The book of Acts is "part two" of Luke's great story. He begins his Gospel with the birth of Jesus and finishes Acts with Paul under house arrest in Rome. This covers a time span of roughly sixty years. We pick up the story as Jesus is preparing to leave the disciples, not this time for the brutality of crucifixion but for the glory of heaven. Although Peter and the others did stand gazing upwards for a little while they were, perhaps surprisingly, by no means distraught. They had been given the assurance that Jesus would always be with them (Mat 28 v 20) and there were important things to be done! The story of how the Christian faith reached the four corners of the earth begins here. There was just a short wait before the Holy Spirit arrived with a rushing wind and lit a flame that has never been put out. The 120 people who were in that fairly anonymous house somewhere in Jerusalem when the Spirit came found their lives transformed. They couldn't help but speak about what had happened to them! The church of Jesus Christ was well and truly born.
The first steps of this infant church have much to teach us twenty centuries on. Let's allow ourselves to be challenged by a church that was brand new, tiny in size, had no buildings to call its own, suffered fierce persecution and yet spread like wildfire through the Roman world. It was a church that was:
This is the beginning of the story; a story that is still going on and of which we are a part. There are, worldwide, still many thousands of people turning to Christ every day - how exciting is that!