The Book of Acts - Introduction

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Fort Collins Bible Church Sermon Audio Broadcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is our prayer that these messages will spur you on to growth in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you have any questions or would like to hear more, please access our website at www.Fort CollinsBibleChurch.com and now a word from Pastor Brad Maston.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, welcome to our first study in the book of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: We've just finished up Luke and now we get to continue Luke's story as he chronicles the beginnings of the church.

[SPEAKER_01]: As we see these wonderful transitions take place we'll note that this is a very special and important time and a very special revelation to us because it not only shows us our spiritual history, but it also tells us a great deal about how we mean

[SPEAKER_01]: Here we go.

[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so welcome to our first study in the Book of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: We just got through a big and monumental study in Luke, and I don't know about you.

[SPEAKER_01]: I enjoyed it immensely to see Christ in this way.

[SPEAKER_01]: And to see him throughout Luke's recording of his entire earthly ministry had an incredible power and transformative value in my life.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I hope in yours as well.

[SPEAKER_01]: And interestingly, I've certainly seen the results of that study and live it or lived out throughout the members of this body and seeing the care and compassion and love of Jesus Christ increasingly displayed because we'd be held him through his word.

[SPEAKER_01]: Again, having nothing to do with me, the interpreter, having just everything to do with the Holy Spirit's power, working with his word in your life.

[SPEAKER_01]: And as we start a new section, I'd like to take a brief moment and talk about our basic system of understanding the Bible, I shouldn't say system, but a method of understanding the Bible.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is something that you do rather naturally, without thinking with most of your publications.

[SPEAKER_01]: Whenever you pick up something up to read it,

[SPEAKER_01]: you'll generally understand all of these elements and apply them without even thinking, but it becomes more important because, interestingly, even very intelligent people when they come or very well-learned people, when they come to the Bible immediately go brand it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because this book is different, and we've actually done many studies on how this book differs from every other book in the world.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is living.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is active.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is sharper than every double inch sword.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training, and righteousness.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is everything that we need to be fully equipped followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is an exceptional and phenomenal book brought through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit

[SPEAKER_01]: conducted down through time collected over years of careful and prayerful study and then guarded down to us to this day.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is a very special book and it's a very important book in our lives and yet that does not mean that we immediately short-circuit all of our normal methods of reading and understanding in order to draw the meaning out of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: which is what we often think.

[SPEAKER_01]: We think because this book is different from others that we can then kind of unplug our brains as we go to read it.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is kind of what we talk about when we talk about basic Bible interpretation.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason why this is important is because we're moving into another section of narrative.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we don't read narrative the same way we read the epistles or the letters that we see later in the New Testament.

[SPEAKER_01]: We don't read narrative the same way we read the Psalms, which are poetry.

[SPEAKER_01]: We don't read narrative the same way that we use Proverbs, which is wisdom literature.

[SPEAKER_01]: We read narrative as narrative.

[SPEAKER_01]: as a connected string of events that have been organized for an express purpose.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we've got some important challenges that the Church has faced throughout history in misunderstanding how narrative is meant to be read and meant to be understood.

[SPEAKER_01]: So our Bible process or a Bible reading process starts with observation and there are three main areas in which we make observations.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's the area of language, the area of history, and the area of culture.

[SPEAKER_01]: And these all are quite important.

[SPEAKER_01]: Again, when you use words like the war or the revolution or anything,

[SPEAKER_01]: But having to do with a historical event, if you were to use that now versus using it in the 50s versus using those terms in the 1800s, you'd be talking about totally different events and totally different results or repercussions of those events.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so we need to have a basic understanding of how human language works.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is why every week I spend a great amount of time in the Greek and the Hebrew Scriptures, is because I want to know and I want to dig out for all of us, the real meaning, the most clear understanding that I can come to from the original languages and we've trained wonderful men in this body to do the same thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Nevertheless, even if you don't have access to those tools, you don't have access to the ability to read and Greek or Hebrew, you can make observations about language just from your Bible translation.

[SPEAKER_01]: Quite easily, in fact, because most Bible translations, if not all the mainland ones, are really, really good.

[SPEAKER_01]: They really do accurately tell you what the Word of God has to say.

[SPEAKER_01]: And most of the time, our Greek and Hebrew observations are not changing the sense, but they're in depth, they're bringing more depth or more color, more vividness to the sense of what your English translation already says.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, you can make observations about the language in your English Bible or your English translation.

