We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

The first treasure door had been opened. The gospel message had gone to Samaritans, and it was confirmed that Christ included them in His treasury of souls, because they received the Spirit of Christ. There were more doors to open. At this point, I rely on my previous commentary of this passage.

At the height of his success, Philip was commissioned to a special task. An angel ordered him to take the roads southward, and follow specifically the route between Jerusalem and Gaza. Most of it ran through dry terrain. On that road he met up with a very powerful man in a chariot. He was the Royal Treasurer for a nation we now associate with Nubia, northern Sudan. As a eunuch, this man would not be permitted full conversion to Judaism, but was faithful. Heading home from a worship trip, the man was reading Isaiah aloud. The chariot would have been rather slow moving, with a large entourage on foot for such an official. Philip would have been able to hear what the man was reading, and could simply walk fast to keep pace. Led by the Spirit, Philip did so, and asked if the man understood what he read. They would have conversed in Greek, and Luke quotes the official reading from the Septuagint (Isaiah 53:7-8). The man seized the opportunity for teaching at his own convenience.

The passage was known even then among Jews as a puzzling text about the Messiah. Philip pointed out that it was fulfilled in Jesus. For a eunuch who had struggled to find a path to embrace the God of Israel to now hear that he was welcomed as a full member of Christ was clearly joy beyond words to him. Philip’s message would have been an obvious call to repent and embrace Jesus as the final offering for all sins. The eunuch signaled his readiness to be baptized, showing that he understood the meaning of the Jewish ritual of repentance [and cleansing in order to stand before the Lord]. Once the act was complete, the eunuch was free to serve Christ as he had never been under ritual laws, and Philip was snatched away to a city some 20 miles (32km) north, called Azotus. Preaching all the way, Philip simply continued up the coastal highway through Joppa, as far as Caesarea.

Thus Luke shows that the command of Christ was fulfilled by stages. Once the Jewish leaders had made their final rejection of the Messiah, it was time to carry the Word farther. First came the Samaritans. Jesus had already preached among them, but now it was no longer mere repentance, but the power and presence of God Himself in every man who repents. The final stage of carrying the Word out to the larger world of Gentiles required a two-pronged approach. It needed the one man best fitted for the task, which was none of the Twelve, yet the senior Apostle must be the first to cross the barrier and bring the Spirit among Gentiles.

A few weeks ago, a friend of my sister's Sheila, learned that her brother had been murdered.  This coming Saturday will be her family's celebration of her brother's life.

Then this past Monday, my sister and Sheila went to Sheila's doctor about a lump in her breast and she had a biopsy.  We just today heard it is cancerous.  Not that one can actually use fortunately in a sentence like this, but fortunately it is "DCIS - Ductal Carcinoma in Situ", which means it is early stage and is located in one of her breast milk ducts.  It is very easily and usually very successfully treated through a myriad of different options.

Sheila has a strong faith; has little income from her minimum wage jobs and will struggle to pay any co-pays or living expenses while she is being treated and recovering from the surgery she most likely will have to have.

Please lift her up to Our Lord.  May He comfort her with His grace and peace.  If it is in His will, may His healing hands move over her.  May her doctor(s) be blessed with compassion and exceptional wisdom. 

Lord, hear our prayers.
AMEN!

Yesterday, my friend Lyn was at his doctor's office and we were texting back and forth because I was cooking chili and corn bread and as is the usual case, told him to be sure to come by and get some for himself and son, Joe, on their way back home.

Later on, he said he was leaving the doctors and would pick up some chili and then head to the ER.  Good grief!  What?  His blood work has shown an extremely low hemoglobin level - 4.5.  Normal for men is between 14-17.  Most common cause is internal bleeding.

Anyway, yes he got the chili.  An hour or so later, Joe texted me that his dad sure had enjoyed the chili and that they had just arrived at the ER in Raleigh. 

I have not heard anything else, but please lift him up to our Father for healing, for patience, for good and compassionate doctors and that Lyn will feel His Spirit and His Peace.

