Continuing Christ's Work

Published by Stanley Pouw in 2015 · 25 October 2015

“In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, 2 until the day when He was taken up, after He had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom He had chosen. 3 He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.”

Luke, the writer, is referring to his Gospel of Luke as volume 1, about all that Jesus began to do and teach. Acts is volume 2 about the continued doing and teaching of Jesus. The gospels tell the story of the finished work of Christ. Remember what He said in his high priestly prayer in anticipation of the cross in John 17:4, “I have finished the work you gave me to do.” And on the cross in John 19:30, just before He gave up his life, he said, “It is finished.”

So the first volume, the Gospel of Luke, and all the other gospel writers, tell us of the finished work of Christ. The long awaited sacrifice for sin that satisfied God fully, He offered. He saved forever those who believed, and secured their redemption by his resurrection from the dead. Nothing can be added to the finished work of Christ. It was satisfactory to God, and so God raised him from the dead to validate His satisfaction.

And then God gave Christ a name above every name, exalted him to his right hand, gave him the name Lord, restored him to exalted heavenly glory, and even added a new dimension now as the savior because he had offered personally the sacrifice. This is the work that Jesus finished, but there also was the work that Jesus only began. The work of redemption he finished. The work of proclaiming the gospel, teaching the kingdom, and living the kingdom He only began.

Christ began in his ministry to collect the elect. By the time he ascended into heaven, there are just a few. They are all in one little country in the midst of this world. A hundred and twenty gather in the upper room in Jerusalem, and several hundred more in Galilee, and that is the beginning of what Jesus began. So Acts is the story of what Jesus continues to do and teach, the story and the long process completing God’s redemptive work through Christ.

So Luke 1:1-4 says, “In as much as many have undertaken to compile account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses of servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well having investigated everything carefully from the beginning to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.”

Luke is a fastidious and meticulous historian from a human standpoint. And added to that, he is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and he doesn’t know this will be called Luke, and he doesn’t know that volume 2 will be called Acts. He writes one great, long history, and the goal was exact truth. To provide certainty of the facts of redemptive history, to provide full assurance to believers, like Theophilus and others, that God’s promise of salvation was being fulfilled.

The prophecies in the Old Testament that came through the prophets were precise and identified places where Christ was born in Bethlehem and details about his life and details about his death. So Luke wants to show us that all the precision of the Old Testament that pointed toward Christ was fulfilled with the same kind of precision in the New Testament.

So Acts then continues the story of the exact truth of God fulfilling Old Testament prophecy with the coming of Messiah, and then after Messiah’s resurrection and His ascension, God continues to fulfill the story, and Luke writes to provide certainty so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught so that you may know.

At the end of Luke Jesus opened their minds to understand the scripture, and He said to them in Luke 24:46-49, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things. 49 And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”

And that is how Luke ends, and Acts begins with the arrival of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is promised in the book of Luke and comes in the book of Acts the way the Messiah was promised in the Old Testament and in the book of Luke. This is an exact and precise history. The early readers were taught then essentially that the apostles and the prophets all spoke the truth.

This is not just a broad overview. As in the Old Testament, all that is going on in Luke and Acts is being done by God. God is the sovereign power behind all of redemptive history, and the Spirit works the will of the Father, and the Son does the will of the Father. Luke loves to use a particular word in its death in the Greek language, and it means it is necessary. Luke uses that word 40 times in his writings to affirm to us that it is necessary that this happen.

It is necessary Luke says it because the Old Testament prophet said it. It is necessary, Luke says in Acts, because Jesus predicted it and promised it. So Acts is written to give believers an exact account so they could have confidence that God is still fulfilling His redemptive promise. This assurance is necessary because Judas had killed himself, and another had to be chosen to replace him among the 12, and that happens in the Acts 1. Nothing can stop the purpose of God from unfolding, not even the suicide of Judas.

So what do we call this book? The Acts of the Apostles? The only time the apostles appear is in Acts 1. So it is inaccurate to call it the Acts of the Apostles. Some have said it should be called The Acts of the Father because God is clearly at work unfolding his redemptive plan. Because the Lord opens the heart of Lydia in Acts 16:14, and when they do church together they begin to report all that God had done. You could also call it The Acts of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit separates Paul and Barnabas, to send them on the missionary trip out of Antioch.

Some prefer to call it the Acts of the Risen Lord because the theme of the preaching through the whole book is about the resurrection. Starting with the message at Pentecost, Christ has risen from the dead, and all the apostolic preachers feature the risen Christ. But is the risen Christ really acting?” Alan Thompson, says this, these all are “The Acts of the Lord Jesus through His people by the Holy Spirit for the accomplishment of the Father’s purposes.” That’s it in essence.

Is Jesus involved in the Book of Acts? Yes. He has gone back to heaven and been placed at the right hand of God, given a name above every name. And several times in the NT epistles, He is reigning from heaven as the head of the church, as the king over his spiritual kingdom, He extends his kingdom through the history of the Book of Acts. Acts 2:47 says, “And the Lord was adding to their number, day by day, those who were being saved.”

Jesus, the Lord of the church is still at work. He is adding people to the church. In Acts 11:20-21, there were some men of Cypress and Cyrene, who came to Antioch and began also preaching the Lord Jesus, and the hand of the Lord was with them, and a large number who believed turned to the Lord. So again, the king is reigning over His kingdom, He is building his church, He is saving his people.

