Acts 3:6 But Peter said, “I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you.  In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!”

You may have seen the movie Avatar.  It was the biggest and most expensive movie ever made.  Some of you may have even seen it in 3D and in this theater.  You were blown away.  The visual effects were literally stunning.  Then you rushed out & either bought or rented the DVD & watched it at home.  You yawned a bit.  The effects just didn’t seem quite as special.  In fact, for some of you, you may have even noticed that the actual story was a bit shallow…and that in fact it was just the futuristic reincarnation of Dances With Wolves.  Some of you just got that too…  Here’s the point:  The glitz & the glam masked the fact that the story was actually pretty weak.  God is different.  He works an incredible miracle, and then when we are able to see the back-story, we realize that the story is so much more spectacular than the special effect.

The Holy Spirit, and I believe Luke, is using Acts 3 as narrative example of Acts 2:43.  Within this example or expression, we get a glimpse of what the early church was like and what they experienced.  Acts is descriptive; it is not prescriptive.  Scripture is not providing a pattern for the healing of human bodies, rather the story of God saving human souls.

All of the healing events in the book of Acts involve unbelievers, and they are always used as providing occasions for the Gospel to be preached and proclaimed.  Because that’s the point:  Jesus is King.  Peter performs a miracle because of the gift of faith given him by Jesus, and then takes the opportunity to deliver a 2nd incredible sermon.  The preacher was on a role.

Peter essentially equates the lame man to his hearers.  We are all natural disasters in need of a Sovereign God of grace to give us transformative life.  We are by nature opposed to God and actually work against Him.  But He has made a way for us to be re-created into the people He originally created us to be:  Repent and return.  Literally, turn and run back to Him when we sin; not from Him as is our tendency.  The healing is the illustration.  The sermon is the illumination.  We are as dependent on him for sanctification as we are for salvation.  Rise and walk!

Subscribe to Bethel Bible Church (Arbor Campus) – So That!

Acts 2:37 When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

Food / cooking shows are ridiculously popular these days.  One of the reasons is people love to see transformation and the process of “Before & After.”  That’s in each of us (Ecc. 3:11). There’s a latent question that every person has hard-wired: Luke 18:18(ESV) And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” In other words: What’s the recipe for redemption; how does one cook a Christian?

Acts 2:38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Biblical repentance is essentially synonymous with belief.  Repentance is not the fear of consequence but rather the love of holiness and virtue.  It is glimpsing His grace and glory and goodness and recognizing that I deliberately rebelled against it.  And now there is nothing I can do to undo what I did.  That’s what hell is, the eternal and infinite regret of not embracing the Son.  My only recourse is to repent and rethink my thinking.  He’s not just a carpenter’s son from Galilee, He is Lord and Christ (2:36) and I participated in His humiliation & execution (Zech. 12).  So now I want to abandon every aspect of my former mindset and pursue Him.

Water baptism is not saving, but it is a demonstration of the conversion that has taken place.  It is because of the forgiveness of sin.  It is identifying with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Colossians 2:11-12).  We are literally raised to walk in newness of life “in Him.”  Water Baptism is supposed to make it impossible to be a secret disciple.  One who desires secrecy has still not re-thought their thinking and internalized the reality that He is Lord and Christ.

Then, we are entered into one Body.  We do worship, discipleship, ministry, mission, fellowship. Church essentially consists of doctrine and fellowship; praying and “breaking bread” together are expressions of fellowship.  This is God’s plan for this age.

Many of us still need to reorient our thinking and build our lives around what God is doing in the world.  We claim Christ as King, but in reality He is not making the decisions.  The Jews had to abandon their affiliation with Judaism as a primary identity and be identified with someone who had been branded a blasphemer. They risked social, economic, and even physical ostracism.  People who have identified with Christ need desperately to come together to commune and share the experiences of participating in “the rightful King’s campaign of sabotage” (C.S. Lewis).

So what’s the recipe for redemption?  Rotate (repent), Hydrate (baptism), Congregate (Church).  It takes a Church to raise a Christian.  May we mix well.

Subscribe to Bethel Bible Church (Arbor Campus) – So That!

Acts 2:14 Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say.

