Author: Bryan Richardson

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.

Re: Verse reading–Acts 3:1-20  (day three)

“He asked them for money.”  Money was the only remedy in society’s framing of the situation.  But Peter and John broke that frame.  A handout was no longer the best thing a person might hope to receive.  The eternal kind of life they were learning from the Holy Spirit enabled them to imagine new possibilities.  This is not imagination like we understand it, which is essentially “make-believe”.  Rather, it is a future redefined by Christ.  As Jesus’s disciples, we have the power to usher in new ways of living.  At least for now, we have social standing and power unknown to the first century church.  Can you give money?  Do it.  Can you heal?  Do so.  But can we leverage our social standing and power to alter the economic landscape for the sake of the least of these?  We must.

Re: Verse reading–Acts 2:1-41 (day three)

“They have had too much wine.” It is a feature of this universe that what one looks for, he will find.  One might say, “Well I looked for financial wealth and didn’t find it.”  Ah, but what is actually being sought in the search for money is a zero-sum world—and whether you find riches or not, you certainly find that world.  So again, you find what you seek.  If you decide to explain events by ruling out some things in advance to satisfy an anti-miracle bias, you seek a miracle-less world, and that’s the world that will be your home.  God’s Spirit could blast a city with sound and light and super-human abilities, and some will call it a bender.  What do your explanations reveal about what you’re seeking?

Re:Verse reading–Acts 1:1-14 (day three) 

“Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”  Yes, powers will rise and fall, cultures will conquer and get conquered, and nations will go from ruler to ruled.  But Jesus invites the disciples out of obsessing over a geopolitical conundrum and into occupying an eternal kingdom.  This is invitation done perfectly.  It doesn’t squash peoples’ interest in matters at hand and try to sell them a bigger idea.  Jesus’s invitation just says, “Yeah, some questions will work your soul to death.  Or we can use our energy in a way that will make those questions seem too small.  Ready to get to it?”  We can build a workaround for our current circumstances, or we can rethink our future, but we can’t do both.  What if a church put that invitation in front of people?