[SPEAKER_01]: Also, observations of history, hopefully you've come to a broader idea and an ever growing idea of what biblical history is all about.

[SPEAKER_01]: You can read extra books about this, but most of the historical information you need to understand the Bible is in the Bible.

[SPEAKER_01]: God has given you most of the historical background that you need to make meaningful understanding of what His word says.

[SPEAKER_01]: And finally, cultural understanding, again, most of our observations are drawn from just noticing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, every time I read about this and the Bible, it's a little bit different.

[SPEAKER_01]: you're coming to a place each Sunday morning where you get hopefully some more background and some more knowledge and some more ability to come to responsible conclusions.

[SPEAKER_01]: But once you have all your observations piled up and you've observed and you've observed and observed, you move on to the all important next step.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I see it's most common to move directly to the application in most Bible study today.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're in a hurry, we just read the passage, go, what does that mean?

[SPEAKER_01]: What should I do?

[SPEAKER_01]: We're skipping an important step.

[SPEAKER_01]: The next step is asking what does the text mean?

[SPEAKER_01]: What does it mean to the original recipients?

[SPEAKER_01]: What does it mean to us now?

[SPEAKER_01]: What does it mean in general?

[SPEAKER_01]: What does it tell us about God?

[SPEAKER_01]: What does it tell us about man?

[SPEAKER_01]: What does it tell us about what God expects or hope from us?

[SPEAKER_01]: Or what does it tell us about what God expected or hoped from the original audience?

[SPEAKER_01]: So, we move to interpretation, having hopefully come to a cool, logical understanding of all the available facts, or at least all the facts that are available to us or the observations.

[SPEAKER_01]: From that interpretation, and oh, by the way, this is a great thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: this process should bring increased unity in the body of Christ.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now I know churches have broken up over doctorinal issues and so on and so forth, but I find that most doctrinal breaks in a church come because we haven't agreed over this process.

[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds a little amazing.

[SPEAKER_01]: But if I decide what I want to see and then choose to forego this process all together, then we're not going to come up in the same place, or at least not as the same place as the person who is going to reasonably interpret the Bible.

[SPEAKER_01]: But if we can sit down, say these are observations, it comes to this natural logical interpretation because God did not want to confuse us.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then we can have increased unity within the body.

[SPEAKER_01]: I see that within our body now.

[SPEAKER_01]: I see that within our body and our Bible studies, where we employ the simple method over the various passages and verses and now topics of Scripture.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, finally, that moves to application and sadly, a much on the seminary level or the academic level, much Bible studies stops there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we figured out what it means.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're good.

[SPEAKER_01]: We win.

[SPEAKER_01]: We are the rightest.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's a terrible shortcoming.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just as terrible as jumping over interpretation is cutting off application.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're looking at the scripture to find out how this is meant to responsibly affect our lives.

[SPEAKER_01]: How is meant to change?

[SPEAKER_01]: How we think about God?

[SPEAKER_01]: How we think about ourselves?

[SPEAKER_01]: How we understand what He's done for us?

[SPEAKER_01]: How we understand what He's doing in us?

[SPEAKER_01]: How we understand what He's going to do?

[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the basic process and I wanted to take a little break because we're going to hit some big passages as we go through acts that have been drawn or ripped out of context to mean things that they could not possibly mean except that you brought that meaning to them and tried to breathe it in.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what we're going to see is hopefully we go on this journey together, digging and working through the book of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when invite you, we have some resources in the back by Ron Meriman, that's a great source.

[SPEAKER_01]: I can give you other resources if you want to do study on your own, but the best thing you can do.

[SPEAKER_01]: It spends some time reading ahead in the book of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: Start to formulate your own ideas, make your own observations, come prepared for this study.

[SPEAKER_01]: You absolutely are a brilliant, lovely, handsome or beautiful individual and you can probably follow what I'm saying based on your previous study.

[SPEAKER_01]: But you're going to get the most out of this study.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you come prepared, having spent some time throughout the week reading what we studied last week and what we're going to study next week.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we'll give you a hint.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to start next week with the early verses of chapter 1 of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you can dig into those together and you'll have a preparation if you're like to retain more from our time together.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we did mention that this is narrative and that narrative differs from other forms of Bible revelation or what God's chosen for us to see.

