Author: Bryan Richardson

Re:Verse reading–Acts 23:11, 25:12, 28:16-31 (day three)

“For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him.”  This situation looks like an old man who’s finally settled down after his nomadic ways and now spends his days regaling wide-eyed young hangers-on with war stories, doesn’t it?  Don’t be fooled.  The man in this narrative is none other than Paul “Straining-Toward-What-Is-Ahead” the Apostle.  In his welcoming guests to his home, he is wielding the shaping power for the future of the human race.  In these “Rome sessions”, he’s teaching people, forming spirits, enlightening minds.  He speaks not of the old days, but of new possibilities.  He’s hasn’t “ended up”, but rather he presses on.  We think aging means fading.  Paul new the older he grew, the newer he became.  And that’s what he showed the world.

Re:Verse reading–Acts 20:17-38 (day three)

“They would never see his face again.”  The Spirit’s here, and we look forward to Christ’s appearing and the resurrection at the end of the age, but there sure are a whole lot of people who’ve left the scene.  And there’s still a church to lead, character to form, a cross to bear, and a world to seek.  It seems we could have used a few more years with the ones who made it happen.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know: We would become so dependent on them that we wouldn’t ever develop the strength we need to do the work at hand.  But it’s probably worse than that.  Forget depending on them; we might just leave it to them altogether.  Something about absence forces a choice, though: Step into the gap, or step down.  Paul’s gone.  Where are you?

Re:Verse reading–Acts 17:10-12, 16-34 (day three)  

“Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God.” Ecclesiastes tells us that the end of a matter is better than its beginning. As the church began, the band of believers saw an explosion of growth and joy. Even though the establishment—through arrests, beatings, and jail time—responded harshly, the joy of so many people embracing Christ opened the disciples’ hearts to a Holy Spirit-fueled courage and a command of circumstances they had never before known. As years passed, did they perhaps begin to think of themselves as naive in retrospect? Things would get much, much worse. And through it all, their faith and joy would grow much, much deeper. These were the days that taught Paul how all things bend toward the good in the lives of those who love God. That was reality. It still is.

Re:Verse reading–Acts 15:1-29 (day three)  

“Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.”  Ours is a sentimental society, that is, sentiment—feelings—have a cachet of authority.  If one is sincere, nothing else matters.  Paul will later teach a “circumcision of the heart”.  When Paul speaks of heart circumcision, though, he doesn’t use “heart” like we often do, as a synonym for “feelings”.  By “heart”, Paul means the very core of one’s being—the will or spirit of a person.  In rejecting circumcision as a prerequisite to the Christ-life, the Jerusalem council could have simply placed Christianity on a foundation of feelings.  That seems good if you feel good, but what happens when you don’t?  On what do you depend when you feel conflicted and confused?  No, they declared.  Christ transforms the spirit, and gives us sure footing.

Re:Verse reading–Acts 13:1-52 (day three)

“Take care that what the prophets have said does not happen to you.”  The reason Jesus appeared so extreme—even anti-scriptural—to his contemporaries is that his life was exactly what a human life looked like when lived the way the law and the prophets teach us to live.  We’re all pro-Bible, we’re all pro-God, blah, blah, blah.  But theory isn’t practice.  Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die, as blues artist Albert King sang.  We can talk about the Bible; Jesus lived it.  The fulfillment of the law was the perfect man who would show us what the law looked like in practice.  Paul’s chilling words point us to the good news that Jesus will teach us how to live the kind of life he himself lived.

Re:Verse reading–Acts 11:1-26 (day three)  

“Surely not, Lord!”  There is a strain of thinking that warns us against disagreement with God, against verbalizing our negative reaction to his direction.  But repeatedly in scripture we see honesty with God met not with anger, but engagement. Abraham opposed God’s intention to destroy Sodom, and God granted escape to Abraham’s family.  Jonah disputed God’s withholding of the destruction of Nineveh, and that conversation enabled Jonah to see God’s compassion for non-Hebrews.  Here, Peter’s honest dissent resulted in the revelation that Christ came to seek and to save all men, regardless of ethnicity or culture.  There is such a thing as rebellion against God.  But disagreement is not disloyalty.  God can tell the difference.  And he’ll use it as an occasion to shine the light of understanding.

Re:Verse reading–Acts 9:1-22, 26-31 (day three)

“Who are you, Lord?”  Think of the irony of this prayer—that these words would come from Saul, of all people.  His résumé: “as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.”  Here’s a man who trained and studied and researched and analyzed and inspected every square inch of the received spiritual knowledge of his culture.  He had trained his entire life for this exact work.  The Way of Jesus would stop here.  But all that Saul had studied, he had misunderstood.  Whoever God is, he’s not who Saul had thought.  Even if he had not been blinded by the light, there was no way he would have been able to see anything, because the light by which he saw the world had gone out.  What would happen to you if you prayed—really prayed—this prayer: “Who are you, Lord?”

Re:Verse reading–Acts 6:8-10, 7:54-58, 8:1-5, 26-38 (day three) 

“Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power…”  By grace we are saved.  The mighty acts of power were necessary to push back the rot of a decaying universe through the healing of broken bodies, pointing to a day when all things will be new.  But grace governed that power.  That is why Stephen could use it to reveal God and resist the temptation of leveraging it to gain the upper hand.  It was the grace brimming in his soul that enabled him to turn his eyes to heaven.  It was the grace flooding his spirit that gave him the peace to fall asleep.  And it was the grace radiating from his life that reached a young man named Saul, and began the preparatory work for his meeting with Jesus on the road to Damascus.

Re:Verse reading–Acts 4:5-31 (day three)

“By what power or what name did you do this?”  There’s a difference between wonder and suspicion.  Wonder asks, “How can these things be?”  Suspicion inquires, “Are you trying to gain the upper hand?”  Wonder makes room for miracles; suspicion fears loss of control.  Wonder draws a person nearer to the source of miracle; suspicion drives a person away from anything unexplainable.  Wonder prepares the heart for the eternal; suspicion hardens the heart towards God.  Some of us will approach the spiritual realm with wonder; some of us will approach it with suspicion.