The most powerful man who ever lived spent most of his time praying. Think about that. Jesus could have spent every waking moment healing the sick, casting out demons, or building His movement. Instead, He regularly disappeared to pray, sometimes all night long. Why would the Son of God, who spoke creation into existence, need…
A man stands on a staircase above the mob that just tried to beat him to death. He raises his hand. The crowd goes silent. Then he opens his mouth, in the language they did not expect, from the history they cannot dismiss, and begins to tell the most important story he knows: his own….
A prophet named Agabus took Paul’s belt, bound his own hands and feet, and said: “So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man that owneth this girdle, and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.” Everyone in the room began weeping. They begged Paul not to go. And Paul’s answer was not…
Picture the shore at Miletus: grown men on their knees, weeping without shame, falling on the neck of a man they love and kissing him, knowing they will never see his face again. That is the scene that closes Acts 20, and it is the most tender moment in all of Acts. The lessons from…
Imagine the scene: the city square of Ephesus, and a bonfire built not of wood but of books. Scrolls and manuscripts containing the most commercially valuable occult knowledge in the ancient world, stacked and burning in the open air. The believers who threw them in had counted the price first, fifty thousand pieces of silver,…
Three people sit in a workshop in Corinth, their hands working leather and canvas, making tents. One is a Jewish couple recently expelled from Rome. One is the apostle who will write half the New Testament. The lessons from Acts 18 begin here, at this workbench. None of them could have known that the church…
In the most educated city in the ancient world, someone had carved an admission of ignorance into stone: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. The philosophers of Athens had debated every idea for centuries, yet they left space on their altars for the God they could not name. The lessons from Acts 17 begin at that altar,…
A man appeared in the night, standing on the other side of a continent, stretching out his hand. “Come over into Macedonia, and help us.” That cry crossed the boundary between Asia and Europe and, through Paul’s obedience, brought the gospel to the Western world for the first time. The lessons from Acts 16 are…
Picture a crack forming in a dam. The lessons from Acts 15 begin there, at the opening of the chapter, at the first sign of theological fracture in the early church. Men from Judea arrived in Antioch teaching that unless a Gentile believer was circumcised after the manner of Moses, they could not be saved….
Imagine a man who has just been stoned, dragged outside a city, and left in the dirt for dead. Now imagine that man standing up, walking back through the city gate, and resuming the mission the next morning. That is the lessons from Acts 14 in one image. This chapter is one of the most…