[SPEAKER_01]: The first thing we're going to use kind of a heavy academic term, but we'll explain it is the narrative normative fallacy.

[SPEAKER_01]: And basically, with a narrative normative fallacy as it has been a plague to the church in general and certainly to the church in America, it's when something happens in a narrative, and we say, then we're going to do it that way forever.

[SPEAKER_01]: We make the narrative event a normative practice, if that makes sense.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this very frequently happens what we'll see is that the early apostles chose their or Judas' replacement by casting lots.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we need to cast lots for our church leaders.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now we'll find no, that's not the case.

[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, as Revelation continued, we had a very different system of recognition of church

[SPEAKER_01]: and scripture, and so that was a one-time event.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was never meant to happen again.

[SPEAKER_01]: Additionally, we'll see that the disciples were told by Jesus to wait or Terry in this upper room and wait for the Holy Spirit to come.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was in one time event after which the Holy Spirit in dwelt and sealed every believer thereafter.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we never need to Terry and wait on the Holy Spirit's coming again, because we are told that he in dwells and seals every single believer now.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we don't take narrative events and make normative practices out of them or put another way.

[SPEAKER_01]: We don't build our theology on the events of narrative, but on the dogmatic statements of Scripture.

[SPEAKER_01]: we don't just look at it and say oh well that's the way they did it that one time and therefore we must do it that way every time we saw this with Jesus ministry as well right at one point he's sending out 72 he says hey by the way don't bring a backpack don't bring a bag don't bring any money don't bring anything which we always thought or this I don't stop it for actually studying it out this was some sort of extreme and amazing thing but Jesus was saying hey you're going to towns where you have family and friends

[SPEAKER_01]: Just stay with them.

[SPEAKER_01]: You don't need to prepare for a six-month camping trip.

[SPEAKER_01]: You're gonna be back in a week or a lot of a couple weeks or less.

[SPEAKER_01]: So and then later you went on to

[SPEAKER_01]: to say hey I told you before don't bring any you know don't bring all your extras don't bring your camping here now even bring a sword because you're going to have to defend yourself going forth.

[SPEAKER_01]: So Jesus changed that again the narrative normative fallacy many Christian particularly cults have taken that example and said okay well you just need to set out without an extra coat without an extra go total unprepared to injured yet hate to think how many how many Christian hobos are dead alongside the roads of America because they tried to apply the scripture

[SPEAKER_01]: Narrative displays truth, but does not dogmatically dictate biblical Christianity.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's what we're going to simply get to put forth.

[SPEAKER_01]: Narrative displays truth, but it does not dogmatically dictate biblical Christianity.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we are going to see the truth of God's Word and God's character displayed.

[SPEAKER_01]: God's plan for the church displayed in the working of the early church and the growth of the early church through Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we're not going to look to narrative to dictate our practices today.

[SPEAKER_01]: To that, we're going to look for the clear revelation through, again, the epistles and

[SPEAKER_01]: So with all that preamble said, we're ready to introduce the book of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I want you to think of the book of Acts as a bridge.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know in terms of course your walk with Christ, but my early walk with Christ particularly through high school and college was plagued with some real difficulty.

[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't figure out for the life of me why it was okay for me to eat bacon when it wasn't okay in the Old Testament.

[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't figure out for the life of me why it was not okay for, or why it, why I was not expected to sacrifice a lamb, why I was not an on and on and on and it's because I didn't understand yet.

[SPEAKER_01]: the reality that the Book of Acts is the Bridge.

[SPEAKER_01]: The Book of Acts takes us from where we left off, Christ ascended, or Christ, yeah, ascended in the end of each of the Gospels.

[SPEAKER_01]: resurrected and now going forward into this new thing that we don't have much information about yet.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it takes us from them living as Jews who believe in Christ to really developing into a real understanding of what it means to be a part of this new thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: That is, the church.

[SPEAKER_01]: The Book of Acts is our bridge between Israel and our understanding of God and his interaction with Israel and the Old Testament and the New Testament church and what we are meant to be doing now.

[SPEAKER_01]: Without the Book of Acts we would not be able to understand.

[SPEAKER_01]: what we're meant to be doing, even with the epistles.

[SPEAKER_01]: The epistles would, by themselves, not be sufficient to understand in history.

