Table of Contents
Acts
Luke’s Gospel ends with the ascension. Acts — written by the same physician-historian, addressed to the same “most excellent Theophilus” (Luke 1:3; Acts 1:1) — picks up at exactly that moment and tells what happened next: a handful of frightened disciples in an upper room become, within thirty years, a movement that has reached Rome itself. Acts is the only history book in the New Testament, and its subject is the birth and spread of the Christian church — Pentecost and the outpoured Spirit, Peter’s early ministry to the Jews, Stephen’s martyrdom, the conversion of Saul on the Damascus road, and then, for its second half, Paul’s own missionary journeys across the Roman world, his arrest, and his voyage to Rome to stand trial before Caesar.
This series reads Acts chapter by chapter, immediately following this site’s own chapter-by-chapter studies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — the first book past the four Gospels. Ellen White’s own dedicated commentary, The Acts of the Apostles, is this series’ primary source throughout, tracing the same story she titled after this very book: the acts of ordinary men and women, filled with the same Spirit poured out at Pentecost, still recorded today wherever that same Spirit is still at work.
List Of Articles
Ye Shall Receive Power
jesus spends forty days appearing and disappearing among his own disciples before he finally ascends off a hillside in front of them, promising a power they don't have yet; back in jerusalem, a hundred and twenty believers pray together for ten straight days waiting for it, and in the one bit of business they take care of first, they replace a traitor by casting lots rather than campaigning for the job
Acts 1This Jesus Hath God Raised Up
a sound like a rushing wind fills an upper room, tongues of fire rest on a hundred and twenty ordinary people, and they start speaking languages they never learned, understood at once by a crowd gathered from fifteen different nations; peter — who three months earlier denied even knowing jesus — stands up and preaches one sermon, and three thousand people are baptized before the day is out
Acts 2The Prince Of Life
a man who has never once walked in his life begs every day at the same temple gate; peter and john stop, tell him they have no money to give, and heal him in jesus's name instead — he goes leaping into the temple, and the crowd he draws gives peter his second sermon, naming jesus with a title found nowhere else in scripture
Acts 3We Cannot But Speak
peter and john spend the night in prison and wake up facing the same council that condemned jesus, asked by what name they healed a man; peter names jesus to their faces and gets away with it, and when the council orders them to stop preaching altogether, their whole answer is one sentence — we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard
Acts 4We Ought To Obey God Rather Than Men
a husband and wife lie about how much they gave to the church and fall down dead, one after the other, three hours apart; the apostles are thrown in prison and an angel lets them out overnight, and when the council demands to know why they're still preaching, peter's whole defense is five words, followed by a beating they walk away from rejoicing
Acts 5The Face Of An Angel
a complaint about neglected widows becomes the young church's first internal crisis, solved by appointing seven men — all of them, it turns out, from the very group that felt overlooked; one of the seven, stephen, ends up debating trained rabbis and beating every argument they throw at him, until they resort to hired liars and a trumped-up charge instead
Acts 6Lord Jesus, Receive My Spirit
given one last chance to defend himself, stephen instead retells his whole nation's history — abraham, joseph, moses at a burning bush miles from any temple — building to one point: god was never confined to a building; the council drags him out and stones him while he watches heaven open, and the coats of his killers pile up at the feet of a young man named saul
Acts 7He Went On His Way Rejoicing
persecution scatters the jerusalem church, and a deacon named philip ends up working miracles in a city that once held a famous sorcerer spellbound — who tries to buy the holy spirit with cash and gets told his money can perish with him; an angel then pulls philip away from that whole booming ministry and onto an empty desert road, for the sake of one man in a chariot
Acts 8Saul, Saul, Why Persecutest Thou Me?
