Series Dates: 01/02/22 - 04/17/22
Luke’s first letter, the gospel in his name, traces the fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel through the person of Jesus. In Luke’s second letter, Acts of the Apostles, that which was fulfilled is now poured out. Jesus pours out His Spirit to His Church and their lives become an outpouring of His love and gospel to the world. Here Luke traces the empowerment of Jesus’ followers in carrying the gospel to the world in establishing outposts of His new Creation through new disciples and local church expressions.
The ordering of these two books is significant: we tend to work out of our own strength or intellect, but the picture in Acts is that of an ongoing, harmonious stream where outpouring results in an overflowing into more and more puddles of water. Ministry flows out of the abundance of God’s grace through the Holy Spirit.
God has a vision for the earth- that the knowledge of His glory would be poured out to every seen and unseen place. This reality is echoed through Scripture: In Acts we find Jesus fulfilling the covenant promise that was first made to Abraham (Gen. 12.1-3), reiterated through the Psalms and prophets of old and spoken of by Jesus himself (Matthew 28.18-20) culminating in the pouring out His Holy Spirit through His people (Acts 1).
Our first parents’ garden rebellion in Genesis 3 rendered us empty in our sin. Acts is God reclaiming a people for himself through the outpouring of his Spirit. This vision of outpouring was embodied by Jesus in his ministry through the gospels, accomplished through his atoning sacrifice on the cross and validated through the resurrection.
God pours out His Spirit into our lives that our lives might be an overflow of His love to the world. This is the narrative of Acts- the geographical progression of Christ’s spontaneous and expanding overflowing movement filling the earth through the earliest activity of his Church. The narrative follows the accounts of foreign dignitaries, kings, and peasants alike. It is both individual and collective, institutional and grassroots: the movement of Jesus reaches all kinds of people in all kinds of places- across tribe, tongue, and geography. From individuals receiving healing, to families discovering and identifying with Jesus for the first time, from business leaders being impacted to local communities of faith being established, it is an outpouring that spans both locally and globally, to the religious and the irreligious.
The movement began and is now overflowing- God’s glory is filling the earth, and the narrative is continuing with us. Broken things are being put back together. What was fractured is being healed. This happens in our individual lives as Jesus’ followers, but we also see signs and hints of this happening collectively through the community of Jesus (His Church) as she becomes an instrument to foster flourishing in the world. While we certainly don’t and won’t see this kind of flourishing everywhere here and now, we know this progressive expansion and extension of God’s grace is a foretaste, a sign of what one day we will experience when Jesus makes all things new. Luke’s second volume work is the breathtaking story of Jesus pouring out his Spirit through the most ordinary of people. It is a normal revival and establishes a basic standard for how Jesus’ followers are to live in a world that God is filling with His glory.
Each Sunday at our Gatherings we will be taught section by section, each week, in our personal time of abiding with the Lord we will be studying each verse of that section using The Daily. In our Communities and Discipleship Bands we will be studying and discussing Acts together. Our Community and Discipleship Band leaders are equipped with some simple resources to help us make sense of this incredible account.
We believe this will be a season of a deeper outpouring of the Holy Spirit as we are transformed in Christ, and he sends us into the estuary of our lives, to further the gospel of grace in our city + world
grace + peace,
The Downtown Hope Theology Team