[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, we couldn't come to a nearly the good understanding that we have of the epistles without acts, but we'll get there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I want you to think of the Book of Acts as a bridge that exists that grows between the Messiah, the end of the Messiah's ministry.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we often think of the Old Testament, the New Testament,

[SPEAKER_01]: Hopefully, we can understand the idea that your old testament really doesn't end until you get to the cross.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's still Christ dealing with an Old Testament economy, dealing with Israel.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not until the cross that things change, so Acts is the bridge.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not saying that you need to rip out that Old Testament New Testament page and move it forward for books.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just saying, as we think about it, we need to realize, just as we saw all the way through the gospel of Luke, there was a distinction in how Christ dealt with them from how Paul and Peter and John wrote to us in the church age.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the book of Acts provides that bridge.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is exciting.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is looking at the primitive history of everything that you and I are a part of as the body of Christ is the Church of God.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're looking at our spiritual history here.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we're seeing why clearly why we're no longer beholden to the Old Testament law and all that came before in that manner.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, as a really a reminder, if you were here a year ago when we started our studying loop, we'd like you to meet Luke.

[SPEAKER_01]: Luke is a doctor.

[SPEAKER_01]: Luke was a medical doctor and we saw that or evidence of that throughout his

[SPEAKER_01]: examination of the healings that Jesus Christ performed and Luke was very specific about drawing wisely.

[SPEAKER_01]: This was a healing, this was a demon possession.

[SPEAKER_01]: He used more specific words or great words and Greek to describe the ailments and illnesses of people and it made Luke, I believe, all the more powerfully and joyfully portray in his portrayal of these amazing miracles.

[SPEAKER_01]: His Luke, Luke the Doctor, had undoubtedly, like any physician, looked at a person who was hurt, who was broken, who had gone through something and couldn't heal them.

[SPEAKER_01]: And now he saw...

[SPEAKER_01]: and knew the one who could, the one who could heal them, not because of his—not because of just pure wisdom or knowing the right medicine or the right application, but because he alone, Jesus Christ was the powerful Son of God who could speak to illness, could speak to sickness and heal it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we see Luke as a doctor being very important.

[SPEAKER_01]: We also are going to see Luke the historian.

[SPEAKER_01]: The book of Acts is a very exciting book for us to get to study in the church today, whether you know it or not.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was only 50, 60, 70 years ago, not much that the early science of archeology was building in and digging in and saying everything Luke said was wrong.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so, as a believer, some years ago, if you deferred anything at all about it, if you deferred about how Luke's phrases were inappropriate, what Luke talked about or what rulers that Luke assigned to give it areas were surely wrong and Luke was undoubtedly written years and years after.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that was before we started digging around.

[SPEAKER_01]: And as we start digging around, we see multiple affirmations that what Luke wrote was absolutely accurate.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it was our faulty knowledge of history that we didn't realize and we didn't know the individual names for rulers of various areas throughout the Roman Empire, but Luke did.

[SPEAKER_01]: And God has actually provided for us the ability to find these things carved in the stone, these titles and these places.

[SPEAKER_01]: rank.

[SPEAKER_01]: And even though the skeptical world will look at Luke's work with the least amount of favorable or generous intellectual generosity, we're going to find that it stands up to the historical tests and rigorous examination that the places, the people, the positions, the world that Luke wrote about was a world that he knew about.

[SPEAKER_01]: and understood more so even than we do obviously because he was a part of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to see Luke the historian which hopefully will give you an increase, give us all an increased confidence in the very word of God.

[SPEAKER_01]: We'll look at those examples as we go along the way.

[SPEAKER_01]: We see that Luke also had a special connection to the Apostle Paul.

[SPEAKER_01]: Luke was Paul's, we might say, in a way, his prodigy, so Luke was even a part of, we noticed when we looked through the book of Luke, or the gospel of Luke, we noticed that he said, hey, I interviewed everybody and I went to set out an orderly account and that's what we have.

[SPEAKER_01]: When Luke, we have

[SPEAKER_01]: Mary's words and Luke we have the words of Martha and Mary and Luke we have the words of the apostles because he was conducting thorough interviews trying to write down and get the facts usually in some sort of chronological order.