If you go to Acts 8, you find Paul persecuting the church. Who stopped Paul? Jesus did, He showed up on the Damascus road in Acts 9. Now Jesus is involved both in the growth of his church and in stopping the destruction of his church. Jesus appears in Acts 18:9-10 in a vision to Paul and says, “Don’t be afraid any longer. Go on speaking, and don’t be silent, 10 for I am with you, and no man will attack you in order to harm you, for I have many people in the city.”

Acts 23, things are getting very difficult for Paul. Persecution is increasing with a conspiracy to kill him. Verse 11, the Lord stood at his side and said, “Take courage, for as you have solemnly witnessed to my cause at Jerusalem, so you must witness at Rome also.” I’ll protect you until you reach Rome. So the Lord Jesus reigns over his kingdom from heaven, He is engaged in building his church by adding people to the list of saved souls. He is doing it by the preaching of the Gospel and the power of the Spirit.

And all along, the believers are suffering for their noble efforts and being rejected by the world, but the Lord is protecting them so that the gospel can be preached, and the elect will be gathered, and this is the history of the church until He returns. Now Luke is not an apostle, but he is a close friend of the apostles for 30 years from 30 to 60 AD. And he knows the history, from the death of Christ on. So he knows what happened in Jerusalem and Judea and beyond because he was there.

So in a sense, what began to be in the Book of Acts still is, and on the same basis, we are living this history, which while not written down in the New Testament is written down with the same exact precision in heaven. There is another message that you need to understand is very important in this pattern of growth, and it is this: The gospel is universal, and it goes well beyond Israel.

Even the disciples were stuck on the fact that all the promises of God were theirs and theirs alone. They had the traditional attitude toward gentiles that they had developed through centuries, and toward half-breed Samaritans, it was even worse. And Jesus, after all, came to Israel and really never went beyond Israel, other than journeying a little bit into Decapolis, an area around Galilee where gentile towns had developed.

There are many passages in the Old Testament where the messianic promises relate to the world and other nations. But somehow the Jews missed that. In Acts you realize that Philip is preaching to the gentiles, that a gentile eunuch is converted, that Peter is preaching to a gentile soldier named Cornelius, and that the church is established after Jerusalem in a gentile city called Antioch, and that Paul takes the gospel to the gentiles all over Asia Minor.

And that leads to a discussion in Acts 15, how does this all work? God allows the same miraculous phenomena of tongues to occur so that the Jews don’t think this is some kind of a second class event to Pentecost. So there was a very important message to proclaim to the Jews through the Book of Acts, and it starts in Acts 1:8, “Go preach in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the world,” that Christianity is global.

We could divide Acts into six sections. Section 1 begins from the beginning and ends at Acts 6:7 which tells the story of the church at Jerusalem. Up to Acts 9:31 it moves the church throughout Judea and into Samaria and says at the end, the church increased. Then comes to the third section from Acts 9:32 to Acts 12:24 which includes the extension of the church to the gentiles, Antioch, and that ends with these words, “Let the word of the Lord continue to grow and be multiplied.”

The next section is Acts 12:25 to Acts 16:5, and this tells the story of the church going way beyond Antioch, jumping into Asia Minor, and the preaching tour through Galatia by the Apostle Paul. So the churches were being strengthened in the faith and were increasing in number daily. These sections all end with the same sort of summary of the development of the growing church.

Acts 16:6 begins to tell the story of Paul reaching the great gentile cities, like Ephesus and beyond Asia Minor even into Corinth, and this ministry goes on all the way into Acts 19:20. So the Word of the Lord was growing mightily and prevailing. The final section, from Acts 19:21, goes all the way to the end. It tells the story of the final years of Paul’s ministry before his imprisonment in Rome.

Luke had lived through 30 miraculous years from the resurrection to the imprisonment of Paul. He lived during the first fulfillment of The Great Commission by the force of apostolic preachers to the point where churches were established, and the next generation was put in place by placement of elders. Luke wrote a history, which started in Jerusalem, and ended when the gospel penetrated Rome, the capital of their world.

Look at Acts 1, because the Father’s plan worked through the Spirit’s power by the Son, has some requirements. Let us read Acts 1:1-11, “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, 2 until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. 3 He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.”

4 And while staying with them He ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; 5 for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” 6 So when they had come together, they asked Him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

“9 And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, 11 and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” And with that, they went back to Jerusalem. Initial lessons were taught.”

This is the last talk Jesus had with them before He went back to heaven. And in these words here, He gives to them all that they need. The first is you have to have the proper message. You have to have also the right confidence. Thirdly, you have to have the right power. And then, you have to have the right mystery. Then you have to have the right mission, and you have to have the right motive.

To effectively carry on Christ’s work, you have to begin with the right message. It all starts with the words of Jesus. That’s why there are four gospels, so we can get as many of the words of Jesus as the Holy Spirit wants us to have. Many people are giving others the wrong message. Biblical ignorance and false teachers are at an all-time high.

When you know the Word and you believe the Word, you are powerful. There are all kinds of people who write books that critique Christianity, call things into question, deny the inspiration of Scripture. These are from so-called Christian writers, Christian scholars. But those kind of people are impotent. They are just other people with false opinions. Faith comes by hearing the truth concerning Christ, Romans 10. Let us talk about the others next time. Let us pray.