In the remainder of this chapter we see the story of Paul’s integrating with the apostles, and we see an honest reaction of doubt from them, as well as a predictable reaction from the Jews of attempted assault on Paul.

I can’t imagine what must be going on in Paul’s heart and mind at this point, and the shame he must be feeling.  I mean, he was killing Christians with a level of personal vengeance  and now he is preaching God’s good news to people.  That is an amazing about-face.  What in the world could explain this transformation apart from either (1) he went completely crazy, which doesn’t seem like it is reasonable given all that he did after this point in time or (2) he was actually transformed from the inside out as prescribed by Luke’s account.  Sometimes when people are assaulting the Bible’s historicity, they are  solely focused on things written in the scriptures and they miss the amazingly strong circumstantial evidence like this - how do you explain Paul without accepting Luke’s (and Paul’s!) testimony?  How do you explain James’ conversion...a guy who grew up with Jesus eventually confessed that He is his Lord and Savior - that’s incredible.  What about the hundreds of eye witnesses to the risen Jesus...there were plenty of people who would have refuted this if it weren’t true.  And, you can’t say that there wasn’t a motivation to refute these stories about Jesus, just look at the lengths to which the Jewish leaders went to stop the spread of the Gospel.  They were HIGHLY motivated...they just didn’t have anything to record to refute what was being reported!   Paul reminds me of that this morning...that big idea that it is actually a bigger leap to NOT believe the bigger message of the Bible, especially the New Testament, than it is to accept it.  That really makes me a confident Christian.

And, coming back to the text and the chapter, we now see the stage is set for the spread of Christianity to the world outside of Palestine.   Paul will be launching his ministry, and we are about to see Peter’s ministry really explode too.  This is the point in time where momentum really took over and the Christian movement really started to go global.

Today I am praying that God would help me to see how I can grab hold of the momentum of the church by being an influencer to those around me, and by plugging into they things my local church is doing as these Christians did here in Acts; I want to play my part.