[SPEAKER_01]: And now, as we get into the book of actions are tracing the ministries of Peter, and then into the ministries of Paul, we're going to find there are three very specific sections where Luke doesn't say Paul did this.

[SPEAKER_01]: He did this.

[SPEAKER_01]: He says, we did this.

[SPEAKER_01]: He lived some of this history with Paul quite a good amount of it as we get towards the end.

[SPEAKER_01]: So,

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to see that this special connection to Paul gives him more reason to write and more fodder for writing, and we'll talk a little bit more when we get to the purpose.

[SPEAKER_01]: But he had this special connection to Paul, there's very important.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're seeing that we're continuing out of the gospel of Luke, and it's very probable that

[SPEAKER_01]: that this really was meant as one big work.

[SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't just, you know, doing the gospel of Luke and then going on to do the book of Acts later.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we find that this grows very naturally, which is exciting, because it means when we get the story or the history of the early church, we're getting it from someone who had a deep understanding of the ministry of Jesus Christ.

[SPEAKER_01]: They could become clear from someone who had first gone through all the paces of understanding who Jesus Christ was, and all that he'd done.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to see that the focus of Luke continues.

[SPEAKER_01]: We see Luke's focus as we saw in the gospel.

[SPEAKER_01]: He did, he, he, he, he, he singled out the needy.

[SPEAKER_01]: He singled out the disenfranchise.

[SPEAKER_01]: He singled out those that the world would not have noticed before.

[SPEAKER_01]: We also saw the focus of Luke as he,

[SPEAKER_01]: As he tried to describe how Jesus Christ, this God man, 100% God and 100% man was not like the Greek demigods that had existed and that they already understood.

[SPEAKER_01]: So he's trying to show them something that had similarity to what they'd already seen and also had distinction from what they knew or believed in their paganism.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, Luke continues in this and continues to make distinction, but now he's got a new distinction to make between what was come before Israel and what was now developing the church.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we see the focus of Luke moving.

[SPEAKER_01]: And finally, just a brief word, the office, both books are started at the office.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to spend a ton of time because we really don't know who the office is.

[SPEAKER_01]: Some have suggested that he was an upper ranking slave within the Roman government.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that this was in a way, and we'll talk about this later, but this was in a way a complete kind of summary of what this new Christianity thing was all about to in some legal sense.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let me explore that later.

[SPEAKER_01]: That seems really less likely.

[SPEAKER_01]: It seems far more likely to me.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just personal preference that the office was the one who was paying.

[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't cheap to publish a book.

[SPEAKER_01]: So if the office was likely, again, in my view, very likely, the one

[SPEAKER_01]: who is putting forth the money so that this message could be copied and written.

[SPEAKER_01]: which is a phenomenal thing and I would put forth what a great thing if did if that is the case there are other ideas of who the awfulest might have been and they have just as much merit like you say we're all kind of guessing but if that is the case what if the nominal testament down through history that God worked through the generosity put potentially of a man named the awfulest to bring his wonderful word to bear and to light and revelation about all that he

[SPEAKER_01]: So now we'll move into the Purpose of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, we're going to notice that there's a lot quite a few different ways you can look at the book of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: As with any great book of literature or work of literature.

[SPEAKER_01]: As with any book of the Bible, you can look at it from one angle and approach it from another.

[SPEAKER_01]: You can look at it to try to draw specific doctrines or ideas or you can ask what was the general flow of it on.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to look at this in a couple different ways and these will all come up.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're not conflicting, they're not different ideas.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're just different ways of approaching the same book.

[SPEAKER_01]: So one way we're going to look at the book of access through the geographical movements.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this is built off again, one of the statements that many people think is and I tend to agree is a way in which Luke organized this book.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is Acts 1 verse 8.

Acts 1:8

[SPEAKER_01]: Where Jesus says to the disciples, but you shall receive power on the Holy Spirit as come upon you and you shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what we see is the early chapters of the book focusing around what's happening in Jerusalem.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so we're going to start off mostly what's happening in Jerusalem and into the Jerusalem church and then as we as we go through our adventure we'll see how the Lord scattered the message and scattered his church all the way through the areas of Judea and Samaria.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it starts here localized just in Jerusalem and then the church moves and

[SPEAKER_01]: to the surrounding areas of Judea and Samaria, and then we're going to see how that continues on in the early travels of Paul Barnabas and Peter, and starts to go out into the, here we go.

