📖 Acts Intensive — Unit 1: From Jerusalem to the Uttermost Parts (Acts 1–2)

I. Volume Two of a Two-Volume Story

Open your Bible to Acts 1:1 and read the first sentence carefully. "The former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, until the day in which He was taken up" (Acts 1:1–2, NKJV). Notice the verb. Luke does not say his Gospel was the account of all that Jesus did. He says it was the account of all Jesus began to do. The Gospel of Luke ends with the ascension, but the work has barely started. Acts is volume two — what the risen, ascended Lord Jesus continued to do and teach through His Spirit-empowered Church. The book has no formal ending, by the way, because the work still isn't finished. We are living in the long second volume.

Luke wrote both volumes. He was a physician, a Gentile, a careful historian, and a personal friend of the apostle Paul. The book was almost certainly written around AD 62 or 63, while Paul was still in his Roman house arrest. We know that because of what Luke does not mention — Nero's persecution that broke out in AD 64, Paul's death around AD 68, and the destruction of the temple in AD 70. None of those earth-shaking events appears in Acts. If they had happened, Luke would have written about them. So Acts covers about thirty years of history, from the ascension of Christ around AD 33 to Paul preaching in Rome around AD 62.

Think of the four Gospels as the vertical dimension of our faith — they show us the Trinity at work, the Father sending the Son, the Son obeying to the cross, the Spirit descending at the baptism. Acts is the horizontal dimension. It shows the gospel running outward from a temple-centered Jewish movement in Jerusalem to a world-wide community of every nation under heaven, indwelt not by a building but by the Holy Spirit Himself. The Church (in the Greek, the ekklesia, "the called-out assembly") is born here as the living body of the ascended Christ.

II. Forty Days and "Many Infallible Proofs"

After the resurrection Jesus did not call the disciples together and tell them to go preach immediately. He stayed forty days. Luke says He showed Himself alive "by many infallible proofs" (Acts 1:3, NKJV). The Greek word there is tekmeriois — incontrovertible evidence, the kind that holds up in a court of law. It is the only place in the entire New Testament where this word appears, and Luke the historian is the man who chose it.

You probably don't recognize the name Frank Morison. In the 1920s he was a British advertising man and writer who set out to do the world a favor. He was philosophically skeptical toward Christianity, and he believed the resurrection was the foundation stone of the whole faith. So he decided to write a book that would, once and for all, expose the resurrection as a tissue of fable. He resolved to weigh the evidence as strictly as a courtroom would. But while he was doing his research, a remarkable thing happened. The case was not as easy as he had supposed. As he examined the witnesses, the empty tomb, the changed disciples, and the early creeds, he became persuaded against his will of the bodily resurrection of Christ. The first chapter of his book is titled "The Book That Refused to Be Written." The book itself is called Who Moved the Stone? — and nearly a century later it is still in print, still being handed to skeptics, still doing what Morison never intended it to do. Acts is built on the same kind of evidence Morison eventually trusted: forty days of physical, edible, touchable, repeated, public appearances of the risen Lord.

At the end of those forty days Jesus gave one last command and one last promise. The command: "do not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the Promise of the Father" (Acts 1:4, NKJV). The promise: "you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:8, NKJV). That single verse is the table of contents of the whole book. Chapters 1–7 — Jerusalem. Chapters 8–12 — Judea and Samaria. Chapters 13–28 — the end of the earth. Memorize Acts 1:8 and you will never lose your place in this book.

III. The Hardest Word in the Christian Vocabulary: Wait

It is striking how the disciples respond. They had just received a worldwide commission, and what does Jesus tell them to do? Sit still in Jerusalem. The hardest single word in the Christian vocabulary is wait. We are an instant generation. We have instant coffee, instant messaging, and instant opinions. We expect God to operate at our speed and on our schedule. Isaiah 40:31 says, "those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength." But waiting is a discipline almost nobody enjoys.

Friends in our ministry once told me about their two-year-old son and his stuffed gorilla. The boy dragged Rilla everywhere. One day Rilla's seams gave out and the stuffing started leaking. The little boy waddled up to his mother and held out the gorilla and said, "Mommy, Rilla's broked. Fizzit." She said, "Honey, I'd be glad to fix him — give him to me." But when she reached for the toy, she found a two-year-old firmly attached to it. She tugged, he tugged, the tears started, and finally she said in exasperation, "I can't fix it until you let go of it!" And right at that moment, she said, the Holy Spirit tapped her on the shoulder and reminded her of about a half-dozen things in her own life that she had been holding onto with both fists while asking God to fix them.

That is exactly where the disciples were on Day Forty. Jesus had given them the world. They had things to do. But Jesus said, "Wait. Don't run ahead of Me. Until the Holy Spirit comes, all you will do in your own strength is run with no power and disastrous results." So one hundred and twenty of them, including the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and His brothers, went up into the upper room and prayed for ten days. They did not know how long they would have to wait. They did not know what was coming. They simply obeyed.

One small footnote here, and I will admit it is a contrarian view, but the great J. Vernon McGee held it and so do I. In the middle of those ten days, Peter stood up and proposed that they replace Judas by lot, and the lot fell on Matthias (Acts 1:15–26). Matthias is never mentioned again in the Bible. Not once. God had already chosen Saul of Tarsus to be the twelfth apostle, and the Holy Spirit had not yet been poured out to make that clear. I think Peter ran a hundred yards ahead of the gun. Even good men, even apostles, can act before the Spirit has spoken. Sometimes the most spiritual thing we can do is sit on our hands and pray.

