One of our tasks as Christians is to learn to read the story that we’re in. As individuals, we have a past and a future. As families, communities, and as a nation, we have pasts and futures. And we tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of where we’ve come from and where we’re going and what our role in the story is.

One of our tasks as Christians is to learn to read the story that we’re in. As individuals, we have a past and a future. As families, communities, and as a nation, we have pasts and futures. And we tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of where we’ve come from and where we’re going and what our role in the story is.

What we find in the last section of Acts 4 is not an isolated event, but starting here, we discover a theme that is repeated throughout the rest of the book. And that theme is a vision for how the church lives in this world.

In Acts 4:1–12, we see the controversy surrounding the name of Jesus, and what that name represents — the real person who lived and died and rose again and has fundamentally changed the world and time.