The Daily Devo with Steve

Today we read through the rest of chapter 13, where we see Paul teaching in a synagogue that was likely full of Jews and God-fearing Gentiles.  Almost like Stephen, for whom Paul oversaw his stoning, Paul recounts the Jewish history in a summary format, to point to the fact that there has always been an expectation for a Messiah, and that he has come in the form of a man named Jesus, and that there are many witnesses to this that are alive and well as Paul is talking through this.   Paul is asked to come back and teach the following week and he does, and we are told that many people begin to follow his teaching, to place their faith in what Paul is saying, and to no one’s surprise, we see that the Jewish leaders start to get jealous and to feel threatened, and so they put together an effort to push Paul and Barnabas out of the city; so Paul and Barnabas depart and head on to the next stop in their missionary journey.

What I focused in on today is a little less spiritual and a little more human...it’s Paul’s approach to these people in this synagogue.  One thing about Paul that is truly fantastic is that he tends to be a little of a chameleon in terms of his evangelical approach.  We will later see that when Paul meets with philosophers, he leverages reason to reach them.  When he speaks here, to Jews and God-fearing Gentiles, he leverages a shared history of God’s story and relationship with Israel, and we also see him reaching people who have no real relationship with God later one, who are uneducated and with whom he really has nothing in common, and he meet them where they are in order to bring them to faith, and to deliver the message of Jesus.  Paul, in a subtle way, is showing us one of the real keys to evangelism - meeting people where they are.  A second, and almost more subtle, takeaway would be that Paul isn’t so worried about how they come to faith, about the method, he is just worried THAT they come to faith in Jesus.  Paul is the one that really emphasizes the importance of being in the world as evangelists, and not positioning ourselves in society in a way that keeps people away from us, but in a way that invites people it.

Today, we see Paul’s skill on display.  We are going to see many more examples of this as we move forward in reading Acts, but it really struck me today, and it gives me pause and prompts me to consider this question, “Am I invitational in how I live my life?  Do I seek to meet people where they are in terms of evangelical efforts?  Do I spend adequate time sharpening my skills in evangelism, working to understand how people’s thoughts and opinions are changing and growing to make sure I am equipped to meet them where they are?”  I am not suggesting that we are all called to be seminary-level theologians, but I think it is incumbent upon us  be prepared, as Peter teaches us in 1st and 2nd Peter to make the case for our faith, for what we believe.  And Paul demonstrates how powerful that opportunity can be if we have at least some level of understanding of how people are thinking in our times.

I am breaking this chapter into two pieces, and today we see Paul and Barnabas being sent off by the church there in Antioch, to go out on their first (of 3) missionary journeys.  We also see here that John Mark, the same Mark of the Gospel of Mark, was with them - this is part of the reason Mark’s testimony is great, because he was front-and-center to the action with Paul, which is a unique claim for his version of the Gospel.  We also see Paul actually named Paul instead of Saul.  Saul was his Hebrew name, and now that he is going out among the Gentiles, he will go by his Roman name Paul.  As they get going with their ministry, their first encounter is with this false prophet named Bar-Jesus, also called Elymas in this section.

In today’s reading - two main ideas jumped out at me.

The first is just a subtle thing that I tend to notice periodically, and that is the amount of people, place, and time references that are found in the text.  If you read these 12 verses and you have an Atlas and a history book (apart from the Bible), it is very easy to place these events onto the map and onto the timeline of history.  I point this out because it just provides more evidence that this stuff isn’t just being made up for the sake of stories.  This isn’t Luke sitting down writing a fairy tale that starts with ‘Once upon a time’.  If this was a fairy tale, this would have been called out as such WAY before we got our hands on this material.

The second thing that I got to thinking about while reading this relates to our motivations and our intentions as we approach our faith and our spirituality.  The Jewish Leaders, from everything we read between the first pages of Matthew’s Gospel to here in chapter 13 of Acts, really didn’t ever give themselves a chance to hear the Gospel.  They couldn’t hear it because they weren’t really looking for the truth, they were just looking to maintain their power.  That is readily apparent when reading the New Testament.  It wasn’t an intelligence issue.  It wasn’t that they were inherently bad people.  It wasn’t that God was keeping them from hearing it (or, at least I don’t believe that).  It was just that they couldn’t hear it because they had an agenda.  Here, we see Bar-Jesus suffering from the same issue - he is up close with the Proconsul, which was like the top guy in this Roman province, and he didn’t want his power or his counsel to be diminished by Paul’s teaching and preaching.  He stood in opposition to Paul because he had something to lose, and he saw that something to lose as more important than examining whether or not there might be something to gain in Paul’s teaching.

