To the ends of the earth

Read Acts 1:1-11

The first chapter in Acts begins with a helpful summary of the end of Luke’s Gospel and follows a conversation between Jesus and His disciples before He ascends into heaven.

‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth ’, Jesus says to His disciples, and ‘after he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.’

The Holy Spirit had not yet come upon the disciples, and they wondered why Jesus would not remain with them. Pentecost Sunday shortly follows where all would become clear…

Read Acts 2:1-12

The disciples had no idea what to expect – a recurring theme throughout the gospels – and played out plainly in Acts 2.

Pentecost was a Jewish celebration that occurred 50 days after the Passover festival. With ‘God-fearing Jews’ from all over the known world gathered in Jerusalem, God chose this day in 33AD to pour out His Holy Spirit, first to the disciples, then to the Jewish audience.

The Holy Spirit arrived as a violent wind and descended visibly on the disciples in ‘tongues of fire’. Thus, an evangelistic flame was lit that would never go out until Jesus’ return. What this meant bewildered the apostles: we now know it was the beginning of early Church.

16 April was IFES Global Giving Day where we rejoiced with our fellow IFES movements that the gospel continues to go out to students across the whole world.

The ends of the earth were further than the other early apostles could have imagined. Join us in praying for two regional CU movements in the Caribbean and Latin America. Prayer points on our social media.

You can visit the link above to read stories like Hendi’s, a Staff Worker in Mexico, and Samantha’s, a Staff Worker in St Vincent & the Grenadines on IFES website.

Read Acts 10:1-48

Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved – a statement from Romans 10:13 we may know well. But how often do we stop to consider the Holy Spirit’s role in leading us to want to be saved in the first place?

In Acts 10, we meet Cornelius, a God-fearing Gentile (non-Jew). Despite being as Roman as they come, Cornelius was an upright man and exactly the sort of person you’d want to know.

Stationed in Caesarea, the Roman capital of first century Judea (and modern Israel), God chooses Cornelius to pave the way for the gospel to spread where it hasn’t before.

Instructed by an angel to send for the Apostle Peter, Cornelius patiently waits.

In Jewish custom, it was forbidden for Jews to associate closely, visit or eat with non-Jews, not least because they had laws forbidding them to eat certain foods.

The narrative helps us to understand Peter’s headspace; he had been reminded by God in a dream that there was no longer clean and unclean (v15). He can go against these customs. Thus, Peter enters Cornelius’ house with God’s blessing, in the power of the Holy Spirit, but in full humility that he is a servant to the gospel. It’s easy to miss just how significant this is.

‘Then Peter began to speak: ‘I now realise how true it is that God does not show favouritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right. You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, announcing the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all.’ - Acts 10:34-36

‘The Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message’ (v44). What an astonishing and revolutionary event for the Jews who had converted to Christianity. No longer a chosen few, many were to become evangelists to the gentiles in Judea, and to the ends of the earth.

The Holy Spirit had come upon the Gentiles in a second Pentecost, and Cornelius and the other God-fearing Jews were baptised that day.

'The apostles and the believers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God.’ - Acts 11:1

After explaining what had happened in Caesarea to the Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 11:1-8), the gospel begins to reach the gentiles outside Judea.

Read Acts 11:19-26 and Acts 13:1-12

A church is established in Antioch (modern-day Syria) and with the help of Christians from there and from Jerusalem, the first true missionary journey took place, to Cyprus.

St Barnabus is one of those on this first missionary journey from the newly established church in Antioch. With an evangelistic but heavy heart, the church agrees to let him go.

Although not one of the 12 disciples, Barnabas becomes a prominent apostle. Along with St Paul, they meet a Roman official (proconsul), Sergius, and his attendant Elymas, a Jewish man who practices sorcery & is actively trying to prevent Sergius from hearing the Word of God.

Paul demonstrates the power of the Holy Spirit by calling out the false teacher, and the Lord blinds him. Witnessing Paul’s words and this act of God, the Lord works in the Roman official’s heart and praise God, brings him to faith! Another Gentile convert to Christianity.

The gospel first reached Judea and the Middle East, before spreading to Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean. Join us in praying for two regional CU movements in the Palestine and Cyprus. Prayer points on our social media.

Today we meet a man from the Ancient Kingdom of Ethiopia, a gentile nation that still exists today, who meets the apostle Philip on the road between Gaza and Jerusalem.

Read Acts 8:26-40

After an angel of the Lord instructs Philip to take the road south of Jerusalem, he meets a devout man who had been in the city worshipping. Though we cannot say for sure whether this man was a Jewish descendant who lived in Ethiopia, or a gentile, we do know that as a Eunuch, he would have been seen as something of an outsider in Jewish culture.

In the Torah (first five books of the Bible), the writings outline that Eunuchs within the Israelites are not permitted to enter ‘the assembly of the Lord’ (Deuteronomy 23:1). Joyfully, however, the Ethiopian has been reading the Book of Isaiah, which pointed him towards a messiah, whom we now know to be Jesus.

Acts tells us that the Ethiopian has read Isaiah 53:7-8, showing a humbled messiah being led ‘like a lamb led to slaughter’. Directed by the Holy Spirit and placed by God to be there at just the right moment, Philip reveals some of the meaning behind the text as the eunuch welcomes him into his chariot and listens intently.

We cannot say for sure what was said in this conversation, but it’s clear that the Holy Spirit came upon the Ethiopian, and his eyes were opened to the life-saving gospel of Jesus. That Jesus, the messiah, who was fully man and fully God, was that lamb who had died for his life. Most crucially, he understood he was welcomed into the family of God, and for an outsider, this was so significant.

