Acts 1 – Then They Prayed
Romans 1 – Exchanged the Truth of God for a Lie
1 Cor 1 – Isa 29:14
2 Cor 1 – In Our Hearts as a Deposit
Gal 1 – Revelation from Jesus Christ
These were my last five chapters from 2021. Thirteen days in and this year seems as good as any other. I need to pay quarterly taxes tomorrow, so figuring out how much I must pay in April was a big task for the week, and the overwhelming (but encouraging) thought is you have to have made money to pay taxes. Ugh.
The aspect of Acts 1 that jumps out at me is that the people decided what they thought was the right things to do and then they prayed to confirm that they had it right. They used their brains, but then they stopped to make sure their sin nature had not fouled up the decision-making process. As the kids learned at church last night, sometimes your heart will lie to you.
The world has an adage about the best lie being almost indistinguishable from the truth. My favorite is that God will not give you any more than you can handle, and second favorite is that we can all get along. God always gives us a reason to turn to Him and many more people than anyone wants to admit are evil. Murder and other crimes have been around since Cain and Able and will not go away until the devil has been thrown into the final fire. Satan is a liar and lies as beautifully as he can.
1 Corinthians 1:19 quotes from Isaiah 29:14. It is about how God will destroy the wisdom of the world, which is not really wisdom at all. Any wise saying that does not come from God is most likely a lie from Satan anyway. Without the spiritual aspect of life taken into account, the wisdom of life is only good for perishing after a little better life.
2 Corinthians had a piece that focused my attention on the gift of the Holy Spirit. Life without the Holy Spirit after Pentecost is worthless. God has promised us eternal life and the Holy Spirit is our key to getting in, so to speak. When we do not follow the lead of the Holy Spirit, our lives look just like those of the lost who are “On the Highway to Hell”.
Galatians has some memorable parts, but this first chapter focused me on the fact that the New Testament was revealed by Jesus Christ so that we might be His body on earth. Yes, Christ can reveal himself to us anywhere or anytime like He did for Paul on the road to Damascus, but more often we learn about Him from the scriptures. Paul studied the Old Testament for something like four years to pull together what Christ revealed personally and what God had revealed in the Old Testament. Paul then spent his life educating the rest of us.
We need to pray for direction, we need to test ideas for truth, we need to test wisdom for its source, we need to be different, and we need to expect revelation from Christ. Christians can be world leaders, they can run multinational companies, they can be rich, or they can have the simple everyday lives that we do. The focus should always be on following God to give Him glory. Directions we can Act on.