I do the same thing sometimes.  Sometimes I feel like God is calling me to do something, and all I can think about is what I will/might lose; I fail to think about what I might gain.  I fail to recognize that God doesn’t have a track record in my life of calling me into loss, but a track record of calling me towards gain...and often times, I don’t see or understand the gain until later.  I have to be careful here to say clarify that I am NOT preaching a prosperity Gospel here, that if, for example, I give 10% of my income to the church that God will increase my income as a result.  What I am saying is that in doing as God says, I will begin to see as God sees, and I will start to realize that God is asking me to do things for my own benefit, whether it is a direct or indirect benefit.  God has my best interest in mind.  So, today, I would pray that I would see how God is calling me, and that I would respond in courage as well as be blessed enough to get a sense as to why I am being called in that way.  I guess this is the old Irish Proverbial Prayer - “God, please grant me the wisdom to know what to do, and the courage to do it.”

Today we see a leader, Herod, killing and attempting to kill to gain favor with the Jews and the quell the spread of what we know were now being called the “Christians”.  He kills James, which is James the brother of John and not James the brother of Jesus and author of the book of James, and then he puts Peter in prison to kill him.  But, as Peter is laid up in prison, and angel of the Lord appears to him and rescues him, and this completely infuriates Herod, so Herod orders his guards, these sentries, killed. Then we see Herod’s death as we close the chapter - which was interesting.  Herod has consolidated his power and gained peace over these few neighboring countries, and everyone is essentially praising him and he takes the credit as his own, as opposed to giving glory to God, and we are told that he is immediately struck down by God and that he was eaten by worms.  What I find interesting though, is  that the Jewish historian Josephus records how Herod celebrated games in Caesarea in honor of the Emperor, which were attended by the leading men of the kingdom. When Herod entered the theatre, clad in a glittering silver garment, his flatterers addressed him as a god: ‘May you be propitious to us, and if we have hitherto feared you as a man, yet henceforth we agree that you are more than mortal in your being.’ The king accepted their flattery. Then looking upward he saw an owl perched on a rope and took it as a symbol of ill fortune. At the same time he was seized by violent internal pains and was carried into his palace where he died after five days of illness (Jos., Ant. 19:343–350). It is clearly the same story which Luke tells us here.  That is just really cool to me, how non-Biblical writings like this are so often found that substantiate what’s being said in the scriptures that we read...it places things in the right historical timeframe and it really validates so much of what we have in our hands in the Bible.

The thing that MOST stuck out to me this morning though was really in the study notes from this chapter.  The author makes a huge effort to explain how historians have varying opinions about how Peter could have possibly escaped, and some go so far as to way that some of the story could have become a little more fantastic in time, and that some of the angel of the Lord appearance stuff could have eventually been written into the story.  In a sense, they are discounting the fact that the story could have really had this miracle in it.

Here’s my thing...all we have is what is written here by Luke, and that’s fine.  And I am a fan of historians working to understand the text.  What I tend to find most interesting though is how people will accept the resurrection and the reject this miracle, or Jonah and the whale, or Noah’s Ark, or the Parting of the Red Sea.  Think about it...if God raised a man from the dead, and if God created the universe, what real problem could we have logically with God performing a miracle to get Peter out of jail?  I mean, come on!

So, for me, today, I am just reminded that I have to avoid the temptation of placing my logical limits on God.  I have to suspend trying to put God in a human box, subject to the reasoning that I understand, because He is way bigger than that.  God rescued Peter, and God made a point out of Herod - I don’t need more explanation than that!

Peter is one of my favorite characters in the Bible because you can always tell what he is thinking, and he (like Paul) is a doer.  And Peter tends to go through these ups and downs where he gets it and then he seems to struggle to get it...and I just love the vulnerability he displays in this way.  His story is so much like mine in that way...there is a vulnerability I have to life’s ups and downs.

