ABOUT THIS SERIES

Acts: The Origin of Who We Are

Jun 2017 – February 2018

We’re breaking out the fine china – we’re diving into this monumental book of the Bible, the book of Acts. The gospels of Jesus come to a close with a question. The gospels: the biographies of Jesus in the New Testament, come to an end, with a question:

Now what?

We read about the life of Jesus.

We listen to the teachings of Jesus.

We come face to face with his death, and, his resurrection.

And there is a conclusion that we draw about the person of Jesus. He is God, revealed to humanity, he is showing us God, and he is opening new ways of relating to and understand God. But we’re still, on a very practical level, left with this question: Now What? In other words: How do you hash this stuff out? How does Jesus’ teaching, his death, his resurrection, and the realization of who he is impact our lives?I think that’s a question many of us find ourselves asking. We don’t have time for “empty religion.” And this meaningful life in God that Jesus seems to be promising is something we are compelled by.

So, now what? Where do we go from here? What’s next for us as individuals? And, what is next for us, as a church? The book of Acts answers that question. It closes the gap between what Jesus did and taught, and how his earliest disciples began to live that out in the places where they lived.

Acts is this beautiful and wonderful account of the first church – it’s birth, it’s struggle, and it’s expansion. And it doesn’t just inspire, it also instructs. It shows us something beautiful and wonderful, but then it calls us into that something as participants.

The heart behind this series, our greatest desire, is that what we learn would make a deep connection to the reality we are living in. That it would be translated into our language and time. And, that we would participate in the very things of God that we see the earliest Christians participating in.