#1 The Birth of the Church: The Acts of the Holy Spirit

At Easter we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, the week preceding that we typically focus on the events leading up to the cross. That was the culmination of the perfect life of Jesus which was sacrificed for all of us. Now in this series we will focus on the other side of the story.  If you can imagine, just for a moment, it is AD 31, 32, maybe and we are believers, maybe we are one of the 11 disciples that remain, perhaps we are one of the several hundred believers, or maybe we are one of the several thousand people that actually saw Jesus when he was living and he performed a miracle in front of our face and we believed he was something special, maybe we didn't know quite what it was but we experienced it.  We are in Galilee and we hear that he’s dead.  There is no instant communication, so maybe it's been a week or two. Maybe it's a rumor, we just aren’t quite sure, we are devastated and we don't know what to think.

The disciples were in disarray, we know they were at least until resurrection day.  The several hundred believers were probably despondent at the news. It seemed like to us, to the believers, that the vail that had fallen as Christ was dying was still there. The sun was up but the vale was still there. We didn't know what we were going to do.

Suddenly the Church emerges.  In this series, we are going to study how this happened. Our reference will be the first chapter in Acts which many of us are familiar with. However, as Pastor Harris always does, he will give us the details and insights that will make it come alive.

We know that Acts was written by Luke.  Luke, as Pastor Harris will point out, Luke wrote more of the New Testament than any other person.  We think of Paul as the primary author of the New Testament but Luke was very instrumental in the writing of our gospel. Luke was not one of our 12 disciples, sometimes you will ask people, “who are the 12 disciples?” and they will throw Luke in there, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and you know… but nope, he was not a disciple.  

Luke was from the area above what is now known as Greece called Macedonia. He encountered Paul on one of his missionary journeys and became a believer through Paul and apparently Luke and Paul became very close.  From there Luke will take on the role of early church historian. By profession Luke was a physician, he was a learned man far more educated than most of the disciples.  Maybe not as educated as Paul, but close. So here you have these two deep thinkers together and they begin to share with us the history of the church.  We invite you to follow along as Pastor Harris tells us the details of the birth of our faith in this series titled, “The Birth of the Church”.  So let’s kick it off  with the first teaching in this series titled, “The Acts of the Holy Spirit”.