Be Of Good Cheer!
Scripture Text: Acts 23
Application Questions
Where are you feeling IT right now?
Read the quote by Willie James Jennings. As we look to Christ, how is witness a natural outflow of suffering?
How can intimacy with God change your experience of whatever IT is?
Quotes for Reflection
Andrew Peterson, The God of the Garden
Trees need to be still in order to grow. We need to be still in order to see that God's work in us and around us is often slow and quiet, patient and steady.
William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England
When I pray, coincidences happen; when I stop praying, the coincidences stop happening.
N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone
We cannot stress too strongly, or too often, that the ‘theology’ which Paul worked out in his various letters was not the product of someone sitting at a desk and working out a jigsaw of abstract concepts – though his concepts and doctrines do fit together remarkably well. They were the result of someone struggling with the huge questions of what God is doing right now in the midst of a turbulent world where many different answers to that question were on offer. Paul clung to the sheet-anchor: the God he had worshipped from boyhood, the God whose glory he had seen in the face of Jesus Christ, was faithful to his promises, and would go on being faithful to those who kept faith with him, even if he often seemed to have surprising ways of showing it.
Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary
“Keep up your courage! For just as you have testified for me in Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also in Rome”(v. 11). This is an extraordinary moment through which Luke narrates the intimacy of life with God for Paul. Jesus encourages Paul. This is what Jesus does. He encourages us in the midst of struggle and especially at what seems like the beginning of an intensification of suffering. The words of Jesus point to Paul’s destiny, to bear witness. His life is in Paul’s life, and Paul’s life is in his life. God takes bodies and places with absolute seriousness. Paul’s body in Jerusalem and then in Rome—this is the divine desire for us to be where witness must be given and for God to be with us in the giving of that witness in difficult places. This intimacy will be the engine that drives everything Paul will say and do now.