In today’s reading, Peter is called to account for the fact that he had ministered to this centurion from yesterday in chapter 10, and we see Peter demonstrate through his experience with the dream and with this centurion that this is the new calling for the church, to get outside of the circumcision party, the Jewish Christians who were in support of Jesus but also clinging to the Old Testament law.  Peter is basically announcing to this group that it is time for this movement to go global.

And we also see that for the first time this group of Jesus followers are officially named Christians.  It was more of a slang term than anything specific, and it was something the locals probably came up with that just stuck.  It is kind of funny actually - this name has stuck for 2000 years!

I love how we see the church wrestling with what to do.  I love how the path forward isn’t know.  It reminds me how dependent we really are on God - we are just feeling around in the dark with this stuff.  And I love how we see these guys looking back in time and putting the pieces together and realizing that God was actually there all along, orchestrating things on their behalf.   That, for me, is one of the biggest recurring themes I see when reading Acts - the reminder that God has been working a plan all along.  I can look back at my life and connect the dots as well...and that’s my prayer for today.  I pray that God would help me to do that, to connect the dots, to be like Peter and to reflect on this and to be emboldened by it.

Today we read mostly about Peter’s dream, where God tells him to wake and eat after he’s fallen into what I assume was a God-induced trance, and Peter responds reflexively with a “No, I don’t eat that” (it was an unclean animal that he was being called to eat).

As is often the case with dreams and visions reported in the Bible, the scholars from my study Bible go to great lengths (which I enjoy and appreciate) to try to explain and reconcile all of what is said in a very scientific manner.  For me though, it seems pretty obvious that God was communicating with Peter in a way to instruct him to change his paradigm, and to stop seeing the world through all of the classifications the Jews had for it; to see that God calls him to love everyone, and that there is a new order set forth by Jesus that frees him from the bondage of the law.  We gets these reminders based on Peter’s actions and words and thoughts at various times that he was trying to move in the direction of this new covenant, but that the traditions of the old were still front-of-mind and occupying his conscience.

This story illustrates in a beautiful way how God can personalize His interaction to deal with our own situation.  It also shows how God can orchestrate things of which we would otherwise be completely unaware.  A few chapters ago, God arranged a meeting between Phillip and the eunuch, and here God does the same thing between the Centurion and Peter.  And, in Peter’s dream and prayer, God was preparing his heart for what was to come.  I can pick on Peter about struggling to get past the Jewish law and push on towards being a Jesus-follower, but Peter responds here, he does as God had commanded, and he leaned into what God said.  So, in this instance, we could say that Peter passed the test.  He did as he was called to do by God.  As a result, his ministry (as we will see happening with Paul’s) begins to expand outside the bounds of the Jewish Christians and to the rest of the world.  This was a bit of a ‘coming out’ for Peter’s ministry - or at least the start of it, as we’ll read tomorrow.

This story reminds me how personal prayers can be.  It reminds me how God can and does customize His response to me.  It reminds me that I, as Peter, have a calling in God’s story.  Peter found his.  Paul found his.  Most of us are not actually called into vocational ministry like them, so our mission is to find God’s calling in a non-vocational manner.  This can sometimes be harder to do I think, because we are still called to be Jesus-followers, and to influence others by the way we live our lives to follow Jesus.  But, without making ministry our professional life, we must be intentional about making it a part of our identity.  When people say, “What do you do”, I will likely never respond with “I am a minister”.  But, really, that is still one of my titles.  It is still one of my roles.  I must find a way to weave that into my identity in the marketplace, in the home, among friends, and everywhere else.  And then, like Peter, I must respond to prompts from God to leverage my opportunities to further His kingdom, for His glory.

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.

In the first 19 verses of Acts chapter 9, we see the dramatic conversion of Saul or Tarsus, whom we will see renamed as Paul here soon.  This story is a great story to read, and it illuminates 2 big ideas as I am reading it.

First, it is hard to overstate this, but this story is proof that God is going to do what God is going to do.  There are some things in life where I think God may be a little more malleable in how things go - I think God does answer and respond to prayer based on my experience and my point of view, and I don’t want to get into the question of whether God is really responding or whether God orchestrated the prayer that He could answer it and all of that...but I think God responds.  That being said, there are some major things that God puts in place to guide and direct the course of time, and Paul is a great example.   Paul was going to become a part of history as a Christian evangelist, and there wasn’t anything Paul could do to get around that.  Sometimes God just makes things happen...what a great example!

