Acts: An Unfinished Story
Acts is the book that reveals the power of the church. Therefore, when a church begins to dwindle, lose its power, and turn dull and drab in its witness, it needs desperately to get back into the spirit, expectation, knowledge and teaching of the book of Acts. In this book, the principles of the exchanged life -- "Not I, but Christ" -- is dramatically unfolded. If the book of Acts were taken out of our New Testament, we would never understand the rest of it. It would be like a child with his front tooth missing. When you close the record of the gospels, you see nothing but a handful of Jews in the city of Jerusalem, the center of Jewish life, talking together about a kingdom for Israel.
Episodes
January 28, 2020
We arrive this morning at the last page of the first chapter of church history -- the last chapter of the book of Acts. Luke's unfinished book introduces us to the whole record of the history of the church which continues to this day. This chapter is a resumption of the cliffhanger with which we concluded the previous chapter. There we left the Apostle Paul and his company on their way to Rome but stranded as shipwrecked sailor...
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January 28, 2020
If any of you are sailors, or lovers of the sea, I know you will be particularly interested in the passage to which we have come this morning in our studies in the book of Acts. The twenty-seventh chapter is a fascinating account by Dr. Luke of Paul's voyage to Rome, and of the shipwreck which occurred on the way. Luke was not a sailor; he was a landsman. And yet he was such a careful historian that the detail which he gives in...
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January 28, 2020
We are in the closing part of our study in Acts. The Apostle Paul is fulfilling the great prediction which Jesus himself made about him when he called him to be an apostle. The Lord Jesus said to Ananias, whom he sent to Paul to pray with him and welcome him into the Christian family: "This man is a chosen servant unto me. I will sent him to the Gentiles to stand before governors and kings, that he may bear my name before them,...
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January 28, 2020
During our studies through Acts, I am sure you have felt in your own heart, again and again, the impact of the faith, the prayers, and the power of Paul -- Christ's mightiest missionary apostle. Who would ever have dreamed that this mighty apostle would eventually fall into the devil's trap and disobey the Spirit of God? But that is exactly what we have seen happening to this great man as he neared Jerusalem but was forbidd...
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January 28, 2020
Today we begin the last series of our studies together in the book of Acts. We will pick up the story at the beginning of Chapter 21 and move on into the last section of this great book, where Luke recounts for us Paul's imprisonment in Jerusalem and his voyage to Rome. The book closes with Paul a prisoner of Caesar, living in his own hired house there at Rome. And so we will call this last series The Prisoner of the Lord, for ...
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January 28, 2020
On this last Sunday of 1970 not only are we drawing to the close of the old year, but we have also reached the end of the present series of studies in the book of Acts. With Chapter 21 we will begin a new series, in which we will see Paul in a role different from any we have seen him perform before in Acts, i.e., as a prisoner of the Lord. But today we are completing "The Pattern Setters" series in which the great apostle h...
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January 28, 2020
Last week we left our hero, the Apostle Paul, 'back at the ranch' in Antioch of Syria. There he enjoyed a short but well-deserved rest after the two to three years he had spent on his second missionary journey, during which he had carried the gospel to Europe. But he did not rest for long. Luke continues the story immediately with Verse 23 of Chapter 18:
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January 28, 2020
At the time of Paul's visit to Athens, that city was no longer important as a political seat; Corinth was the commercial and political center of Greece under the Roman Caesars. But Athens was still the university center of the world. It was the heir of the great philosophers, the city of Pericles and Demosthenes, of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides -- these men who established patterns of thought that have a...
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January 28, 2020
Let's resume our study of how the most revolutionary message the world has ever heard moved into Europe and thus affected the history of Western civilization for some 2000 years. We began, you remember, in the sixteenth chapter of Acts with the story of Paul, Silas, Luke, and Timothy in the city of Philippi, and of the great earthquake that released them from prison with dramatic impact, and of how God used four distinct method...
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January 28, 2020
When Paul and Barnabas left Antioch to go out on their first missionary journey, they started a new movement in the book of Acts. They began the last phase of our Lord's great commission. They started to go out to "the uttermost parts of the earth..." (Acts 1:8b KJV). So this constitutes a separate section of this book. We call this series of messages "The Pattern Setters" because, in this section of Acts, you f...
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January 28, 2020
We will look this morning, in Acts 13, at the first recorded sermon of the Apostle Paul. This man has changed the course of world history by the power of his ministry in the Spirit of Christ. He did so by the preaching of the word of truth, and here we have a good example of how he did it. Paul had preached many messages before, but this is the first of which we have a record. It was a very powerful and shattering message. It was p...
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January 28, 2020
Let us resume our studies in Acts. Here we learn afresh of the movement of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit at work is like a great river, cutting a fresh channel, going wherever it wishes. Sometimes we Christian flood control experts are disturbed by that. We do not like the way the Holy Spirit moves. We like to dig a channel, line it with concrete, and say, "Come, O River of God. We have dug the channel. Flow through it now a...
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January 28, 2020
In the last year or so of Paul's life, when he was imprisoned in Rome, he wrote a letter to his son in the faith, Timothy. And, looking back across the years of his ministry, he spoke of the coming of our Savior Christ Jesus, "who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel..." (2 Timothy 1:10 RSV). That is the great and central fact in the good news about Jesus Christ: He has done what ...
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January 28, 2020
When I entered the city of Jerusalem for the first time I came down from the Mount of Olives and went through the gate called St. Stephen's Gate. In my mind's eye I can still see the activity in the Old City and I can feel again the tremendous impressions that were mine as I came in through that gate named in honor of the first Christian martyr. We meet him today in our studies in Acts. Of course this gate is not the one th...
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January 28, 2020
The parable of the wheat and the weeds (the wheat and tares in the King James Version) is the Lord Jesus' own prediction of conditions in the church during the age between his first coming and his second -- this present age in which we live. The whole series of parables there in Matthew 13 describes this, but in the parable of the wheat and the tares he said particularly that he, the son of Man, would begin by sowing in the fie...
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January 28, 2020
When the Apostle Paul wrote his last letter to his son in the faith, Timothy, he said, "In the last days there shall come perilous times..." (2 Timothy 3:1b KJV). Those last days began when our Lord first appeared upon the earth. We make a great mistake if we read that as though Paul was talking only about the future. He was talking about the present age, his own day. All the time that lies between the first and second comi...
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January 28, 2020
We last left our heroes, Peter and John, hailed into court before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish rulers of Jerusalem. With them was the former lame man who had been made whole. Peter had said to him, "Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I unto you; in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk!" (Acts 3:6). Peter and John had been arrested because they had used the occasion to preach Jesus and the resurrect...
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January 28, 2020
In Acts, the action book of the New Testament, we are examining the first miracle in this present age in which we live: The instantaneous healing of a lame man who, waiting at the Beautiful Gate of the temple, had asked for money from Peter and John as they went up to pray. And, you remember, Peter had turned and said to him, "Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have I give to you: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth...
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January 28, 2020
Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour. And a man lame from birth was being carried, whom they laid daily at that gate of the temple which is called Beautiful to ask alms of those who entered the temple. Seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked for alms. And Peter directed his gaze at him, with John, and said, "Look at us." And he fixed his attention upon them...
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January 28, 2020
Last week we left our heroes, the apostles, in the temple courts of Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost. Peter was explaining the apparent drunkenness of the believers to the crowd that gathered when they heard the siren sound of the mighty rushing wind that came when the Holy Spirit fell upon these individuals. He explained the strange excitement of these 120 people, and also their strange utterances, their speaking the praise of Go...
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