Pastor Prince

What do you do when God does something completely unexpected and wonderful?  In the story of the apostle Peter's vision at Joppa, God did something like that. The story starts at the beginning of Acts 10.  A God-fearing Roman Centurion living in Caesarea named Cornelius has a vision of a an angel.  The angel tells him to send to Joppa for a man called Peter, who's staying at the house of Simon the tanner.  Cornelius immediately dispatched two servants and one of his aides to go to Joppa. The following day, around noon, the three men are nearing Joppa.  While people are preparing the big meal of the day, Peter goes up on the roof to pray.  Though he's hungry, he falls into a trance.  In the trance, he has a vision of a large sheet coming down from heaven.  In the sheet are all kinds of unclean animals, animals the Jewish law said Peter should never eat.  A voice called out, "Arise, Peter, kill and eat." Peter recoiled at the c...

In the ancient world, life was bookended by breath.  They believed life began when babies were born and took in their first breath.  Life ended when a person made their last, long, exhale. In Genesis 2, Adam becomes a living being when God breathes into his lifeless body.   Acts 2 describes the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  It was like the birth of the church.  Jesus had commanded his followers to remain in Jerusalem to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit.  He told them that when the Spirit came, they would be his witnesses to the world. It begins with the sound of a rushing wind.  In Greek, the word used here for "wind," also means "spirit," and "breath."  The terms were closely linked in ancient minds.  What happens here blends them all.   Following the wind, they saw what appeared to be tongues of fire that fell on each of Jesus' followers. The fact that they looked like tongues suggest they were r...

Matthew 28:16ff says that after Jesus' resurrection, the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus told them to go.  When they went there, he appeared to them and gave them a commission.  They were to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything he had commanded them.   One verb in his commission is in the imperative tense, which was like putting it in bold face.  It was "make disciples."  A disciple is a person who comes under the discipline of a master.  In Jesus' time, people learned by attaching themselves to a teacher.  They spent their days with him, following him around and learning from him.  Their goal was to think, speak, and act like their masters.   Jesus' disciples were to be disciple makers themselves.  This disciple-making process had two components: baptism and teaching.  They were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Sp...

The climax of the Big Story of the Bible is Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.  It's easy to think of these as two distinct events, but they're two parts of one event.  In it, God provided for the redemption of humanity. "Woman, why are you crying?" is the question highlighted in John's account of the resurrection (20:1-18).  Mary Magdalene went to Jesus' tomb early on Sunday morning, and found the stone rolled away.  Assuming Jesus' body had been stolen, she ran to Peter and John, and told them what she had seen. They ran to the tomb.  John arrived first, but waited outside the entrance.  Peter, true to his impulsive nature, strode right in the tomb when he arrived.  John followed him. As Peter looked around, he saw Jesus' burial clothes neatly arranged.  That seemed to rule out grave robbers, because they wouldn't have left them that way.  John looked around and believed .  The account doesn't say what he believed, bu...

God's Big Story has a climax.  This climax is Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.  Everything that happened before these prepared the way for them.  Everything that happened after was built on them.  What was happening when Jesus was crucified?  That's a question theologians have pondered for thousands of years?  None of us can comprehend all that was going on in those hours.  Jesus' followers didn't understand at the time.  They would begin to understand only after the resurrection. Two key words the New Testament uses to tell about what was going on when Jesus died on the cross are "redemption" and "reconciliation." In Romans 3:22b-26, the apostle Paul says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by the redemption that came by his grace in Christ.  "Justified" means to be declared "not guilty."  "Redemption" is to be freed of a debt.   In the ancient...

How do you sum up the things Jesus did during his earthly ministry?  Sounds impossible to do!  But Matthew did it in Matthew 4:23-25.  He said Jesus preached the good news of the kingdom, taught people how to be kingdom citizens, and showed the kingdom had come by healing diseases. He preached the good news of the kingdom.  The kingdom was the kingdom of God.  Jesus talked about it all the time.  The Bible teaches that at the end of the world, God will bring his kingdom to earth.  He will establish his kingdom through his Anointed One, his Messiah.  In this kingdom, he will right all wrongs, and establish his peace and love.   The good news Jesus proclaimed about the kingdom was that it was entering the world through him.  In Luke 17:20-21, he said that the kingdom wasn't coming by careful observation.  It wasn't in a geographical location.  Instead, it was in human hearts.  People entered God's kingdom when t...

One of the prominent themes of the gospel of Luke is that Jesus came to bless the poor and marginalized.  The Virgin Mary is a poor, unknown woman in Nazareth.  God announces Jesus' birth to a group of shepherds out in the field.   Luke continues that theme in his account of Jesus' sermon at Nazareth in 4:14-30.  It's Jesus' first sermon in the gospel, giving it prominence.  It sets the theme of Jesus' public ministry.  The fact that it takes place in Jesus' hometown of Nazareth gives it particular importance. Jesus is in a synagogue at Nazareth on the Sabbath.  They hand the scroll of Isaiah to him, and he turns to what we know as 61:1-2.  This is one of the "Servant Songs" of Isaiah, which tell about a special servant of the Lord.  Many in Jesus' time connected them to the Messiah, the Anointed One, who would establish God's kingdom on earth.   Jesus reads the passage, in which the servant says that he came to proclaim...