Second, looking at Ananias’ role in this story, it kind of goes back to what we drew from the reading yesterday about Philip, and us never really knowing what hangs in the balance of our faithfulness.  Ananias, almost in comedic fashion, questions God about this “Saul of Tarsus” that he’s heard about, and that’s been killing Christians, and God reassures him that he should go and do what God’s asked, to go meet Paul.  I mean, talk about an act of faith!  2 chapters ago Paul was stoning Stephen in the streets.  Ananias wouldn’t have known about this dramatic conversion of Paul at this point, he probably didn’t hear about that until he started talking to Paul and Paul started telling him the story of his conversion.  Ananias is just another example of what faithfulness to a request from God can bring.

Today, I pray that I would have the vision to see those areas of my life where God is forcing His way, so that I might just go ahead and relinquish control and not waste my time and energy pushing back.  And , like yesterday, I pray that I would recognize those moments when I have a choice as to whether or not to lean into a decision where God is prompting me one way vs. another, and that I would be courageous enough to go where I am led.  This often requires that I carve out time to pray, to relax, and to create margin in my life...which are things that I typically have to be intentional about, because none of that comes naturally to me!

This is a short reading this morning, because I had a very specific thought as I was reading this passage.  Here we see Philip going along and feeling a tug at his heart to go South.  Now, the text says an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, but imagine for a moment that it is written in a less dramatic fashion; imagine that Philip just kind of had that sense that we all have, that goes something like this, “I just feel like this is something I should do...”.  We have all had that.  And Philip follows this feeling.  And we see that he bumps into this guy who is sitting there reading the book of Isaiah.  Now, reading the story it seems obvious what is going on - God is orchestrating something here.  But, think about it from each of these two guys’ point of view.

Philip had felt a nudge, he followed it, and as he is just going along his way he bumps into this guy reading Isaiah.  Philip, I am sure, kind of thought, “Oh wow, that’s cool...let me go talk to this guy.”

This guy whom Philip runs into in this story is just doing his thing, minding his own business, reading his scriptures, and a random dude walks up and starts talking to him about it.

At this point in this story, no one is probably thinking God has had anything to do with this.  It probably feels like a normal day with just a random event happening.

Then Philip connects the dots for this guys, showing him how Isaiah’s prophecy has actually come to fruition, that Jesus was the character in that story, and that Philip is actually a part of a movement that is spreading the word of this event.  Then they baptize this guy, and Philip gets on his way.  Meanwhile, this guy goes back to his home and starts preaching and teaching this news to others.

As I am reading this, I can’t help but just think about the little decisions that each of these two gentlemen made that ultimately led to this incredible outcome.  Philip followed a nudge.  Philip probably had some doubts along the way, but he went along with it anyways.  This eunuch opened up his Bible to read, just being faithful to his routine, faithful to opening God’s Word.  And fate would have it (or, as we know, God orchestrated), these two dudes’ paths collide; and there are many people who’s lives were positively effected by these small acts of faithfulness.

It is a great reminder to me - I never know what hangs in the balance of my faithfulness.  I don’t know what a positive word, an encouragement, a prayer, or any other small act of faithfulness could lead to...there is really no way for me to trace the impact of these moments.  Philip probably, and I am speculating here, didn’t even realize that this guy went off and started preaching and teaching the word like this.  Luke was investigating everything to compose this manuscript and could have put two and two together on this, and Philip may never have known the impact of his faithfulness.  This eunuch changed the lives of who knows how many people simply because he sat down and opened God’s word and a random dude walked up on him while he was studying.  We never know what hangs in the balance of our small acts of faithfulness...what a GREAT reminder this morning!

I am taking a quick break from Acts and doing a reading of Proverbs 11.  I take these breaks from time to time just to avoid burnout on a longer reading like Acts will be.  I also love reading Proverbs, so it gives me an opportunity to do that.

At any rate, in reading this Proverb this morning, what really stands out to me is Proverbs 11:27, which reads:

“Whoever diligently seeks good seeks favor, but evil comes to him who searches for it.”

This entire chapter is one of the favorites for me in Proverbs, and there are several recurring themes in this one including humility, controlling our tongue, and the futility of desiring/pursuing riches.  But for whatever reason, this verse stuck out to me this morning.