Thank you, family

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Tomorrow I will start on print book #6 of Ed's stuff. It's quite the mishmash of things. I don't have a clear title, although I will admit I haven't thought much about it yet. Here's what will be included:

A Psychology of Non Comformist Faith
The Heart of Biblical Living
Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith
The Shepherd's Household
Heart of Faith
Radix Fidem: Faith Arising at the End of Western Civilization
Biblical Law: Divine Justice
Redemption and Sexual Identity
Expectations, Hopes and Dreams
The Practice of Christian Mysticism
The Laptop Oracles
A Christian Guide to the Sexual Marketplace
Biblical Morality
A Course in Biblical Mysticism

Let me know if any ideas come to mind.

Jesus said that Peter had the keys to His Kingdom, in the sense that it was Peter's mission to open up the treasury of souls to Jesus. Peter was slow to recognize that the treasury included Gentiles, as well. His Jewish prejudices died slowly, but his caution was not wrong. Peter's role was to recognize when the Lord laid claim to His new treasures.

Stephen hinted at something that he did not get to say to the Sanhedrin. The accusation against him was that he said the Covenant of Moses had been retired, and that the Presence of God was no longer bound to the Temple. He said this in so many words during his recitation of Hebrew history. He accused the ruling council of resisting the Holy Spirit of God, implying that it was time to move beyond the national boundaries, since the nation had rejected the Messiah and His gospel message of bringing into His Kingdom the Gentiles.

This is what made them so very angry. They were already going to execute him one way or another, but his final moment of vision compelled them to hurry things along. Paul was very pleased with this execution. This Pharisee had a gift from strategic thinking, seeing clearly the implications of where things were going. Furthermore, being from Cilicia, Paul was almost certainly a member of the Freedmen Synagogue, since there were a good number of Cilician Jews there. He had heard Stephen preaching that this message had to go out into all the world.

It was the inclusion of the Gentiles that always triggered a Jewish revulsion. The idea that Jesus was the Messiah was a matter of debate; His power and resurrection was too well established in the Sanhedrin already. The need to reform laws and the way the Sanhedrin had ruled was something they could have agreed to discuss. Keep in mind that it was half Sadducee and half Pharisee, and the former did not endorse the oral traditions of the latter. But the very notion of including the Gentiles in anything that they regarded as an internal Jewish matter was wholly unthinkable. It was a bitter spite that went beyond mere racism; Gentiles weren't actually human in their minds. Stephen's emphasis on taking the gospel to those who spoke Greek was already too close to this.

So, while Paul did not participate in the hasty execution of Stephen, he got his turn later, driving out the members of the church most easily identified -- the ones who spoke Greek. Getting rid of them would reduce the threat that they might start agitating for opening up the Temple grounds to Gentiles and pull down the existing ruling regime. The local Hebrew Apostles were left alone, because their kind could blend in more easily. But when the dragnet was unleashed in the city, there could be no legal dispute about whose jurisdiction these Hebrew-speaking believers were under. The Greek-speaking Christian Jews might have offer legal challenges on that score. Paul knew this all too well with his own Roman citizenship.

Stephen was buried and duly mourned, and then the church scattered across the region. And wherever they went, they preached the gospel of Jesus. Among the remaining six Greek-speaking elders, Philip was no slacker. He fled into the Samaritan territory and began preaching. The effects were off the charts, as it seemed most of the residents embraced his message. The miracles Philip performed gave the message a real punch. The whole city was celebrating.

In times past, Samaria had been plagued by a magician named Simon. The context indicates this man was a fraud, using trickery that looked like magic among people who lacked any significant science education. Simon himself probably didn't really understand some of his tricks, and might have believed they were real magic. In those days there was a very busy market in such secrets, and this man had obviously invested quite a bit in his lore of tricks. He made it all back by taking fees for his "work" that made him a local celebrity, treated like nobility.

This Simon was touched by Philip's message and embraced Jesus as the Messiah. If anyone recognized that the miracles were real, it was Simon the Magician. But it was the duty of Simon Peter to ensure that His Lord was actually present in these people. He would have remembered that time Jesus had ministered among the Samaritans starting with that encounter at Jacob's Well. Keep in mind that the Samaritans had the Torah with a tiny few edits, and actually possessed a genuine piety most Jews couldn't surpass. Jesus spoke well of them.