Powerful preaching is still God’s plan for proclamation.  That doesn’t mean it’s the only way we should unpack the Word, but it does mean that when both Jesus and Paul give unambiguous commands to teach & preach, we should.  But preaching must be Spirit-lead and Spirit-fed if it is to have any eternal significance at all.  Peter, in Acts 2:14-41, preached the very first Christian sermon ever.  It was powerful then and it is our model now.  Peter takes the opportunity to explain a current conundrum with the exposition of an ancient text.  He essentially says, “this is that.”  All good preaching should aspire to that strategy.  Rather than merely “teaching the Bible to people,” powerful preaching takes the truth of God’s Word, synthesizes it with the contemporary context, and addresses the latent questions of the hearers.  It must matter.  It must change people.

Answers for “why now” and “how then” come from God’s Word written way back when.  Peter explains the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit by preaching from Joel 2, Psalm 16, and Psalm 110.  Interestingly, Joel was also preaching from an ancient text as he references Deuteronomy.  And what is the powerful message?  The Gospel.  Peter explains a mystery.  The last days began at Pentecost, but they haven’t finished.  We’re in them.  The end has come, it’s just not over yet.  He unpacks what Joel and David could not have seen:  There has been one Advent and there will be another.  The first advent was catalytic; the second will be cataclysmic.

The Gospel presentation lands with the intended wallop.  The hearers are cut to the heart and they are moved to response.  So too must we.  Peter’s Gospel presentation cuts them to heal them; ruins them to resurrect them.  We killed the Christ, but God has made Him Lord.  And it was God’s plan.  Pride is dealt a death blow when we realize that repentance means we envision Christ on the cross by our own hand and will.  Then we ask our Father to apply our sin to our King.  He did.  He also imputes the full righteousness of Christ to us.  What a marvelous exchange.  What we intend for evil, God actually intends for good.  This is that.

Our sole response is our soul response.  We are living in the last days, the days of the soul.  No longer is our identity merely national, it is individual.  The Kingdom has inaugurated, and indeed it is here in it’s spiritual sense.  The earthly Kingdom is yet to come.  Until then, we live as citizens of heaven and we eagerly await our Savior from there, and while we wait, we offer our bodies as living sacrifices in view of God’s mercy.  This is that.

Subscribe to Bethel Bible Church (Arbor Campus) – So That!

Acts 2:1-4 When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place.  2 And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began  to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

Luke and Paul must have swapped some amazing stories.  We know that Luke was one of the last and only friends that stuck by Paul near the end of his life (2 Timothy 4:11).  We can, by our sanctified imagination, picture Paul explaining the theological nuances of several events while Luke recorded the description with precision.  And that’s the key to understanding the book of Acts.  It is a description of events that occurred while Paul’s epistles are a prescription for how the saint is to strive.  Luke often provides a play-by-play illustration for what Paul will later prescribe.  Pentecost, the birth of the Church and the coming of the Spirit, is just such an instance.

Pentecost is a big deal.  Perhaps the only equivalent understatement is that God is awesome.  In this new mysterious tapestry, Pentecost weaves together pictures, prophecies, and predictions from all the Old Testament.  It was a fulfillment of the Feast of Weeks from Leviticus 23 and it was the undoing of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11.  Pentecost was the pouring out of God’s Spirit that resulted in a nation of royal priests (1 Peter 2:9).  That was supposed to have occurred in Exodus 19:6, but the people then would not have it.  This time, God instituted it on His timing by His sovereign grace.

After the confusion of languages at the tower of Babel (Genesis 11), God inaugurated the Abrahamic covenant in which He said that He would bless all nations through Abraham.  After Pentecost, God inaugurates the New covenant long foretold by Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Joel.  Scripture is full of stunning symmetry.  But Luke’s recounting of those events is for us a description, not a prescription.  Luke “slows down the action” so that we can more clearly understand what happened.  Luke describes the baptism with the Spirit (Acts 2:2-3) and the filling of the Spirit (Acts 2:4).  These are separate events.  Baptism with the Spirit takes place one time at salvation, and is eternal and non-experiential.  Filling of the Spirit takes place repeatedly through the saint’s life and is both momentary and experiential.  The baptism grants the power; the filling turns it on.

