Two Ways of Living
Scripture Text: Acts 19
Application Questions
Wendell Berry wrote, “The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.” What is life teaching you right now?
Survey the two ways of living in Acts 19. What does it reveal about life with God compared to life with other gods?
How can the word of the Lord give you a new imagination for an alternative way of life?
Quotes for Reflection
Wendell Berry, “Healing,” What Are People For
“The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.”
Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods
“An idol is anything more important to you than God. Anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God. Anything you seek to give you what only God can give. Anything that is so central and essential to your life, that should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.”
N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone
“Ephesus was, as we said, a centre of power: magic power, political power, religious power. And Paul’s ministry demonstrated that the power of the name of the Lord Jesus was stronger than all of them.”
Eugene McCarraher, “Enchanted Capitalism,” Plough Journal 05.30.23
“Fixating on material progress evidences a failure of moral imagination. The way we evaluate the economy is asking,“How much stuff did we produce last year?” We don’t ask whether any of the stuff that we produced actually contributed to human flourishing. We don’t distinguish things like fruit and vegetables from cigarettes and nuclear weapons. It’s all economic growth. There’s no kind of moral evaluation involved...I think we know, as a society, that all of this is bad, and yet we don’t seem to be able to act any differently. I think a major reason for that is that we don’t know what we want. Even though capitalism isn’t ideologically invulnerable to the same degree that it was, we don’t have any conception of what an alternative way of life would be. So we default to the status quo.”