[SPEAKER_01]: and go out into the area around Judea and further it in Samaria.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then we're going to see in Paul's first missionary journey that he takes his first trip and moves all the way along as far as Perga and La Cia and the city and these areas of what they were calling Asia at that time.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to see in Paul's second journey that he gets as far as modern day Greece and moves through Corinth, Athens, Beria,

[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, we get to the third missionary journey.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to see that kind of a repeat in a second in terms of the geological or geographical breadth.

[SPEAKER_01]: And his final trip to Rome recorded in Acts, is when we recorded in Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: We know we likely traveled after that.

[SPEAKER_01]: takes them all the way to Rome, and Rome was the center of the empire.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was kind of considered if something got to Rome, it got to the heart.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of like if you have some sort of bloodborne illness, we can get to the heart, it can get everywhere, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: So, this...

[SPEAKER_01]: This chronicles the movement of the gospel of Jesus Christ getting all the way to Rome.

[SPEAKER_01]: We interestingly have historical records within the first century of the gospel reaching great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, even just within the first century because it hit Rome.

[SPEAKER_01]: And all those soldiers who were in Caesar's household were listening to Paul's defences in Rome.

[SPEAKER_01]: Eventually, we're stationed elsewhere and moved on, and they brought the gospel with them.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we see the very ends of the earth being reached even within the first century, from their mindset.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to see a geological movement.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to see the gospel starting at the heart of Jerusalem and moving outwards.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're also going to see a theological movement.

[SPEAKER_01]: The theological movement.

[SPEAKER_01]: As we alluded to before, it's going from Israel and God's economy and dealing with Israel and moving forward into dealing with the body of Christ or the church or Christianity, whichever way you want to look at it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to see how God deals differently and what a challenging process this was.

[SPEAKER_01]: When Jesus talked about the Great Commission, gave the Great Commission, He said, go there for make disciples of all nations,

[SPEAKER_01]: go there for and make disciples of the Jews in all nations.

[SPEAKER_01]: It took them as much as a decade and maybe more to understand that maybe Gentiles could be included in this.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then it took the many more years as we saw in the study of Galatians understand, we don't have to make them into Jews

[SPEAKER_01]: In order for them to walk with and follow Jesus Christ, in fact, this new church thing is totally different.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then they had to deal with, well, how do we live together?

[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm a Jewish person and I still want to follow the traditions of my fathers, and yet you're a Gentile Christian, we're one where united, but boy, it's tough for us to live together.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so we're going to see all of those challenges and all of those tensions.

[SPEAKER_01]: And all of those dramas come out, all those wars that were won.

[SPEAKER_01]: That quite frankly, make most of the conflicts in the church today.

[SPEAKER_01]: Look like a bad church, Pollock.

[SPEAKER_01]: They went through most of the work for us.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we'll be encouraged, I believe, in that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But not just in terms of Israel and the church, we're going to see we're going to move from the concept of the principle of Israel, which was run by law.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we're going to see what it means in practice, in narrative, to move from being ruled by law, to being under grace so that when we come to a Paul statement that's central, no longer have dominion under you for you are not under law, which you are under grace will understand increasingly what that means.

[SPEAKER_01]: What it means to live under grace rather than

[SPEAKER_01]: living under the economy of Old Testament law.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we'll get to look at what that means.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we need to dig out that idea.

[SPEAKER_01]: Another purpose of act is acts or studying acts that gives us the background to the epistles.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is a chart by Tom Ellsroyd.

[SPEAKER_01]: And what it does is it attempts to, and there's some fuzzy areas, what it attempts to do is it shows us where in terms of the early church,

[SPEAKER_01]: that the epistles of various epistles were written.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so what we see is that Paul's missionary journey is when, second missionary journey is when he writes first and second Thessalonians is first where he writes Galatians and James has written just after 50 AD likely or 45 AD just before.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we have, again, some of these are a little bit on the side of a guess, but what they do is they give us the ability to understand what was going on in Paul's life where he was writing from, who he was writing to, what was going on in the situation around him for when these epistles were written.

[SPEAKER_01]: You notice a great bulk of the scripture is written outside of the context of the book of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: but it still gives us great background because who's he writing to?

[SPEAKER_01]: He's writing to the Colossians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, all those churches which he founded in the missionary trips described in the book of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what we do is we get background for all those epistles because we start to understand how the gospel came to them.

