In an uncertain world that is frequently perplexed — at best — about the Bible and those who follow Jesus, we have hope: the early church faced the same things. Join us as the FaithTree Men’s Bible Study begins a new adventure through the Book of Acts, looking at how God enabled His Gospel to spread across the world using His people… and how He continues to use us today.
In an uncertain world that is frequently perplexed — at best — about the Bible and those who follow Jesus, we have hope: the early church faced the same things. Join us as the FaithTree Men’s Bible Study begins a new adventure through the Book of Acts, looking at how God enabled His Gospel to spread across the world using His people… and how He continues to use us today.
This week, we turn to Acts for hope as we are each called to carry on God’s Mission.
Where do we go from Easter? Acts 1 gives us an idea as we see how Jesus prepares and gives purpose to His disciples.
We easily draw safe boundaries around God’s grace, welcoming those who seem familiar while overlooking those who feel foreign or difficult. Yet the distant wise men of Matthew 2 and the rejoicing Gentiles of Acts 13 confront those boundaries: Jesus came to reach the world. Who might God be placing beyond our comfort, yet within the reach of his good news?
Our past can feel like the wrong ingredients for a quality life recipe. But the case of the Apostle Paul shows God thinks otherwise. He does not waste our past but uses it as He sends us out as agents of the same transformation we have received.
Most of our days do not feel like turning points in history; they feel like errands, obligations, and familiar routines, leaving us to wonder whether our lives matter in any story beyond our own. Those on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in Acts 2 might have wondered the same thing.
Selfishness is sneaky—it feels like commonsense in the moment. As the disciples sat right in front of Jesus, they struggled with the same self-centered question we all are challenged: “But what about me?”
When things go badly, it’s easy to assume God’s favor has lifted—and that assumption runs deep enough that entire churches have been built on promising the opposite. Yet in Acts 13, the disciples who have just heard the gospel find themselves filled with joy and the Holy Spirit at precisely the moment Paul and Barnabas are driven out of the district, which raises a question worth sitting with: what if hardship isn’t the absence of God’s blessing at all?
Being in the right group, studying the right things, living a decent life—it feels like that ought to be enough. But in Acts 13, Paul announces to a synagogue full of people who had done exactly that: there are things the Law of Moses simply could not free you from, and being part of the in-group won’t close that gap.