RE Verse reading–Acts 16:25-34, Acts 17:1-34 (day three) The Sunday School answer was always “Jesus” no matter what the question was. At least that’s how the joke goes. But in Acts, the answer to the questions that welled up in people’s hearts as they negotiated their existence with what seemed to be a harsh or legalistic universe really was “Jesus.” The difference between a Sunday School answer and a real-time answer, though, is revelation. A Sunday School answer doesn’t really reveal anything. It’s a canned, planned, and sanitized response to a question. The people we meet in Acts—the jailer who’d seen it all, the synagogue faithful who’d seen nothing outside their religious tradition, the philosophers trying to see the invisible—these people’s questions hammered away at their minds: Will God rescue me? Will God hear me? Will God know me? And the answer each time is the revelation of a person: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
