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Week 42 Acts

When does a commitment turn into a dilemma?
Maybe lots of times but the one I was thinking about was reading through the bible in a year.
A bible-reader’s Commitment is: keep turning the pages day-after-day.
A bible-reader’s Dilemma is: there’s no time to stop and think.
I thought about that after I read the story of the council meeting in Jerusalem. There was one big agenda item. Pretty much all the people who followed the Lord in the gospels were ethnic and religious Jews. Suddenly a bunch of people who weren’t Jewish want to follow the Lord too. So ethnic-religious Jews who followed the Lord told the guys who weren’t Jews ethnically, religiously or any other way that following the Lord included: a) repenting and believing in the Lord, and b) following a list of legal-cultural Jewish-isms.
The council’s question was: do they really have to?
The council’s resolution was basically, no, but there was a short list: you must abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or eating the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality.
So…the Dilemma. I look at the list and ask myself is-that-it?
It seems like such a weird list and I wonder what to make of it.
But I’m reading-through, so I guess for now the question goes in the What-Do-I-Do-With-It? bin.
And I move on to chapter sixteen.

Note: quote from Acts 15:29 (NLT)

Week 42 Acts

Paul’s conversion to The Way was pretty dramatic, and one of the last things you’d have expected.
While he was on the way to Damascus Paul was stopped by a luminescence that blinded him, and a voice that asked him why he (Paul) was persecuting him (the voice). Paul didn’t know what was going on.
Paul: who are you, sir?
The Voice: I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting.
That was the extent of the conversation.
Paul had to be led by the hand into Damascus. He sat in his room for three blind and hungry days. He did pray, and he did have a vision of someone named Ananias coming and healing his blindness.
In the meantime Ananias had his own independent & simultaneous vision where he was told to go to the house of a stranger named Judas who lived on Straight Street where he would find Paul. He would pray that Paul would regain his vision.
Ananias was about as willingly to see Paul as Jonah was the Assyrians. But the Lord told him: (Paul) is my chosen instrument to take my message to the Gentiles and to kings as well as to the people of Israel. And I will show him how much he must suffer for me.
So Ananias did as he was told.
Once you get to chapter thirteen Paul dominates the rest of the book of Acts.

Note: quotes from Acts 9:5 & 15-16 (NLT)

Week 42 Acts

If I compiled a Top Ten List of Stories in Acts then Peter-in-prison is likely on it.
There’s a couple of things to think about in the story.
First of all a man named James is executed. But Peter escapes. So I wonder why the one guy dies and the other is saved. I realize there’s not much point in wondering why because I don’t and won’t know. Still…I wonder.
Secondly is that Peter’s there in prison. Then an angel appears, tells him to get dressed, releases his chains, and leads him out. While this is happening Peter: thought it was a vision. He didn’t realize it was really happening. He knew something was happening but didn’t think it was a real something – more like a dream-sequence, wish-fulfillment, an abstraction or fantasy. Finally, alone on the dark street he figured it felt too real to be fake.
Third thing is his friends. While Peter was in prison: the church prayed very earnestly for him. I don’t know what they were praying because when Peter walked to Mary’s house a servant answered the door and saw Peter, ran back and told the people, and then they told her: you’re out of your mind. Then on second-thought they decided: it must be his angel.
The story is perplexing, incredible, reassuring; a story of lower-real meeting upper-real.
A great story.

Note: quotes from Acts 12:9, 5, 15 (NLT)

Week 42 Acts

The Cornelius story is one of the big stories in Acts. I didn’t run a word-count on it, but if it isn’t the longest it’s nearly.
And it’s one of the turning-point stories in the bible. The OT story is about the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob-Israel-Hebrew-Jewish people group. They score a ten on the OT-Priority-Rating.
Lots of other tribal-ethnic-cultural-national groups show up too. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Ethiopia, Libya, the Hittites, Philistines, Canaanites. But they’re only scoring ones or twos.
The Israel Group was super-important. Select. Unique. Special. Distinct. As if all the other nationalities were carrying a deadly virus that Israel didn’t want to catch, so Keep Your Distance!
The Cornelius story is a step on the road to revising that sense of Us vs. Them.
Cornelius was: a devout man who feared the God of Israel…He gave generously to charity and was a man who prayed regularly to God. In spite of that, Cornelius was a Them.
So under normal circumstances Peter would never, ever, ever have fraternized with non-Jewish Cornelius. It took a miraculous vision-driven intervention to push Peter through his ethnic quicksand.
Peter had already seen the Lord show an international open-mindedness – there was the Roman centurion, the Samaritan women, the Syro-Phoenecian woman. But it’s only now that Peter is latching onto the fact that ethic and racial differences aren’t as important as he thought.

Note: quote from Acts 10:2 (NLT)

Week 42 Acts

While the Lord was still on earth his disciples revered him as their sage, their master, their teacher. Every important decision ran through him.
But when the Lord left for good the disciples had to start figuring out some things for themselves.
One thing that was new was how they handled their money: all the believers met together constantly and shared everything they had. They sold their possessions and shared the proceeds with those in need.
Giving away all your money is pretty impressive.
Even more impressive is that I don’t get any sense of heavy-handed you-gotta-sell-all-your-possessions messaging. It sounds more like a spontaneous, voluntary, feeling-okay-about-it willingness: all the believers were of one heart and mind, and they felt that what they owned was not their own; they shared everything they had.
Ananias and Sapphira sold land and only gave a percentage of the money. The problem for them was that they publicized that they gave all of it. Peter told Ananias how stupidly unnecessary a lie that was because technically speaking Ananias could have kept it all for himself: the property was yours to sell or not sell, as you wished. And after selling it the money was yours to give away.
So I guess you could decide to give nothing at all.
Unless you really wanted to give, in which case the sky was the limit.

