striking how one person’s willingness to even give of their very life pointing to Christ becomes a moment,
maybe a starting moment,
for what later becomes
one of the greatest evangelistic ministries of all time.
Yeah,
we see just the uncharacteristic movement of God who picks Saul
to be a missionary,
who looks at a young,
angry Pharisee and says,
“That’s my guy.
I’m going to get that guy,
and eventually I’m going to send him to all the people that he
won’t interact with now.” I think only God sees those kind of possibilities.
Nobody else could see that coming.
What does Paul think when he suffers all of the hardships he suffers for the gospel?
And he thinks back to that moment he stands as Stephen is stoned and sees his suffering.
That person, the Saul at that moment,
could have not even conceived suffering
for a moment for the people he was trying to stamp out,
and later he receives shipwrecks,
sicknesses,
stonings himself,
later martyrdom himself.
The remarkable turn that happens here cannot be overemphasized.
This Road to Damascus story is not just a children’s Bible story.
This is a remarkable account of someone turning the definition of 180 degrees.
Absolutely night and day,
and it’s an incredible story and invitation for all of us to look at
our own selves and see,
yeah, we need conversion ourselves,
and the Spirit of God is able to do it
abundantly more than we could ask or think.
I think what can get missed in that,
Michael, is that it’s also a church story.
Conversion stories always seem personal,
and they, of course, are.
God confronts Paul.
He’s blinded.
He hears a voice.
But it’s really that next part of the story where we meet Ananias who mentors Paul,
and who does so with some reluctance initially,
some fear.
“God, are you sure this is the right guy?
You know what he’s been up to?”
And God says, “Yeah, he’s the instrument I’ve chosen.”
And then for a significant period of time,
Paul is under the influence of this church community,
and specifically this man,
Ananias.
I think it says he begins preaching almost immediately.
But if I remember right,
he stays there for a significant period.
It might even be a couple years as he learns the faith and the practice of the faith
from this mentor and this community,
which he had sought to stamp out.
And so, yes, the personal conversion is an amazing moment.
But it’s interesting to me how quickly Luke connects it to the community,
that it doesn’t happen off on its own.
It’s not a vacuum.
It’s a church story.
Absolutely.
It even goes to the extent that Paul shows up in synagogues
where the people are running to the exits,
right?
What in the world is this guy doing here?
Because you know he’s been hunting down Christians.
Everybody is assuming this is some sort of Trojan horse.
This guy is faking it,
and he’s coming after us, and we’re fools.
Yeah, he has to prove himself not only to the Jews that he hasn’t abandoned them,
but to the Christians that he’s genuine.
He begins on an island a little bit.
And if you want to frame it that way,
what an act of faith from these people
who were truly at risk to welcome now this individual,
that is by definition a conversion of the church.
Because these people are literally putting themselves at risk
for the profession of faith of this man who literally had permission to arrest them.
Let’s talk about Paul briefly.
A couple of things stood out to me in this reading.
We use the word Pharisee a lot,
but I’m not sure we always have a good sense of what we mean.
So Pharisee is a designation.
It’s not a vocation.
So Pharisee is not Paul’s job.
It’s his affiliation within Judaism.
There are three major groups,
the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes.
And by claiming himself a Pharisee,
Paul means that he is part of that group
that is very dedicated to understanding how Jewish law impacts daily life.
The word Pharisee means separated,
distinguished even.
But Pharisee is not Paul’s job.
We learn later that he’s a tent maker
and that in most of these endeavors, he supports himself.
One of the things that struck me, Michael,
is how Luke just casually mentions at several instances,
“Oh, he stayed there three years.
He was there two years.
He was there 18 months.”
And during that time,
it’s very likely that he’s making tents.
That some of the people he’s ministering to and converting,
he likely met through his job, through his work.
And that’s a part,
I think, of his story that we could easily read over,
but it stood out to me this time.
Yeah, I think, Michael, that Paul’s a fascinating character,
an incredible man,
a tenacity, and a resilience.
He becomes, by the book of Acts’ ending,
he really becomes in many ways the key figure of the rest of the New Testament.
And in some ways,
the standard bearer of Christianity throughout the latter part of the story.
And in one of his letters,
he’ll make a point of saying that when he was with the people,
he didn’t take charity, that he worked.
And I think sometimes we forget that Paul was not simply a guy out there preaching,
but a person of his era had a trade,
had some religious training,
had all of those things.
And they all funnel together in what he’s able to do on behalf of the gospel.
And it’s worth pausing and pointing out how spectacular it is that Paul becomes that
character portrayed in the book of Acts,
because think about it.
Peter is the one that Jesus says,
“On this rock I’ll build my church.”
Peter’s the one who saw Jesus and his ministry,
and we have all of these stories of him not getting
it and Jesus proclaiming what will be true for him.
Peter is in the book of Acts,
and we hear Peter’s sermons and Peter’s reflections and Peter’s vision.
So it’s exceptional then that in a book which is connecting the church to Jesus,
spends as much time as it does on a person who never saw Jesus.
Paul never saw Jesus.
He never had the same encounter.
And yet the weight,
the amount of words spent,
the amount of history portrayed
of Paul and his work,
and then later, of course, the letters that we have that he wrote to churches,
this is exceptional.
It is out of the ordinary.
You would not expect it if you were going to set out and do it.
And I think that’s just a whole other mark in favor of how the early church was not compelled
to share a rosy happy picture to convince people.