Read Isaiah 56:3-6

Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say,
‘The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.’
And let no eunuch complain,
‘I am only a dry tree.’

For this is what the Lord says:

‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant –
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure for ever.

Acts 8 makes you wonder if the eunuch had read Isaiah 56:3-6: a foretaste of the New Testament, a welcoming and blessing not only to those from other nations, but specifically eunuchs!

That message, that the gospel was for everyone, Jew or Gentile, male or female, not only saved the Ethiopian, but allowed the spread of Christianity into the continent of Africa over coming centuries. Christianity today is the largest adhered to religion in Africa and the oldest church in sub-Saharan Africa (ie. African lands outside the former Roman Empire) is the Ethiopian Church.

Whether the Ethiopian eunuch was the first to bring Christianity to the county, or even helped to spread it, is lost to history, but by 330 AD there were enough Christians in the Kingdom of Aksum, (modern day northern Ethiopia and Eritrea), for King Ezana to declare Christianity as the state religion. A man called Frumentius, a native of Tyre in Lebanon, travelled to Ethiopia in the 320s filled with the Holy Spirit. As he shared the gospel, the Holy Spirit led Ezana to convert to Christianity, about 290 years after the eunuch in the story in Acts.

Will you join us in praising God that Christianity is alive in Ethiopia today? Pray, too, for the continent of Africa, that the Holy Spirit may work in the lives of students in each nation to bring them to Christ.

The backdrop to the book of Acts is one of joy in strife, with the spread of the gospel costing the lives of many faithful Christians. After Pentecost in 33 AD, one of the first stories we read in Acts is the stoning of Stephen, to which the apostle Paul (then Saul) was complacent (Acts 7).

Early Christians were persecuted both by Jews and by Gentiles over the coming decades. In Acts 15, however, we learn of a third concern: internal troubles within the Church. Some Jewish converts to Christianity began twisting the truth, claiming that Gentiles must uphold Jewish customs. The apostle Peter, one of the early church leaders in Jerusalem, sets the record straight. Jesus has fulfilled the Old Testament covenant, and brought in a new covenant, leaving Christians free from many of the binding rules of Leviticus.

Read more in Acts 15:1-11

Persecution and opposition continue as the gospel goes out across the known world. Tradition has it that the Apostles dispersed in all directions from Jerusalem. Saint James was said to travel to the Iberian Peninsula in around 40AD to spread the gospel there and continues to be commemorated to this day in Spain.

While the Bible gives us no record of this, we do know from Acts 12:1-3 that James was back in Judea by around 44AD when he becomes the first of the apostles to die for his faith. Martyrdom and persecution were rife in the early Church.

Have you ever stopped to consider how encouraging this is though?

Many who saw Jesus in life, in death and after His resurrection were so compelled by the truth of these events that they were willing to die for them.

What a gospel we believe in!

Paul in Athens

Read Acts 17:16-34

Christianity continued to spread across Asia minor and Europe. In Acts 17, we see Paul famously address the people of Athens, Greece. He calls out the pagan Athenians for having an altar to an ‘unknown god’, just in case there is a deity they have forgotten to worship who who might curse them if not acknowledged.

Paul tells them of the one true God who isn’t just acknowledged but wants to be known!

Paul is mocked by some, but the Holy Spirit is at work in the hearts of others, and the church in Greece is firmly established.

‘When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ At that, Paul left the Council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.’ – Acts 17:32-34

Christianity in Rome, the heart of the empire.

Historians generally agree that Christianity must have reached Rome by around 50 AD, though we do not know who first evangelised there. By 56 AD the church is firmly established, as the Apostle Paul writes his longest epistle (letter) to the Roman church.

Read Romans 1:8-17

The famous passage contains the line ‘for I am not ashamed of the gospel’. Despite the persecution he has faced, Paul plans to go into the proverbial Lion’s Den, and ultimately it is likely that he dies there, but not before he has preached to thousands and helped to bolster the early Roman church.

Read Acts 28:11-31

The Book of Acts ends with Paul in Rome, but the story doesn’t end there:

Tradition has it that the Apostle Peter later travelled to meet Paul in Rome and lead the church there. There is little to suggest whether this happened, but we do know that God placed God-fearing men and women where he needed them over the coming centuries to grow the early church from there, long after Paul and Peter had died. From 54 AD to 68 AD the Emperor Nero makes living as Christians in Rome a misery – and yet the gospel spreads.

Over the coming 150 years, Christianity spreads to the far corners of the Roman empire, including Britain sometime after 200 AD. Form 244-249 AD Emperor Philip sympathises with Christians. We don’t know if he was ever converted but for a time there was some respite from persecution and in 260 AD Christianity is decriminalised.

This doesn’t totally end the persecution though as Diocletian (284-305 AD) severely persecuted Christians. Indeed, it was during his reign that Saint Alban was martyred for his faith, in modern-day Hertfordshire, and became the first recorded British martyr, although at this point, Christianity had still mostly spread to Roman citizens, not to the native Britons.

Finally, in 312 AD, Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity, making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Finally, Christians were able to practice openly in much of the empire – and Christianity was even spread to the farther corners of Europe, to the Celts and the Germanic tribes. The Roman church becomes one of the largest churches in Europe and the Mediterranean. With greater power though comes changes.

In 440 AD Leo, Bishop of Rome, begins to lead the church in such a role that we would now refer to as ‘the Pope’. The Western Roman empire falls some 30 years later but the church survives and continues to grow into the Middle Ages. The role of the Roman Church, now the Roman Catholic Church, does change throughout this period, but what we do know for sure is that the foundations laid by the early church meant Christianity was able to spread across Europe where it remains culturally important.