Note: quotes from Acts 2:44-45, 4:32, 5:4 (NLT)

Week 41 Acts

In Acts 3 Peter was instrumental in helping a man who had never walked walk. The man actually started jumping around in excitement, and witnesses were pretty impressed too.
Not so excited and not so impressed was a group of people that included: the leading priests, the captain of the Temple guard, and some of the Sadducees. They came and arrested Peter.
The miracle was what it was, but the leader’s big concern was who Peter attributed the miracle to. Peter told them the lame man: was healed in the name and power of Jesus Christ from Nazareth, the man you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead.
Then Peter said something extra about the Lord: there is salvation in no one else! There is no other name in all of heaven for people to call on to save them.
I’ve been reading through some of the Analects the last couple of weeks. They’re pretty good and they really make you think. And Confucius seems like a pretty good guy – smart, sincere, gentle, earnest, genuine, serious. He seems like a real character guy.
So this thing that Peter says about the Lord slows me down a bit.
It’d be different if Peter said that only a couple of dozen key people can save me. But he says only one can.

Note: quotes from Acts 4:1, 10, 12 (NLT)

Week 41 Acts

I took about eight weeks reading through the gospels (which means I dropped below my daily average and lost ground).
Funny thing is that even though I spent extra time on the gospels they’re still a bit of a blur. If someone asked me to give a brief gospel-synopsis I’d have to stop and think a bit.
So, fortunately for me there’s Acts 2.
Peter’s speaking to a crowd. The gist of his message takes up twenty-three verses. But right in the middle of it Peter says something that helps me with my summarize-the-gospel dilemma. He says to the crowd: people of Israel, listen! God publicly endorsed Jesus of Nazareth by doing wonderful miracles, wonders, and signs through him, as you well know. But you followed God’s prearranged plan. With the help of lawless Gentiles, you nailed him to the cross and murdered him. However, God released him from the horrors of death and raised him back to life again, for death could not keep him in its grip.
These three verses are a pretty fine Concise Gospel Story.
Jesus of Nazareth was an incontestable miracle-worker;
Powerful opponents engineered his death;
But that sad and ugly murder fitted into the bigger design of God;
Jesus came back to life;
Death lost its power.
Four gospels boiled down to about three dozen words.

Note: quote from Acts 2:22-24 (NLT)

Week 41 Acts

The first chapter of Acts is a quiet one. Peaceful. Calm. It’s an introduction to the book. And it builds a nice bridge from the gospel stories. Chapter one’s calm turns out to be a calm-before-the-storm kind of calm because chapter two just explodes: suddenly, there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm in the skies…Then, what looked like flames or tongues of fire appeared and settled on each of them. And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages.
I heard a story an African guy told about how he’d travelled far from home to a place where people spoke another language. He wanted to tell those people the story of Jesus, and one day he was praying and begging the Lord to help him learn the language quickly. He was praying in his own language – obviously – and by the time he finished the prayer he realized he was praying in the language he didn’t know. The story seemed pretty wild, and I talked to the guy later in private. Apart from the fact that it was impossible to believe there was nothing loony or carnival about the guy, so that it all seemed plausible – in a impossible-barring-miracle way.
I thought about that guy today while I read Acts two with its unilingual-one-minute gathering interrupted by gale-force winds and fire the next. And then…bi-linguality.

Note: quote from Acts 2:2-4 (NLT)

Week 41 Acts

Some guy says to me: Okay I’m giving you five selections and they’re Matthew-Mark-Luke-John-Acts and you have to choose two of them, what are the two? Personally I think I’d be insane if Acts wasn’t one of them. I’d have to think about which gospel I’d take but Acts would be automatic. (My gospel pick would be either Luke or John – most likely Luke.)
Acts is a definite.
As far as that goes let’s say someone says: Pick three and only three NT books because that’s all you’ll have when I lock you up in an internment camp. I think I’d be partially-insane not to make Acts a pick. (I think my first two would be Luke & Acts, and then some undecided-right-now letter.)
Acts is gigantic.
It’s one of most interesting story-sets in the bible. Someone says to me: Okay pick the one book out of the whole bible that from top-to-bottom has the most interesting series of stories. I’d be semi-insane not to have Acts as part of that mix. (Genesis, the first half of Exodus, the Samuels, one of the gospels for sure, but Acts is right up there.)
One good reason for getting ahead in my bible-reading schedule is that I don’t have to rush through Acts.
Acts is one of the best.

Week 41 John

I finished reading John with the impression that belief was pretty important to him so ran some numbers to see.
I looked up Believe in a word book.
Matthew-Mark-Luke used the word a total of about eighteen times; John more than fifty. 18:50. A similar ratio showed up with other forms of the word:
Believed 5:22
Believes 2:14
Believing 1:5
Another impression I had – I can’t show this one numerically – is that John had a sort of Belief Continuum in mind. Not so much just two exclusive categories: Belief & Unbelief. More like a line stretching from Comprehensive Belief along through middle-stages and then on through uncertainty and all the way over to Complete Unbelief.
For example Martha in the Lazarus story is near the top-end of belief.
Nicodemus seems like a kind of middling guy who was belief-curious and who maybe in the end believed. The woman at the well spends some time in a belief-flux; ditto for the man born blind.
Judas is a sad and almost incomprehensible case of unbelief in-spite-of-everything-he-saw.
People move toward belief, away from belief, shifting one way or another.
Anyway at the end John spelled-out his aim. His gospel was written: so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in him you will have life.
Which confirms my suspicion that belief is pretty important to John.

Note: quote from John 20:31 (NLT)