And what is the filling for?  Luke details the languages that people spoke to proclaim the mighty works of God.  Again, this is not intended to be a pattern.  What it does show is the practical power that comes from the filling of the Spirit.  Paul explains this practical power in parallel passages such as Ephesians 5:15-20 and Colossians 3:12-25.  What is the power the Spirit offers?  To love our wives, submit to our husbands, disciple our children, and bless our community.  These are also mighty works of of God that we cannot do on our own power.  This filling happens when we yield to His Spirit.  We declare our dependence and release every facet of our lives to His control.  This Spirit-filled life is the only life that really works.  May He have His way in us by having His Word dwell in us richly.

Subscribe to SoThat!

Acts 1:6 (ESV) So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Seems like a fair question to me.  If I had heard Jesus talking about the Kingdom for three years, and then seen Him in His resurrected glory teaching even more about the Kingdom, I’d like to think that I would be thinking about the Kingdom.  I don’t think this was a selfish question, or even a narrow-minded question.  The disciples had been instructed to be expectant for the Kingdom.  It permeated all the teaching of Christ.  But the King didn’t give them the information they wanted.

Acts 1:7-8 (ESV) He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Often, when we want to know, Christ merely says “go.”  If we know something, we feel like we control it.  We are certainly not in control.  What a blessing and a relief!  Besides, if I knew the exact date of His return and establishment of the Kingdom, I’m pretty sure I would be utterly useless up until about 48 hours prior to the deadline.  OK, 8.  Fine: 2.  God does not offer us control; He offers us confidence.  We claim to be expectant, but the reality is that we can gauge the sincerity of our expectation by our preparation.

Luke gives us a great little narrative to show what preparation really looks like.  We track, in the story, from the Mount of Olives to the upper room.  Here we see the disciples desperately praying.  They were praying to their teacher, friend, and family member as if He could really hear them and as if they could really hear Him.  What a concept.  How is that really possible in our context today?  His Word.  It’s how He still teaches and touches and transforms.  They depended on it like oxygen.  This led them to diligent study.  They did theology together in community to try & answer some really tough questions, in this case, how to explain what had happened with Judas.  Peter references Scripture (Psalm 69:25 & Psalm 109:8).  The eventual outcome of this study & prayer was decisive action.  Based on Christ’s promises of the disciples’ role in the Kingdom (Luke 22:28-30), they cast lots for Matthias.  We’re not told if this was commanded by God or not, just that apparently God honored it.

So what?  How can we know that this same sort of transformative living is really sustainable today in our context?

Acts 1:12 (ESV) Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away.

This is subtle, but this is special.  Luke is describing Jerusalem geographically to the reader.  Why?  Because the readers (in Rome) had no concept of Jerusalem; they’d never been there.  What Jesus predicts in Acts 1:8 Luke hints has already happened in Acts 1:12.  The Gospel has gone forth.  God is getting it done, and He does so through people who are expecting Him to speak, preparing for Him to move, and acting upon that revelation.

But it happened in Jerusalem first.  That means we have to take care of the business of Christ-likeness at home before we can expect to make a global impact.  Be Christ in your kitchen, then you can address Kuala Lumpur.  May we wait well.  May we live Kingdom-lives now as we eagerly expect our King (Philippians 3:20-21).

Acts 1:1-2 In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach 2 until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen.

What would a doctor for your soul prescribe?  The prescription would be for whatever was necessary for your soul to thrive.  Luke wrote his Gospel and the book of Acts to be a prescription for Theophilus, a “friend of God.”  Was that the recipient’s real name?  We don’t really know so it really doesn’t matter.  What we know is that Luke deeply wanted for this one who was loved by God to get it to the point that he was changed.

Luke 1:3-4 Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus,  4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

In fact, Acts is all about change; about something new.  Luke’s Gospel depicts the birth of Christ, the book of Acts details the birth of the Church.  Prior to His ascension, Christ provided His disciples with preparation in teaching and example, Presence through resurrection, and power through the Holy Spirit.  All of these are available to us here and now.  But that doesn’t mean that we should feel a burden to change the world.  Christ has already done that.  We just have to be Christ in our context.  We are not Messiah, we’re on His mission.

Christ only began His teaching ministry while present in His earthly body.  He now continues that work through His Bride.  May we do and teach all that He instructed.