Obviously, I get sidetracked easily! After dentist and some quick shopping, I ended up going outside and moving manure from barn to garden and forgot about the Blog post I was supposed to do! Sorry!! It was such a beautiful day and I needed to move poop!
The Book of Acts is a great book that I really enjoy. The full title of the book is The Acts of the Apostles, but it should be the Acts of the Holy Spirit! This book is full of ways the Holy Spirit impacts people. It is the beginning stories of the work of the apostles in spreading Christ's message. It reads somewhat like a novel with some quite humorous stories! There are many familiar stories in it...including the story of the first Pentecost.
The book follows the Gospel of Luke and is written by the same person; that person is traditionally identified as Luke the Physician (remember the end of our Colossians readings). We don't know much of Luke and most theologians he was an independent leader but probably did not work with Paul. We think the book was written soon after the Gospel of Luke , putting it around early 80s. Of course, there are some dating controversies-- the history presented doesn't match with the events of the time period. Some Bible scholars think a date of 60s would be more accurate- but then pushes everything else from Luke and Mark (Luke used Mark as a source of his Gospel) into a different time period. Not that this couldn't be true, its just hard to imagine.
Regardless, we assume Luke wrote the book for a few different reasons:
- offer a mechanism to unify the early Christian church
- demonstrate the political innocence of Christians to prevent persecution
- convert pagans to Christianity
- explain how Christianity became a largely Gentile religion
- tell the story of the early church to inspire others
Pastor Paul
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