I have shared previously on how ACTS of the Apostles is one of my favorite books in scripture. There are a couple of reasons why I feel this way.
First, Luke has set out very deliberately to tell those who come after him, that in his first book, the Gospel of Luke, he dealt with all the things that Jesus said and did up to the time He was taken up, His life death and Resurrection. Second, Luke now takes up describing the early church and how it carried out the mission Jesus gave to His disciples to go out into the world to preach the good news. Without this book, we would not have a very good picture on how everything fits together. Paul’s missionary work can be seen in a totally different perspective rather than just reading his epistles by themselves. This fundamental understanding of the early church is a topic I spent many years studying after being ordained.
So, what we have is Luke laying out the ground work in his gospel, explaining Jesus and His ministry and then to use the words of Paul Harvey, Luke gives us the “rest of the story” in Acts of the Apostles, the life of the early church.
What ties these two pieces of scripture together is that he addressed both of these works to Theophilus. When translated from Greek, Theophilus means lover of God. This should make us ask ourselves is this is a real person or is it a literary figure that Luke uses to explain what he has written? For those who need an answer, then the answer is yes. For those who can hold on to mystery and see an overall bigger picture, then no answer is required. What really counts is how we take these revelations by God and apply them to our lives today.
As with all ascension or resurrection stories we can find a god figure, such as an angel, men dressed in all white, or even sitting on the stone that had been rolled away, that has to explain to the witnesses there that Jesus was no longer in the tomb and had gone ahead to Galilee where He would meet again with His apostles.
This introduction, this brief preface is how Luke sets up writing about the church and how it carried on the work and mission of Jesus.
The letter to the Ephesians may or may not have been written by Paul himself. One thing is very clear is that most of the things written here can be found in the letter to the Colossians’.
What is important is that we see this is a universal prayer written to the universal Church for the saints, both past and present, and that we be the recipients of wisdom through the Holy Spirit.
The passages we read in Matthews gospel this week are some of my favorite. Before I was even ordained, I was moved by the passages where Jesus tell His disciples that they are to go into the world to baptize in the name of the Father, and the of Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
While this alone is important, and we could write lots about Jesus up to this point, but what makes this an even more powerful statement is that Jesus tells them to go out into the world to teach them to observe all that Jesus has taught and commanded His disciples.
For me the significance is that all of us are called to be teachers and spreaders of the Good News, of the things that Jesus had commanded. This is our role as parents and grandparents, especially as we are the first teachers of a child’s faith.
When I baptize children, I always use this gospel to explain to the parents their roles and responsibilities as the teachers of their children. This Great Commission that Jesus gave to His disciples is our Great Commission as well.
As He told His disciples and it applies to us as well, I am with you until the end of the age should be all that we need to give us the confidence to step out into the world and to spread the good news of Jesus Christ.