IV. The Birthday of the Church

On the fiftieth day after Passover the Jewish nation kept the Feast of Pentecost — also called the Feast of Weeks, or the Feast of Firstfruits. On that day each year the worshipers brought to the temple the first sheaf of the wheat harvest. It was a thanksgiving offering for the new crop and an act of faith that the rest of the harvest would follow. On that very day, in AD 33, God brought in His own firstfruits — three thousand new believers gathered out of every nation under heaven, the down payment on a harvest that has not stopped since.

Luke describes the moment in three images. First, sound: "there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting" (Acts 2:2, NKJV). The Greek word for wind, pneuma, is the same word for spirit; in Hebrew, ruach, the same. From Genesis 1, where the Spirit of God hovers over the waters, to Ezekiel 37, where the breath enters the dry bones, the wind has always been the signature of the Spirit. Second, sight: "there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them" (Acts 2:3, NKJV). Fire is the Old Testament signature of God's presence — the burning bush, the pillar of fire, the altar at Carmel. Now the fire rests not on a building or a mountain but on individual men and women. The temple is being relocated. Third, speech: they began to speak the wonders of God in languages they had never learned, and Jewish pilgrims from sixteen named countries each heard the gospel in his own native dialect. This was Babel reversed. At Babel God had scattered the languages to confuse a proud humanity; at Pentecost He gathered them again to unite a humble one.

Some in the crowd jeered: "They are full of new wine" (Acts 2:13, NKJV). It is a sad commentary on us that the natural human reaction to a move of God is to suspect drunkenness. Peter stood up with the eleven and preached the first Christian sermon. He pointed out it was nine in the morning, far too early for that explanation, and he showed instead from the prophet Joel that what they were seeing was the long-promised pouring out of the Spirit on all flesh. Then he turned to Jesus — accredited by miracles, crucified by a deliberate plan of God, raised from the dead in fulfillment of David's words in Psalm 16, and now exalted at the right hand of God. He landed the sermon with a hammer: "Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ" (Acts 2:36, NKJV).

The crowd was cut to the heart. "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" Peter's reply is the gospel in two clauses: "Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38, NKJV). About three thousand believed and were added that day. The Church that had walked into the upper room one hundred and twenty strong walked out of Pentecost over three thousand strong.

V. The Marks of a Spirit-Filled Community

Luke gives us the most beautiful description of the early church in Acts 2:42–47. "And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers" (Acts 2:42, NKJV). Four things — the Word, the family, the table, and the throne room. Drop any one of those four and you do not have the New Testament Church anymore; you have something else. They held things in common, sold property when needed, and met daily — daily — in the temple courts and from house to house, eating their meals "with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved" (Acts 2:46–47, NKJV). The Lord did the adding. The Church did the gathering, the praying, the breaking of bread, the praising. He did the saving.

That same Spirit is still at work today. In 1949 on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, two elderly sisters lived in a stone cottage in the village of Barvas. Peggy Smith was eighty-four years old and blind. Her sister Christine was eighty-two years old and crippled with arthritis. They could not get out to attend the services anymore, but they were burdened to the point of breaking over the spiritual coldness of their island. So they began to pray. They knelt in their cottage at ten o'clock at night and they did not stop until three or four in the morning, twice a week, for months. They pleaded with God for a revival. One night God gave them the promise that revival was coming and that He would send a man named Duncan Campbell. They sent for him. When Campbell arrived, the Spirit fell. Churches that had been almost empty filled to overflowing in a single night. People who had never set foot in a church door fell under conviction in the fields and in their homes. Bars emptied. Crime virtually disappeared. Whole villages were transformed. Duncan Campbell said that the entire awakening was born in the persistent prayer of two elderly women in a Scottish cottage.

And in 1907, in Pyongyang, Korea, missionaries felt revival might be coming. They scheduled the worst weeks of winter as a Bible school. The leader of a men's group decided to open the meeting with a brief prayer time. He said, "Don't take too long." The first man prayed; six stood up to pray next. The second prayed; a dozen more stood. By the time the fifth had finished, every one of the fifteen hundred men in the room rose to his feet at the same time and began to pray aloud, simultaneously, so absorbed in God that they did not notice each other. An English missionary present that night wrote home that he heard "a sound like a rushing wind." Almost eighty thousand Koreans came to Christ in that one revival. Today South Korea is one of the great missionary-sending nations on earth, and it traces its spiritual lineage straight back to Pentecost — wind, fire, and three thousand souls.

VI. The Promise Is to You

Peter ended his Pentecost sermon with this line: "For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call" (Acts 2:39, NKJV). Read those last seven words again. As many as the Lord our God will call. The promise of the Spirit was not just for the people standing in front of Peter. It was not just for the apostolic age. It was for "all who are afar off" — that is, every Gentile in every century in every country. That includes you. The same Holy Spirit who fell on the upper room is available to fill any Christian who will wait, who will pray, and who will obey. Acts 1:8 is not just history. It is your job description.

Where is your Jerusalem? Your Judea and Samaria? Your end of the earth? Begin praying about those three concentric circles. The Holy Spirit who built His Church on three thousand new believers in one morning has lost none of His power. The wind still blows. The fire still falls. The promise is still good. Wait, pray, obey — and watch what He will do.

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