They were compelled to share a picture of what was true and how God actually worked in their midst.
And I don’t know if Luke does it on purpose or not,
but he does give us some insight into Paul,
who it appears has some stubbornness,
some hardheadedness.
We know from some of his letters that Paul can be pretty feisty, pretty ornery.
There’s a story later in the book of Acts where he and Barnabas separate
because it says that Paul doesn’t trust John Mark,
doesn’t want him to come with him.
So, Paul is human,
and yet God uses that.
Now, you know, that maybe is the great takeaway from Paul’s story,
is that he doesn’t stand as a saint that God then knights with the sword and sends him out there.
He comes broken and humbled,
and God builds him up using his particular gifts,
both in his vocation as tentmaker,
a skill that can travel,
in his stubbornness, in his tenacity,
in his former training,
that God puts him to work as who he is.
And I think sometimes we get the sense that we have to become this thing
before God could do anything with us,
and the reality is that’s not how it works.
God is calling us to be us,
the best Christian version of us that we can,
and then sending us out to do his stuff.
There’s a lot of really great stuff to come,
and I think maybe one of the last things I want to add to this conversation is,
especially in the middle of Acts,
it’s fascinating to see how different
communities respond to the gospel as Paul preaches it there.
And I think one place that,
you know, we really definitely need to pause is Athens, another is Ephesus.
Athens because you have this large philosophical group of people there,
or they’re talking about God from the longest standing sort of western traditions.
And I think as those who live with some understanding of our own worldview
being shaped by Plato and Aristotle and some of the philosophical ideologies,
we too can somewhat appreciate Paul going to the Areopagus
and having a conversation about the unknown God.
Hey, that God that you are worshiping because you don’t want to leave a God out,
I want to talk to you about that God.
That shows an adeptness,
an understanding of culture,
a willingness to listen before speaking,
that I think modern Christians would benefit greatly from living in for a little bit.
Yeah, and again,
to Paul’s credit,
he can talk philosophy with the philosophers.
He studies enough to be able to use some of their arguments.
He quotes some of their poetry.
He can have that conversation with them.
He can then comfortably go to the synagogue and have that conversation with Jews.
He can talk to shop owners.
He can talk to merchants.
He can talk to politicians.
He’s able to converse with that wide range of people.
I like chapter 19.
Michael Paul’s in Ephesus and lots of things happen in Ephesus,
but there’s a funny moment where Paul asks,
“Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?”
And this group in the church says,
“No, we didn’t even hear that there was a Holy Spirit,”
which makes me wonder if they’re Presbyterians.
And then later on, there’s a riot,
a meeting, and there’s a wonderful verse that says,
“Some were shouting one thing and some were shouting another,
and the assembly was in confusion,
and most of them
didn’t even know why they had come together.”
And that convinces me they’re Presbyterians.
I’ve been to a lot of those meetings.
You know, I would point to maybe a different aspect of Ephesus.
And I think a thing that strikes me that you may not know is
Ephesus is a capital of religious faith in the ancient world.
It’s a place of great temples and a lot of people come to worship there.
It may be an interesting city for you to study if that’s of interest to you.
But when Paul comes and proclaims the gospel there,
you have a silversmith named Demetrius,
and Demetrius’ entire job is making silver shrines for a god.
And I only say that to say,
when Paul proclaims the gospel
and people become converted,
Demetrius realizes very quickly,
“Wait a minute,
this is going to tank our sails.
My profession is going to be radically
changed by this gospel.”
So what does Demetrius do?
He goes to fix the problem,
not to hear the gospel,
not to dispute the gospel,
to say,
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
this new thing is calling into question the religion that’s making us money,
people.
We need to stop it.”
I pause here to say,
I think Christians of all time and places,
including the earliest Christians,
have recognized that this faith
has real life implications for not just what we believe,
but for literally our lives,
our vocations, our professions, the things that make us money.
All of these things are under the umbrella of what it means to be a faithful Christian.
And sometimes that means that we might need to find a new road,
because our current road has been called into question.
Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve thought of it this way before,
Michael, but it’s interesting in the early part of Acts,
continuing the gospels, the opposition to Christianity is theological.
And then there’s maybe this brief window in the book of Acts,
where it becomes philosophical,
but in Ephesus,
it’s extremely practical.
It’s costing this man money that people are following Jesus.
That’s an intriguing thought,
the cost of Christianity.
Any final thoughts, Clint?
No, I hope you all find something compelling about the book of Acts.
I think it’s a wonderful testament to the early church
and to their passion and their wisdom,
if not always their wisdom,
their faithfulness in that they continue to look to God for direction,
even when it takes them in surprising ways.
I think this idea,
we throw the word inclusiveness around a lot,
but it is stunning that 50 to 70 years after the ministry of Jesus,
no one could have predicted what the church looked like.
It begins with that diversity we see in the Pentecost story,
Jews from every nation and language,
and even that isn’t diverse enough as the church continues to open doors
to welcome new people in Christ’s name.
And I don’t know if inclusive is the right word,
but it’s certainly something we can learn from there.
Paul’s story is not over.
It’s leading somewhere, it’s going somewhere.
At this point, only God knows where that is.
So keep on reading.
You will encounter as you keep going a fulfillment of how this book even began,
and we’ll explore that together next podcast.
We look forward to seeing you next Saturday.
Until then, keep on reading and let us in the earliest account of the church’s life
be inspired how we might live into that same faith today.
See you next week.
Thanks for listening.