Looking at Christ

The Book of Acts might well be a written for a church planter - so what is the end of chapter 15 (v36-41) teaching him as a church leader?  Theophilus' eye will certainly be drawn first to the surprising disagreement between two church planting legends and he'd be given a reality check (and reassurance) that good, godly, well-motivated gospel workers will disagree and that is not terminal and God can use the conflict for good. In particular the incident raises the important issue of who do you take onto your team . Is it wise to take someone onto the launch team of a new church who has proved unreliable or experienced significant 'church hurt' or is in some way in bad relationship with their former church or has inflated expectations that 'this time it will be different'? Many would caution extreme care having seen the way church plants can be a magnet for those with conflicting agendas and unresolved grievances, only for patterns of disfunction to be repeated...

  Acts 18:24-26 gives a window into leadership mentoring, a window into an important biblical theme, and perhaps a window into the intended audience and use of Luke-Acts. Mentoring Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was a learned man, able in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in [the] spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. (Acts 18:24-25) There is a lot of potential here. He knows his Bible He’s been catechised in the way of Christ He is fervent – literally boiling – passionate, fearless, committed, all in  H e does a good job of teaching people Jesus That is a hugely promising profile. That’s the sort of profile of knowledge, heart and ministry instinct we need to be looking for to encourage into church leadership. He's not previously know to the disciples in Ephesus. He's just arrived from northern Africa. But he...

A very simple observation: help = preach the gospel. And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us .” And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them . (Acts 16:9-10) There are a lot of very interesting things about this incident but I just want to highlight this one - that Paul and his companions (to whom he presumably relates the vision) conclude not only that this is God's means of calling them to Macedonia but also that the help which is being called for is preaching the gospel. It is not as if this is the only help possible. In Acts 6 there are food parcels for the widows in the Jerusalem church. Tabitha has also been clothing widows (Acts 9). Paul makes a special point of impressing on the Ephesian elders his modelling of this sort of personal practical assistance of the vulnerable...

"How are you doing?" Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the believers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing . (Acts 15:36) What were they looking to see? What were they checking? As we enter Covid-19 lock down and have that same concern to find out how people are doing, what do we need to be most concerned about? Obviously we'll be concerned for how they're doing physically, financially and emotionally. That's completely right. That's love. But what specifically was the Apostle Paul concerned about? There's a window into his greatest concern in the first letter he sends to the Thessalonian church - a group of young Christians he'd been ripped away from and was desperately worried about.  For this reason, when I could stand it no longer, I sent to find out about your faith. I was afraid that in some way the tempter had tempted you and that our labours might have been in vain. (1 Thess 3:...

A lot has been written on Acts 6:1-7 but a couple of big things that are going on there jumped out at me freshly: Institutional ethnic privilege dealt with . The issue is ethnicity. It is not Jew-Gentile; they are almost all Jews. It is not about skin colour. It is about ethnicity in the old sense of land, language and culture; Hebraic Aramaic-speakers mostly from Palestine privileged over Hellenistic Greek-speakers mostly from the diaspora. This is a big issue, not only because it threatens the gospel ministry priority of the apostles (Acts 6:2) but because it breaks the second commandment, tramples the poor, denies the image of God, attacks true religion, and because it threatens the glorious unity of the church (Acts 4:32) which is such a prominent theme throughout Acts and the whole New Testament. So the apostles deal with it: They listen. They hear the complaint. Which suggests there is an environment within which different ethnicities voice their complaints to ...

As Pentecost Sunday approaches I've been preparing to preach on Acts 2 and reading through the wider book. I was particularly struck by this verse: And he said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” And they said, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” (Acts 19:2) For a disciple not to have heard about the Holy Spirit seems to be Not A Good Thing. For those of us who are concerned to emphasise (I think rightly) the priority of preaching Christ and him crucified and who see the Spirit’s role mainly as (to use J.I. Packer’s expression) a ‘ spotlight ministry ’, drawing the attention to Christ not himself, this stress on the Spirit in Acts is important to reckon with. Is there a danger that those of us who would think of ourselves as ‘conservative evangelicals’ might be so keen to distance ourselves from the excesses of hyper-Pentecostalism and unhelpful (or downright non-Christian) pneumatologies, that we might leave people with no...

We're looking forward to Raising the Bar conference in Arusha, Tanzania later this month. One of the things we'll be looking at with the pastors and Bible college students is the book of Acts - as a model of preaching the Old Testament, as a model of ministry as suffering preachers, and as a book to preach through in its own right. Just a few thoughts here (all second hand) on that last one: It’s already preaching! A large proportion of Acts is sermons and in fact the whole thing is Luke preaching to us. So our job is really just to let it preach. It’s Part 2 (see Acts 1:1) so you need to remember Part 1 (Luke) – all about Jesus who came to seek and save the lost,  about a historical narrative, the unstoppable power of the Word, and coming to certainty , about reversals, about the climax of salvation history, about repentance, about The Way,  about suffering and joy . As Sammy has pointed out to us, David Cook sees Luke 24:46 as a summary of Luke’s Gospel and Luke 24...