Straight to the Heart of Acts

60 bite-sized insights

Phil Moore

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781854249890
• eBook ISBN: 9780857211781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

In 30AD, Jesus of Nazareth looked to have been an utter failure. If you don't understand that, then you will miss the message of the book of Acts. It is a record of survival through adversity, triumph against all odds, and victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. It is the story of a group of ordinary people who turned the tide of history through the power of their extraordinary God.

God inspired the Bible for a reason. He wants you to read it and let it change your life. If you are willing to take this challenge seriously, then you will love Phil Moore's devotional commentaries.

Their bite-sized chapters are punchy and relevant, yet crammed with fascinating scholarship too. Welcome to a new way of reading the Bible with fresh eyes. Welcome to the Straight to the Heart series.

Conclusion: Ordinary People, Extraordinary God

As Peter entered the house, Cornelius met him and fell at his feet in reverence. But Peter made him get up. “Stand up,” he said, “I am only a man myself.”

(Acts 10:25–26)

Rick Hoyt of Massachusetts, USA, has competed in over 1,000 races, including around 250 triathlons and seventy-five marathons. That’s pretty impressive by anyone’s standard, but for Rick Hoyt it is astonishing. Rick has cerebral palsy and has been quadriplegic from birth. When the starting pistol fires to begin a triathlon, Rick’s father does the swimming and pulls his son two and a half miles in a tailor-made dinghy. Next, he cycles over a hundred miles while Rick sits in a seat on the front of his bike. Finally, he transfers Rick to a wheelchair and runs twenty-six miles to complete the triathlon. On his own, Rick is unable to walk even a single step, but with the help of his father he competes alongside Ironmen. In his own words to his father in a television interview: “Dad, when we’re running it feels like my disability disappears.”¹

The book of Acts is written like a Greek or Roman history book, but don’t let that fool you. Its content is far more like the story of Rick Hoyt than one of the heroic adventure stories which the Greeks and Romans loved reading. They loved fiction like Homer’s Odyssey (about the Greek hero Odysseus) and Virgil’s Aeneid (about the Roman hero Aeneas). They loved history books like Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (about the heroic King Cyrus of Persia). They loved anything about strongmen and despised stories about ordinary people who needed a helping hand. They loved stories about people who deserved their hero worship, which is exactly the kind of story which Luke refuses to give them. The book of Acts is not a hero story. It’s a story about ordinary people and their extraordinary God.

Many people finish the book of Acts with the mistaken impression that the early Christians were superhuman and deserve our reverent praise. Luke was one of them and he disagrees. In the first half of the book, it is Peter who is dominant, and who turns to the reader in 10:26 to insist that “I am only a man”, who should be copied as an example instead of worshipped as a saint. In the second half of the book, it is Paul who takes his place, and who also turns to the reader in 14:15 and asks with frustration: “Men, why are you doing this? We too are only men, human like you.” Luke quotes these words from Peter and Paul because he doesn’t want your admiration, but your action. He wants you to see what was achieved by a ragtag bunch of nobodies and to step up to the plate yourself to continue his ordinary story.

Other people make the opposite mistake and finish the book of Acts in a state of excited optimism. They resolve to imitate the passion and strategy of the Early Church, hoping to see similar fruit themselves, but Luke warns us not to join them on their path of disappointment. In the first half of Acts, he refers to God about a hundred times, to the Lord about seventy times, to Jesus over forty times, to Christ over fifteen times, and to the Holy Spirit over forty times. That’s well over 250 times between them, and twice as often as Peter, John, and Paul put together. Luke sets this balance carefully because he wants to stir us to action, not to activism. The book of Acts is not a spiritual pep-talk which urges Christians to fulfil their hidden potential. It is a book which pulls no punches to inform us that without God we have absolutely no potential at all. Our optimistic activism is no more able to make us fruitful than Rick Hoyt’s optimism is able to win him races. It’s not that ordinary Christians have terrific potential, but that they have an extraordinary God to carry them.

Perhaps the biggest mistake that people make when they finish the book of Acts is to assume that it is a story of the past and not of the present. That’s why Luke ends his book, frankly, in a very strange manner. It’s so abrupt and incomplete that one enterprising conman even tried to convince the world in 1871 that he had discovered the manuscript to the “missing final chapter” of Acts.² Luke doesn’t end the book of Acts in the polished style of a Greek historian, or with any of the commentary we might expect if it were written to chart the spread of the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome. He ends his book in mid-air because he wants to show us that it hasn’t finished. Theophilus must continue it by releasing Paul from prison, and every other reader after him must finish by how they live the rest of their lives. It has been said that “When Cicero spoke, people marvelled; when Caesar spoke, people marched.” Luke ends the book of Acts in such an abrupt and sudden manner because he didn’t write it to make his readers marvel. He wrote it unequivocally to make them march.

We live in a world where the call to be Jesus’ witnesses to the ends of the earth is still as urgent as ever. Over 4,000 of the world’s 10,000 major people groups are without any local church of their own. That’s 2.75 billion people for whom Jesus died, who have no hope-filled community in their midst to convince them that his Gospel is true. As for the 4 billion people in the other 6,000 people groups, many of them are in countries like my own, where over five times as many people watched the final of Britain’s Got Talent on television than went to church that same weekend.³ The challenge of the Great Commission is as over-sized for us as it ever was for the 120. It’s as impossible for us as it is for Rick Hoyt to run a triathlon, but we have a Father who is far, far stronger.

That’s why Luke doesn’t want you to put down his book with a sense of defeatism that our task is unattainable, nor with a sense of optimism that our task is achievable. He wants you to put down his book with a sense o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• About the Straight to the Heart Series
• Introduction: Ordinary People, Extraordinary God
• THE GOSPEL TO JERUSALEM (30–33 AD)
• THE GOSPEL TO JUDEA AND SAMARIA (33–37 AD)
• THE GOSPEL TO THE GENTILES (37–47 AD)
• THE GOSPEL TO ASIA MINOR (48–49 AD)
• THE GOSPEL TO EUROPE (50–57 AD)
• THE GOSPEL TO ROME (57–62 AD)
• Conclusion: Ordinary People, Extraordinary God