[SPEAKER_01]: We start to understand what sorts of things might have affected those churches.

[SPEAKER_01]: and why they were dealing with the problems which they were dealing with.

[SPEAKER_01]: So when we come to Thessalonians, we know that Paul was chased out incredibly briefly.

[SPEAKER_01]: So a good part of his letter is, of course, saying, I miss you.

[SPEAKER_01]: I love you and I wish I could come see you and I pray that you're safe.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why we sent Timothy.

[SPEAKER_01]: We just can't stand to think of you.

[SPEAKER_01]: You knew baby Christians totally left out there alone.

[SPEAKER_01]: We know you're not alone.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we want to know more about you.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we can understand when Paul writes to the Ephesian church of the church in Ephesus, that he'd spent the probably the biggest chunk of time actually sitting in one place and instructing, running really, what we call the first church's first seminary.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we see that that makes sense that when he gets to Ephesia's very little to review, can tell them about.

[SPEAKER_01]: because he'd given them more information that satiners teaching more directly than anyone any of the other churches had.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we're going to get background to all these.

[SPEAKER_01]: We also get background about characters, certain characters.

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the time you might hear this called, and in fact, the addition of the Bible I've heard says the acts of the apostles, maybe yours does too.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not really totally accurate, though, is it?

[SPEAKER_01]: because it's not really the acts of the apostles.

[SPEAKER_01]: You're not going to hear about after chapter 1, we're not going to hear about most of those names ever again in Scripture.

[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know what a lot of these people is.

[SPEAKER_01]: We rely on on tradition to find that.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's really not about all the apostles.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's specifically the story of the churches that's opened up through Peter and Paul.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what we see is that the first half of the book is chiefly concerned with the ministry of Peter.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he's the one who gets the big speeches, he's the one who takes the lead role.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then we have kind of an interlude with Stephen and the conversion of Paul.

[SPEAKER_01]: We get a hand-off into Paul's ministry.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what we see is this book perfectly juxtaposes Peter and Paul.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it gets really specific.

[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, Luke was undoubtedly intentionally writing this to say, Peter and Paul stand on the same ground.

[SPEAKER_01]: Both heal a layman.

[SPEAKER_01]: Peter heals a layman in 3, 2, 3, and Paul heals a layman in 14, 8, through 10.

[SPEAKER_01]: Both.

[SPEAKER_01]: performed a miracle at a distance or miracles that involved space changes and that's a Peter in 515 and Paul in Luke 1912 or Acts 1912.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, both exercised evil spirits, 516 for Peter in 1618 for Paul, both defeated sorcerers, 818 through 24, 136-11 through 6-011 for Paul.

[SPEAKER_01]: Both defended themselves against Jewish authorities, with multiple references, both received heavenly visions, both received specific and direct revelation from God.

[SPEAKER_01]: Both miraculously were released from prison in various means and circumstances, both proclaimed the same message.

[SPEAKER_01]: What's Peter saying?

[SPEAKER_01]: Or what's Luke saying?

[SPEAKER_01]: They are the same.

[SPEAKER_01]: Why is that so important?

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, one, Paul gave us a large chunk of our new testament, as we're going to see.

[SPEAKER_01]: But he was also different from the other 12 apostles.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's the other 12.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, sorry, 11 of the 12 were chosen by Christ directly and commissioned to this work.

[SPEAKER_01]: The other one, Matthias and we're going to see was kind of voted in or not voted in so much as brought in by the casting of lots.

[SPEAKER_01]: but Paul was distinct.

[SPEAKER_01]: He was chosen by God to his, to his station as an apostle in the church by entirely different means.

[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, we're going to look at this as we go forward, but Paul fits into what we sometimes call the second class of a apostleship.

[SPEAKER_01]: He is an apostle, and so a lot of this book is trying to tell us that, yes, Paul's apostleship differs from the original 11 and, you know, the 12th added one, but it's not any less important powerful.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's not any less God's tool.

[SPEAKER_01]: because God also revealed some things uniquely to Paul.

[SPEAKER_01]: And what we're going to see is we go forward is that Paul was God's instrument, not just to instruct the church at large, but also to instruct even Peter, James, and John in the original 12, because Christ had not given them that information, evenly used them all, and did reveal things to them.