So when Peter with John's help came to investigate, they began laying hands on the new Samaritan Christians to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Did they really belong to Jesus? This is what Jesus meant about Peter holding the keys; he assisted the risen Messiah in claiming His treasures. If they could receive the Holy Spirit, there was no sense denying that they were part of the Kingdom of the Heaven. It was not that the physical contact was necessary, but that the Lord needed His Apostles to directly experience the progression He had prophesied, that the gospel would go to the Jews first, then the Samaritans and then Gentiles in general.

Simon the Magician mistook this as something that fell into the business with which he had long experience. Would the Apostles sell him the secret to this wonderful magic, so he could keep his business model alive and actually do some good? Peter's rebuke was wholly justified, and actually fairly gentle, all things considered. The former magician had a long way to go to understand his place in this Messianic Kingdom, and such a warning was necessary to jar him awake. Peter warned him against the temptation to be bitter about the loss of his former profession.

Once it was clear that Philip had done the right thing in preaching to the Samaritans, he with Peter and John worked the entire circuit of towns and villages in Samaria. Then they returned to Jerusalem.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

In college, I hated standard sociology courses. That's not to say that a study of social trends, their causes and effects, is a bad idea, but it's been done so poorly most of the time. That's because the folks who came up with the idea of calling it "sociology" and making it an academic discipline were social activists, essentially communists at heart. Nobody has been able to pull the academic discipline out of their hands. But there is an underlying concept of using scientific discipline and tools to study social influences on human behavior that is actually rather useful. It blends nicely into history, economics and so forth.

I am in no position to untangle the details, and I have never found any evidence that someone better positioned has done a more detailed sociological study, but I have noticed some correlations in something that heavily affected churches in general, and still does. At the end of WW2, our nation's leaders had an industrial policy. The process of organizing and mobilizing for war had very good effects on the economy and our living standards in general. At least some of those leaders felt it was a good idea to take advantage of that bureaucracy to encourage veterans returning from war to go to college. It was a massive project that exploded the population involved in academics in the US. The colleges and universities could not keep up with the demand for seats in classes.

While it's well established that our nation's elite were hoping to turn the population into very productive drones who were motivated by their own rising standard of living, the colleges up that point were still rather honestly academic, and all these working class guys suddenly got exposed to serious intellectual pursuits. The result was an explosion in creativity that was not constrained by the elites. It took them another generation to get it all back under control. We can trace the dumbing-down of college education starting in the 1960s. The civil rights movement was partly a cover for that "correction". The natural rise in yearning among minorities who were getting real educations was seized by the communists as a way to force changes in our society and government.

Meanwhile, that sudden rise in people getting real educations opened doors among the American evangelical clergy. A part of this was the rise of lay ministries. There was a strong move in some circles to actually cultivate such a thing. This movement viewed clergy primarily as equippers, not simply leaders. A host of strong educational books were published to put some measure of theological and biblical expertise in the hands of the lay public. The idea was to engage the lay members in ways that got more of them involved in sharing their faith without the silly old door-to-door canvasing operations. Thinkers were looking for ways to broaden the concept of outreach so that any individual member could discover their unique faith and mission calling, and have support to practice it.

If you never heard about this move, which came out most strongly in the late 1960s-1980s, I'm not surprised. I felt like it was being squelched from all directions. I ran across it quite by accident, and discovered a huge number of churches trying to get this thing going, and nary a peep was heard from church staff news sources. The established elite were against it from the start.

Thus, the movement represented by the book The Purpose Driven Life was actually meant to stop the earlier lay ministry movement. The same with "Seeker Sensitive" and some other trendy terms that burst on the scene in the 1990s. All of it was a mask covering a behind-the-scenes movement among leaders to learn how to assert a more centralized control over church operations that turned the membership into passive idiots who waited for the leaders to decide everything. In small newsletters and exposés you could read the horror stories of how the leadership training that came with those "Forty Days of Purpose" programs specifically called for kicking out lay leaders and destroying anything they had built.

I was deeply influenced by the lay ministry movement. Now you can understand whence comes some of what I write.

Israel never seemed to understand that their national identity was not the DNA of Abraham, but their adherence to the Covenant. They were never very good at inviting others to embrace the revelation they were given for that very purpose. They got worse as time went on. Jesus had told His disciples to take the New Covenant to all nations.

