Moving into the Book of Acts and A Personal Note

On a personal note, I apologize for not posting the Daily Feed from Wednesday on last week. I had to go to Canada to attend a funeral service for a family member. I thought I would have the time and focus to be able to continue the Feed at that time, but the Lord had other ideas. Had I more wisdom, I would have shared that ahead instead of offering apologies afterward. Thank you for understanding.

So now, we return to our daily feed. In our preaching time, we are at a point of transition. For the month of April, after Palm Sunday and Easter, we preached through the Book of Jonah. It is not a large book, ideal for the three Sundays following Easter. At the end of May, we have Pentecost Sunday. So, as we shift back to the New Testament, we are going to come to the book of Acts.

For our Sunday preaching, we are focusing on different books of the Bible each month, presently alternating between the Old and New Testaments. When we tackle a book that is too large to be preached through in a month (which is most of the Bible), we seek to come to that book with a certain point of view. What theme might be illustrated? For example, we came to the Prophet Isaiah last December with a point of view of where Christmas finds its prophetic beginnings in this largest of the prophetic books. To that end, we are going to come to the book of the Acts of the Apostles with the question of where the Holy Spirit is made manifest. Pentecost is the coming of the Holy Spirit. But where and how does the Holy Spirit then make a difference in the work of the church and its members?

We are going to look to the following:

In our first week, we look to the direct action of the Holy Spirit in the life and work of an apostle. In this case, we turn to Acts 8, where Philip is directed to share the gospel with the court official of Candace, the Queen of the Ethiopians. In our second, we consider the power of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in Acts 10, where Cornelius, the Roman Centurion and Gentile, and his entire household receive the Holy Spirit. His background is singled out because this is a unique and special moment in the church. In our third week, we shall look to Acts 15, specifically at how the work of the Holy Spirit undergirded and integrated into the work of the church leaders at the Council of Jerusalem. Then, from these examples of how the Holy Spirit’s work is shown to us in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, we come to Pentecost, the day of the Spirit’s coming upon the church, in fulfillment of the promise of our Lord Jesus.

Peace,
Pastor Peter