18 November 2025
Six sessions into Acts, the group pauses to go back to where it all began. Rather than pressing straight on, Harry uses this week to retrace the shape of the whole book — the promise of power from on high, the widening mission from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, and the strange ascension scene that launches it all — before asking the question that hangs over the whole series: is this really what Christianity looked like at the start, and is it what it should still look like now?
Editor's note: This article is a written summary based on the substance of Harry's Bible study on this passage. It is not a verbatim transcript, and while it aims to reflect the heart of the teaching faithfully, it cannot fully convey the warmth, care, and encouragement of the class itself.
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your word and for the privilege of gathering together in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. As we open the Scriptures today, we ask that your Holy Spirit would illuminate our minds and soften our hearts, that we might hear your voice, grow in the knowledge of you, and be equipped to live and speak for Christ. We commit this time of study into your hands, in Jesus' Name, Amen.
Harry opened by reminding the group why Acts repays this kind of return visit. He called it probably the most exciting book in the New Testament, even in the whole Bible — a story told with a vigour and vividness that leaves the reader breathless. At its heart it is an account of ordinary men filled with divine power, and Harry was clear that this power is specifically the Holy Spirit's: it is the Spirit who gives them an effectiveness in speech far beyond their native ability, who guides and sustains them at crucial moments through heavenly visions, and whose presence punctuates their mission with miraculous healings and rescues. Their initial success, Harry noted, is staggering, and their progress toward the centre of the civilised world — Rome itself — is remorseless.
Within that larger story, Harry pointed to one figure who receives special emphasis: Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul. Before his conversion, Saul zealously persecuted the church, aiming to destroy it, as he later confesses in his own words: "For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers" (Galatians 1:13–14). Elsewhere he goes further still, calling himself the chief of sinners: "Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst" (1 Timothy 1:15). Yet after meeting the risen, glorified Christ on the road to Damascus, this same man becomes the faith's chief advocate. Harry marvelled at the scale of the reversal — a former Pharisee turned Christian apologist, an ardent Jew called by Jesus to be a missionary to the Gentiles. Acts, he noted, gives full details of Paul's conversion, his travels, his many crises, his preaching and his encounters with opponents, and Luke is honest enough to record his disappointments alongside his successes, right through to the long, drawn-out defence of the closing chapters.
Paul's story, Harry said, should remind the group of the lives of all the other apostles before they believed in Jesus and were filled with the Spirit. He pointed to the religious leaders' own verdict on Peter and John, who stand for the rest of the Twelve: "When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realised that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and took note that these men had been with Jesus" (Acts 4:13). Acts, in other words, is the account of how a group of thoroughly ordinary people turned the world upside down and changed the course of history — not through any native ability, but because they believed in Jesus Christ, experienced the Father's blessing, and were empowered by the Holy Spirit.
Harry underlined how unlikely this looked at the time. To the watching world, Jesus' mission had apparently failed completely: his disciples abandoned him, he was crucified — which, under the law, meant being cursed by God — and Jesus himself cried out in dereliction, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And who was left to carry the mission forward? Only 120 of them, gathered together to pray at the start of Acts 1. Harry noted that these disciples had certainly been deeply encouraged, even emboldened, by seeing the risen Jesus alive again, just as he had told them. But that encouragement was not enough on its own — as the story goes on to show, they still had to wait for the promise of the Father to be fulfilled.
Harry observed that Acts still stirs the passions today, whenever it is read in Christian groups, congregations, and churches — and it produces the same mixed responses that Paul's own message originally received. Some of the closing words of the book capture this exactly: "Some were convinced by what he said, but others would not believe" (Acts 28:24). For some readers today, Acts stirs a longing for the church to know again the same empowering of the Spirit; others are left doubting, even wondering whether it really happened the way Acts describes it; and some remain simply indifferent to its contents. Harry put the underlying question to the group directly: is this Christianity as it really was in the beginning, as we should continue to envisage it, and even as it should be today?
Turning to the structure of the book itself, Harry showed how Acts picks up exactly where the Gospels leave off, quoting Luke's own opening words: "In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God" (Acts 1:1–3). Convinced that Jesus had truly risen and was alive forevermore, that he had ascended to heaven and was seated at his Father's right hand awaiting the day his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet, the apostles built their preaching around exactly these themes — the resurrection, the ascension, the promised outpouring of the Spirit, and the proof from Scripture that Jesus is the Christ. Harry illustrated this with Peter's sermon at Pentecost: "Fellow Israelites, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day... Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear... Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah" (Acts 2:29–36).
