I love doing these multi-chapter read throughs, where I put on my Bible App so it can read to me while I follow along in my physical Bible - there is something about the tactile nature of the Bible in my hand, where I can see it and touch it, along with the listening, that really engages me.  And reading quickly like this, in multiple chapters, draws out different things because I am not pausing to read into things as much - and there is a benefit to mixing it up between the deeper reading and the more surface level reading like this.

Today though, in reading chapters 1-7, I noticed how the messages that the disciples were preaching and teaching were basically had one theme - here is what we saw and heard is what we heard.  I don’t see them teaching the stories of the Old Testament, and The Law; I don’t see them trying to convince people to behave to receive their salvation.  The message was simply about an event that took place...that Jesus was hung on a cross, died, and then rose from the grave; then, these guys spoke with him and dined with him and saw him depart the earth and rise into heaven.  That’s the whole message.  It just reminds me that I think we make our faith and our message more complicated that it needs to be far too often.  And, I think we (as ‘the church’) can end up being very unclear about we it means to be a Christian.  Really, the answer to that question is just what the disciples said...being a Christian is believing that Jesus was hung on a cross, died, and then rose from the grave; then he appears to a whole bunch of people and interacted with those people before he ended up going back up into heaven.  And, the reason for all of this is because sin requires punishment - and since we have proven, since the start of the world, that we can’t really act right, we keep sinning, God decided to send Jesus to live the life we couldn’t, and die a death that was really meant for us.  All of that was so we can have our sin justified, which is just a fancy word for ‘accounted for’...by placing our faith in Jesus, we can have our relationship with God restored.  Just like we have to get right with each other before our relationships between ourselves can be made whole again.  That is what we believe.  And, likewise, it is that information that would have to be proven to be invalid in order to shake our faith.  Whether Jonah and Whale, or Noah and the Ark, or any of these other stories are all 100% factually true is a secondary issue.  I am not saying anything about what I do or don’t believe personally, all I am saying is that our faith hinges on the resurrection, so if someone wants to give you a hard time about ‘the Bible’, you should direct that conversation to the resurrection...and if you do that more than once or twice, it is interesting how confident you’ll feel about your faith.  There is no good evidence from science, or history, or anywhere to hurt that position...which is interesting.

Lastly, turning to Stephen, instead of having a message of what he’d seen and heard, Stephen gives more of a reasoned approach, going through a wonderful articulation of the God’s historic relationship with His people, a history of Israel.  His message is more akin to modern apologetics...where he shows that history really points towards, not randomness; that there is a God bringing order and purpose from what, in the moment, often feels like chaos.  I just love reading this passage from him from chapters 6 and 7.

Today, I am reminded to keep it simple...and to make sure my faith is rooted on THE thing, the resurrection story, rather than to letting myself be drawn into a position of trying to defend the Bible as a whole.