Stephen was the first man to knowingly stretch the initial audience of the gospel of the Messiah. The gospel message went first to Hebrew-speaking Jews in Palestine. At Pentecost, a miracle brought the message to a few Jews who spoke other languages. With the authorizing of the seven Greek-speaking elders, the message began spreading by their reflex to preach among the Hellenized Jews. The Lord Himself was tearing down the wall Jews had built around themselves to keep the world out of the Covenant.

But Stephen had warned his audience that they had also kept themselves outside of the Covenant. They were unable to recognize that Jesus was the Messiah because they had rejected the Covenant He was trying to restore. The accusations against him were only superficially accurate. As he stood before the Sanhedrin, his face aglow, Stephen proceeded to answer the charges against him.

His primary defense was that the nation had been in no position to judge Jesus, nor anyone else, for that matter. The boundaries of their identity as the Chosen were not in the borders, nor the people, nor the Temple, nor the rules they had piled up. It was rooted in God Himself, the One who made the promises on Mount Sinai.

God had made them a nation. He started with Abraham in a far away land. His location, neither at Ur or Haran, prevented him hearing God and obeying, and reaping the promises. He surrendered his inheritance in Haran and went to wander in a land where he never owned more than a burial plot. That's because the real inheritance he passed onto to his descendants was faith in God and His plans.

Those plans included a period of bondage in Egypt. This was to provide their national birth by His miraculous deliverance. But the descendants of Abraham were not good men, selling one of their own brothers into bondage, never realizing it was the first step in their own bondage. Their failures did not prevent God keeping His promises. Joseph prospered in Pharaoh's court. Eventually a new dynasty arose with no sense of gratitude for just how much Joseph had done to save Egypt.

In the midst of an awful oppression, including the forced slaughter of male babies to the Nile gods, Moses not only survived, but was raised in the very courts of the Pharaoh who had tried to have him killed. God was watching over His promises. Still, his own nation rejected Moses when he sought to lead them out. They would rather stay and suffer than do the work of becoming a nomadic people as God intended.

So it took another forty years while Moses doubled his education. Having first learned everything the Egyptians could teach him, Jethro taught him his forgotten Aramaic heritage and the knowledge of Jehovah. After this, he returned to Egypt to lead God's people out. It was a real struggle and they still weren't ready to leave, but were eventually driven out because of the miraculous afflictions God brought on their oppressors. They whined pitifully all the way through incomparable miracle of crossing the sea on dry ground.

All the way through the wilderness of Sinai, they kept up the idolatry they had picked up from other nations, nations that had none of Jehovah's promises. But God was faithful, and His wrath fell only lightly upon them for their sins. He gave them the Tabernacle to build up their sense of identity, all the while keeping the pillar of fire and smoke with them. He gave them the deliverer they rejected, the Law they disobeyed, the Tabernacle they neglected in favor of pagan deities. Still, He drove out the pagan nations under Joshua so they could possess the Promised Land.

Later, while living in that land, He granted them powerful leaders who built the Temple, along with the nation's wealth and power. What did they lack from God's hand to make them a proud nation who might serve His glory? They cared more about the symbols than the God who loved them.

After reciting all of this, Stephen lowered the boom. Which of His prophets had Israel not persecuted or killed? They prophesied of the coming Messiah who, when He came in due time, they promptly rejected and murdered. The Word was delivered by the hands of angels, even in the form of a man, but they refused to obey. When did this nation not reject the God who called and made them from nothing?

When Stephen then claimed to see the vision of Jesus standing in the clouds -- the vision they had already rejected when Jesus promised to return -- they could bear it no longer. They bum rushed Stephen and dragged him outside the city walls. Instead of a proper Hebrew execution of solemnly crushed by stones, they were throwing them wildly at him with visceral hatred.

Luke notes that a certain Saul was there as their official witness, probably the lowest ranking member of their staff, denied the satisfaction of participating in this bloodlust. Stephen's final words was a plea for God's mercy on those who were killing him.

The only mercy God granted was in waiting another generation before pouring His wrath on the remnant of the formerly Chosen People in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. They had closed the door on God's Word for the last time. There was no going back after the hasty execution of Stephen. The Lord was going to send His message to the nations.