Beyond that, Harry pointed to the widening scope of the mission — a reach that keeps stretching further and further from Israel — summed up in what he described as an outline for the whole book: "But 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" (Acts 1:8). So the story begins in Jerusalem and, as the group will see across the rest of Acts, spreads outward to Judea, to Samaria, and finally to the ends of the earth.
Harry noted something he found genuinely interesting: as the mission moves further from Israel, the emphasis in the message preached changes according to the spiritual knowledge of the audience being addressed. Where a crowd has no grounding in the basics of the Gospel, the apostles' preaching leans on God as creator of all things and sovereign over times and seasons — a theme Harry traced back to the very first words of Scripture, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1), and forward into Paul's own theology: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse" (Romans 1:20).
Harry showed this principle in action in two episodes. In Lystra, in what is now south-central Turkey, Paul heals a man lame from birth, and the crowd — mistaking Paul and Barnabas for gods — has to be stopped from offering sacrifices to them: "We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them... he has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons" (Acts 14:8–18). In Athens, confronted by a city "full of idols" and an altar inscribed "to an unknown god," Paul builds his address to the Areopagus around the same theme: "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands... he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead" (Acts 17:16–34) — a message met, as ever, with a mixture of sneering and belief, including converts such as Dionysius and Damaris, before Paul, led by the Spirit, moves on to Corinth.
By contrast, Harry noted, when preaching to Jews and proselytes the emphasis falls squarely on Jesus as the Messiah. From the moment of his own conversion, Paul devoted himself to proving this very point to his fellow Jews: "At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God... Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah" (Acts 9:19–22). These, Harry stressed, are the very last instructions Jesus gives his apostles before his ascension — the words of Acts 1:8 — after which he is taken up into heaven, bringing his earthly ministry to its end.
Harry closed by tracing a thread that runs right through Luke's two-volume work: the presence of angels. They are involved at every stage of Jesus' first coming — announcing John's birth to Zechariah (Luke 1:8–17), announcing Jesus' birth to Mary (Luke 1:26–33), and announcing it to the shepherds at Bethlehem (Luke 2:8–15) — and they remain just as prominent throughout Acts: freeing the apostles from prison (Acts 5:17–20), directing Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–29), appearing to Cornelius (Acts 10:1–6), rescuing Peter from Herod's custody (Acts 12:6–11), and reassuring Paul during the storm on the way to Rome (Acts 27:21–26). This led Harry to raise a question for the group to hold onto: will angels be just as prominent before Jesus' Second Coming as they were at his first? He pointed to the two angelic figures at the ascension itself: "Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11).
That prompted a closer look at exactly how Jesus went: "After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight" (Acts 1:9). Harry traced the cloud back through the Old Testament as a recurring depiction of God's presence, guidance, glory, and protection — the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night that led Israel through the wilderness (Exodus 13:21–22), the cloud that filled Solomon's Temple at its dedication (1 Kings 8:10–11), the cloud that covered Mount Sinai (Exodus 24:16–18), and the cloud that descended at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting (Exodus 33:9–10). He also noted that transportation by cloud is a regular feature of visions of heaven, pointing to Daniel's vision of "one like a son of man... coming with the clouds of heaven" (Daniel 7:13), and to Paul's teaching that believers will one day be "caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air" (1 Thessalonians 4:13–17). Harry ended simply by noting that, with the ascension and its cloud, the group is now dealing with divine and heavenly things.
Underneath all the cross-referencing, Harry's real aim in this recap was to reset the group's sense of what kind of story they are actually inside. Acts is not a record of exceptional people doing exceptional things — it is a record of unschooled, ordinary men and women who were transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit into people who turned the world upside down, and the same Spirit, the same promise of the Father, is what the church is still meant to be waiting on and living out of today. Harry wanted the class to feel the force of the question he put to them directly: is this Christianity as it really was in the beginning, as we should continue to envisage it, and even as it should be today? By walking back through the ascension, the promise of power, and the widening mission to the ends of the earth, he was inviting each person in the room to decide whether they are simply reading about that kind of Christianity, or whether they are willing to expect it — and be shaped by it — themselves.
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, thank you that we are gathered here in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Father, by the power of your Holy Spirit, open up our hearts and our minds that we might understand your words in the Scriptures and get to know you more, that we might live holy lives, and that we might share the Good News about Jesus in the power of your Spirit, for the building of your Church and the extending of your Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven, in and through Jesus Christ, Amen.