It seems to be saying, in a way, that we’ll find what we are looking for.  It also subtly suggests that seeking good requires a little bit of effort, and diligence, whereas evil tends to find us if we are simply open to finding it.  In my life, I find that to be true for sure - good requires discipline, self-control, and work.  Evil seems to come naturally, and easily.  Evil almost comes as a default.

About 10 years ago I heard of a principle called “hard/easy”.  This principle really is a fantastic principle, and it goes like this.  In life, we are constantly faced with decisions that have what seems to be the hard choice, and what feels like the easy choice.  Often times, the hard choice is known to be the better choice, but it is...hard.  And, it is hard despite the fact that we are fairly certain that it is the right choice.  So, this hard/easy principle says that when we make the hard choice now, things actually get easier in the future.  But, when we make the easy choice now, things get harder in the future.  In other words, we don’t have the choice to never deal with the hard part...it is either hard now or hard later.  For instance, forgiving someone who’s offended you is the hard choice right now.  It requires humility.  It requires patience.  It requires effort on our part.  Holding a grudge is much easier right now.  But, 10 years from now, when that relationship is missed, when we don’t have that friend, when we find ourselves alone, it will be hard.  We have a choice - do the hard thing right now and go to that person and offer forgiveness and experience the enjoyment of the relationship going forward (the easy part), or let ourselves off the hook now, hold the grudge, and suffer the hard consequences later.

Life is full of these situations - this principle is genius.  And, it is one of those things that simple having some language around it often makes it incredibly easy to spot this choice during your life...it certainly has for me.

So, this morning I am reminded by Solomon’s wisdom of this hard/easy principle...for today, I will choose to do the hard thing now to enjoy the easy thing later.  Great reminder!

So now we are introduced to Paul,  still named Saul at the moment, and we see that he was instrumental in the persecution of the Christians of the early church.  The way Luke records it, “entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committing them to prison” makes it sound personal, not just as a part of his role as a devout Jew.   We then see Philip emerge from Stephen’s legacy and begin his ministry by preaching to the Samaritans.  As a side note, the Samaritans  were mixed group of partly Jewish and partly Gentile ancestry that was disliked by both Jews and non-Jews in the region (this was a very fractious society and world at the time - lots of in-crowds).  They were Greek-speaking, and they believed in Israel’s God but they had their own expectations of a Messiah to come named “Teheb”.  I just find that interesting.  At any rate, we then see the first larger section for this chapter, which is where I wanted to camp out this morning - the story about Simon the Magician.

So Simon was this guy who was doing all sorts of magic, which we can’t really relate to but apparently was more common at this time (or perhaps there were people that were trained in the art of deception, not exactly sure on that).  But people apparently could clearly differentiate between Philip’s teaching and miracles vs. Simon’s.  There was something clearly divine about Philip’s teaching - so much so that Simon himself was baptized.  I think that, in a subtle way, this illustrates a difference between having power or magic that is for your own gain and having power that is leveraged for God’s gain.  We can see this different illustrated when Peter and John actually come down to visit Philip as the chapter continues because we get a peak into what Simon was apparently really after in being baptized...he wanted to get in on the power.  Simon, in some way, could see the power of the Holy Spirit falling upon these people who’d been baptized  and he offered to PAY the disciples for some of this power.   I love this interchange because it gets to the heart of an issue that I think we all struggle with in one way or another - we want to leverage God for our own benefit.

Sometimes this is really overt - like in Simon’s case.  Sometimes it is much more subtle - for instance, the person who behaves according to God’s will and expects God to give  them extra protection, or the person who tithes because they believe that they will receive more blessing from God, or really just the ‘fairness’ doctrine in general - these all fall along the same lines.  If we pursue God for anything other than the relationship itself, we are committing the same sin as Simon.

Today, I am reminded that relationship is the reason - it is the reason for engaging God.  The relationship will reward me, sure, but if I want to get the most out of my relationship, it should be viewed similarly to how a healthy relationship works with anyone else on this earth - time together, enjoying each other, understanding each other, and pursuing each other > the journey will reveal things about me, it will shape me, and it will grow me.  That’s the reward in-and-of-itself.  What a great reminder from Simon today!