Overview of Acts

REFLECTION QUOTES

“If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.”

~C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) in The Abolition of Man

“Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.”

~Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), American journalist
and author of Gone with the Wind

“…[The seeker knows that] he cannot go to God, but that God must go to him in His inconceivable grace.”

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1909-1945), German pastor-theologian,
executed for his opposition to the Nazis

“Love that goes upward is worship; love that goes outward is affection; love that stoops is grace.”

~Donald Grey Barnhouse (1895-1960), late pastor of
Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia

“In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.”

~Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), English journalist

“Secularism doesn’t produce secularism; it produces pluralism. The challenge is not that God is dead, but that there are too many gods.”

~Peter Berger (1929-present), famed Austrian-born sociologist

“For [the book of] Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming…Any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken it for granted.”

~A.N. Sherwin-White in Roman Society and Roman Law
in the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 1963)

SERMON PASSAGE

Acts 1:1-9
1 The first account I composed, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach, 2 until the day when He was taken up to heaven, after He had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom He had chosen. 3 To these He also presented Himself alive after His suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God. 4 Gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, “Which,” He said, “you heard of from Me; 5 for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

6 So when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, “Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; 8 but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.”

9 And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.