the church's most feared enemy is riding to damascus with signed papers to drag believers back in chains, when a light from heaven knocks him to the ground and a voice asks why he's persecuting a man he's never met; three days later he's blind, fasting, and being baptized by the very kind of believer he came to arrest
Acts 9God Is No Respecter Of Persons
a roman centurion praying in caesarea and a hungry apostle napping on a rooftop in joppa each get their own vision the same day, arranged by heaven to meet in the middle; peter has to watch the same strange sheet fall from the sky three times before he's ready to walk into a gentile's house at all, let alone tell him the gospel is for him too
Acts 10Called Christians First In Antioch
peter comes home to jerusalem to find himself on trial for eating with gentiles, and settles the whole argument by simply retelling what happened; meanwhile, up in a city famous for luxury and vice, an unnamed handful of believers start a church that grows so fast it earns its members a brand new name — one the whole world still uses
Acts 11Arise Up Quickly
herod kills james, arrests peter, and posts sixteen guards and two chains to make sure history doesn't repeat itself; an angel walks peter past all of it in total silence while the church prays without ceasing for him just a few streets away — and then, in the very same chapter, that same angel strikes the king down for accepting worship as a god
Acts 12We Turn To The Gentiles
barnabas and saul are formally sent out as the church's first missionaries, and by the end of this one chapter saul is being called paul for the first time, a sorcerer has been struck blind for trying to block a roman governor's conversion, and paul has preached his first great sermon — only to watch the same jewish leaders who rejected jesus reject him too
Acts 13We Are Men Of Like Passions With You
paul heals a lifelong cripple in a city with no synagogue, and the crowd decides he and barnabas are gods and tries to offer them a sacrifice; days later, in the same city, a different crowd stones paul and leaves him for dead — and he gets up, walks back into the city, and keeps going
Acts 14It Seemed Good To The Holy Ghost
a full-blown crisis over whether gentile believers must be circumcised and keep the law of moses gets settled not by one apostle's opinion but by a council in jerusalem — peter, barnabas, paul, and james all speak, a letter goes out, and the church breathes again; then, on the very next missionary trip, paul and barnabas split over john mark so sharply that the two men who just modeled how to disagree well cannot manage to do it with each other
Acts 15Come Over Into Macedonia And Help Us
a night vision at a port city redirects the gospel toward europe for the first time; timothy joins the team, a businesswoman named lydia becomes the first european convert at an outdoor prayer meeting, paul frees an exploited slave girl from a spirit of divination, and a midnight earthquake turns a roman prison into the site of a jailer's conversion
Acts 16Whether Those Things Were So
one chapter, three cities, three completely different receptions: a synagogue riot in thessalonica, a congregation of eager fact-checkers in berea who search the scriptures daily to test what paul actually tells them, and a court of philosophers on mars' hill in athens who have literally built an altar to whatever god they might be missing
Acts 17I Have Much People In This City
corinth nearly breaks paul's spirit — until christ appears to him in the night with a promise that keeps him there eighteen months, the longest single stay in the whole book; a roman governor named gallio throws out a trumped-up legal case against him, and a brilliant self-taught preacher named apollos gets quietly, privately corrected by a tentmaking couple rather than publicly contradicted
Acts 18Great Is Diana Of The Ephesians
paul's longest single ministry in the whole book — over three years at ephesus — includes a dozen half-informed disciples finally receiving the holy spirit, seven brothers learning the hard way that jesus's name is not a magic password, a fifty -thousand-piece bonfire of occult manuscripts, and a silversmith whose wounded profits nearly get an apostle killed in a packed amphitheater
Acts 19I Have Not Shunned To Declare Unto You All The Counsel Of God
a young man falls asleep in a window during an overlong midnight sermon, falls three stories, and is raised up alive again — and that isn't even the emotional center of this chapter; on a beach at miletus paul delivers the longest speech from his own mouth recorded anywhere in this book, to elders who will never see his face again
Acts 20The Will Of The Lord Be Done
every warning in this chapter points the same direction, and paul walks toward jerusalem anyway — a prophet binds his own hands and feet with paul's belt to act out what's coming, friends in two cities beg him not to go, and a well-meaning compromise inside the temple itself is what finally triggers the riot that gets him arrested
Acts 21I Will Send Thee Far Hence Unto The Gentiles
standing bruised and chained on the castle stairs, paul doesn't argue with the mob that just tried to kill him — he simply tells them his own story in hebrew, and the crowd falls silent to listen, right up until the one word that sets them screaming again
Acts 22Be Of Good Cheer, Paul
a single sentence about the resurrection turns paul's own trial into a brawl between his judges; that same night christ himself tells him exactly where all of this is heading — not death in jerusalem, but testimony in rome — and forty men who've sworn to starve themselves until paul is dead get quietly undone by his own unnamed nephew
Acts 23Felix Trembled
a hired orator opens with flattery so obvious even the judge sees through it, and paul answers with nothing but plain, checkable facts; weeks later, in a private audience, paul reasons about righteousness and self-control and a coming day of judgment until the most powerful man in the room is shaking — and sends him away anyway
Acts 24I Appeal Unto Caesar
a new governor inherits an old prisoner and an old murder plot in a different disguise; paul, weary of endless delay, finally plays the one card that changes everything — his roman citizenship, and three words that override every local court left that could still reach him
Acts 25Almost Thou Persuadest Me To Be A Christian
for the third time in this book paul tells the story of the damascus road, and this version — before the one audience in the whole trial actually qualified to judge it — is the fullest of all three; a roman governor shouts that he's lost his mind, and a jewish king comes closer to conversion, for one unguarded moment, than anyone else in the entire book of acts
Acts 26Be Of Good Cheer, For I Believe God
two hundred and seventy-six souls, a doomed ship, and two weeks adrift under a sky with no sun or stars to steer by — luke's own most detailed single narrative in the whole book, and in the middle of it a prisoner in chains turns out to be the only person on board anyone can still trust
Acts 27No Man Forbidding Him
the book of acts doesn't end with a martyrdom or a tidy resolution — a viper on malta, healings, the long walk up the appian way to a joyful welcome, and then a chained man in a rented roman house, teaching anyone who comes, with nobody stopping him, and the record just stops there
Acts 28