[SPEAKER_01]: God was, Paul was God's specific instrument to bring a number of doctrines.

[SPEAKER_01]: or teachings into clarity and into view in the early church, including the reality that this church claim differs from the Israel piece before.

[SPEAKER_01]: both in function, in form, and in its ultimate goal.

[SPEAKER_01]: God also revealed to Paul uniquely clarity and clear view about the end times, as well as the believers' position in Christ and the role of grace within the life of the believer.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it becomes very important to realize, and much, I would say, not the Orthodox side of Christianity, a much of

[SPEAKER_01]: Christianity today is still working to try to just remove either the authority from the words of Paul or remove Paul's writings from the Scripture altogether.

[SPEAKER_01]: saying that Paul was somehow less valuable or his writings carry less weight than maybe some of the other writings that they favor more.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the book of Acts is very important for this.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's saying that Paul was God's chosen instrument for this task.

[SPEAKER_01]: And all of his history confirms that.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, as we close up our time of study, we're going to look for some high points for studying the book of Acts.

[SPEAKER_01]: One, as we've seen, we're going to grow in our understanding of the church, the thing that we're a part of.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to understand the history of the church a little bit better, and we're going to understand the direction of the church, and we're going to understand the flow of the church.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're also going to understand how to live in the church more productively and how to deal with

[SPEAKER_01]: and all the other things that make life both wonderful and difficult in this body of Christ.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to look at evangelism and outreach.

[SPEAKER_01]: I have never been more encouraged than when I was studying through the Book of Acts in order to prepare to take it out and teach it in the Philippines very briefly, because I got to study through really quickly.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I noticed?

[SPEAKER_01]: Most of the evangelism and outreach in the Book of Acts was a total failure.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there were those big beautiful moments where 3,000 come to the order where a great crowd comes, but as often as not, they come with the gospel and they walk away stoned or are dragged away stoned.

[SPEAKER_01]: Even in the very earliest time, even when the miracles were flying around like they were cheap fare and the economy of God, even when all the things that were going again by God's

[SPEAKER_01]: It would walk into a city, share the gospel, and they would experience rejection.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think we can probably identify with that.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think believers who live in this world, who try to stand up for Christ, who attempt to represent Him with our lives and also with our words, and how we have those difficult conversations, we wonder sometimes, is it because I'm not a good enough of Christians, I'm not trying hard enough that people aren't coming to Christ all around me, and the answer is no.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because the very God shows in miraculously empowered people, Peter, Paul, James, John, met the same reception, had the same short disappointments, challenges, difficulties that we have.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to see that that also never disweighted them from continuing to represent Christ.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to get great information about evangelism and outreach, how they did it, and by the power of the Holy Spirit and how they reacted to what occurred.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to see discipleship displayed.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to see people mentoring and investing in the next generation of believers and leaders.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to see how teaching and sharing life or sharing normal interchanges,

[SPEAKER_01]: formed the backbone for the early church.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to see that church was never a building, but it was actually all about relationship.

[SPEAKER_01]: The things that I see at work in this church now by the power of God displayed in the early church as well.

[SPEAKER_01]: As we saw, we're going to see with greater clarity, the rest of Scripture.

[SPEAKER_01]: We can understand better how the Old Testament relates to the New Testament.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to understand better what the New Testament epistles are about.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to understand better what our direction is and what we're meant to be doing.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I hope.

[SPEAKER_01]: above all will be deeply encouraged to see that things have changed between acts and now.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to be able to look and say it's a one-for-one because things got settled.

[SPEAKER_01]: Remember, acts is a bridge.

[SPEAKER_01]: A bridge isn't somewhere you stand forever.

[SPEAKER_01]: A bridge is something that takes you to the next bit of solid land.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to find that that same spirit that works in them is still at work in us today.

[SPEAKER_01]: and it will, I pray that encourages your heart as you walk towards Jesus, the dark world.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let's close with a word of prayer and we'll have the privilege of observing the Lord's table this morning.

[SPEAKER_01]: Father, we thank you and we praise you, worship and adore you.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for this wonderful bridge for making your word so clear to us.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, you'd phrase from all sin that would entangle.

[SPEAKER_01]: You keep us in your fellowship by your grace that we may be further conformed to the image of your son and whose name we pray.

[SPEAKER_01]: Amen.