Fan the Flame - a Journey Through ActsSample

Day 44 - The Gospel is for Everyone!

If repetition creates emphasis, then Paul’s dramatic encounter with the ascended Lord Jesus Christ on the Damascus Road is one of the most emphatic episodes in Acts. Not once, not twice, but three times this perspective-shattering experience is recounted for us (9:1-19; 22:6-21; 26:9-21).

Why the repetition, and hence the emphasis? There’s a clue here in today’s reading. Paul has arrived back in Jerusalem after his third missionary journey. Despite significant unrest in the city owing to false rumours about him, in 21:40 the crowd is silent, and they are quite happy to listen to Paul’s defence of himself. All goes smoothly until 22:21, “Then he said to me, ‘Go, for I will send you away to the Gentiles’” (check out the parallels in 9:15; 26:17-18). And then chaos erupts. The real offense for these prim and proper inhabitants of Jerusalem was that Paul’s good news about Jesus was for Gentiles too!

And perhaps that’s the overarching significance of Acts – the gospel is for everyone! There are hints of this already in Acts 1:8, “and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” And at the very end of Acts (28:31), Paul is living in Rome, the heart of the Gentile empire, “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.” The overarching message of Acts is that the gospel can’t be domesticated – it’s for everyone, perhaps especially for those who are not like us!

What keeps you in the huddle of those who are “like” you? What might it take for you to share the love of Jesus with those who are unlike you? You might need to pray a prayer like this today: Lord, I am much too addicted to my comfort zone. Help me to see the “others” around me who are in need of your love and saving grace, and to cross the barriers that hold me back.

Written by D Morcom