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Jared & Christina Blue’s Testimony
Stories of Hope - Jared & Christina Blue's testimony of hope.
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Mike and Ashley Batty’s Testimony
Stories of Hope - Mike and Ashley Batty's testimony of hope.
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21 DAYS OF DEVOTION INTRODUCTION
Easter is almost here! As we prepare our hearts and minds to once again rejoice and remember the resurrection, our prayer is that we at Hope would continue to grow in our devotion to Him and to one another as His people.
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DAY 1
Read Acts 1:1-26
Acts begins with an extremely brief summary of what Luke wrote in his Gospel about the life, ministry, and mission of Jesus. He then quickly transitions to the ascension when Christ Jesus goes up to into Heaven.
DAY 2
Read Acts 2:1-47
Acts 2 recounts the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost and Peter’s first Spirit-inspired sermon. Peter had failed many times as a disciple, yet God uses Peter in this account to preach the first Gospel sermon of the early church.
DAY 3
Read Acts 3:1-26
In this passage, Peter preaches his second recorded sermon. The occasion for this sermon is the healing of a disabled man at the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem.
DAY 4
Read Acts 4:1-5:11
The Gospel continues to be proclaimed and the early church continues to grow. It experiences Spirit-empowered unity and demonstrations of God’s power, especially through miraculous healings. But it is at this point that serious threats to the church begin to emerge from both the outside and the inside.
DAY 5
Read Acts 5:12-42
As God’s Kingdom advances through the early church and as day by day more and more are being saved and added to the fellowship of believers, so too does the kingdom of darkness intensify its efforts to undermine and destroy the early church.
DAY 6
Read Acts 6:1-7:60
As the church grew, there was great need amongst those that had been added to the body of believers — particularly widows who could not provide for themselves. The Apostles know that they are called to “prayer and ministry of the Word,” however, they are certain that the truth of the Gospel must be lived out in the caring for those among them.
DAY 7
Read Acts 8:1-40
After the martyrdom of Stephen, many of the believers are scattered throughout the region surrounding Judea — and as the believers are scattered, so the Gospel is spread. God uses a tragic moment in Church history to continue to move his mission forward.
DAY 8
Read Acts 9:1-42
In this passage we read about Paul’s conversion to Christianity. At the beginning we read that he was “still breathing threats of murder against the disciples of the Lord” but after his encounter with the risen Jesus he “proclaims Jesus in the synagogues saying ‘He is the Son of God’”.
DAY 9
Read Acts 10:1-11:30
In this section, Peter comes to terms with the fact that the Gospel is also for those who are not ethnically Jewish. That is, his messiah, his savior, is also the messiah and savior of those who were not descendants of Abraham.
DAY 10
Read 12:1-25
This passage could be titled “Herod verses God and his people”. As the church has grown, so has opposition to it.
DAY 11
Read Acts 13:1-52
At Antioch, during a time of worship, the Holy Spirit commissions Paul and Barnabas to go out and preach the Gospel. The believers there gather together to send these two off in prayer and in fasting.
DAY 12
Read Acts 14:1-28
During one of Paul’s missionary journeys, on his way back to meet with the Apostles in Jerusalem, he and Barnabas return to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch to gather together with the body of believers in each of these places to encourage them to continue in the faith even through trials.
DAY 13
Read Acts 15:1-41
Chapter 15 of Acts describes one of the earliest disputes amongst believers in the early church. In one sense, it centered around circumcision which was the sign of the covenant for the Jews. The question was: do gentiles who become Christians need to be circumcised in order to be saved?
DAY 14
Read Acts 16:1-40
Even in prison, Paul and Silas pray and sing hymns to God. These very prayers lead to the miraculous earthquake that opens the doors of the prison, and at the same time, lead a desperate guard, assuming that he has failed in his task to guard his prisoners, to a saving faith in Jesus.
DAY 15
Read Acts 17:1-34
At the Areopagus, Paul preaches to the men of Athens. He begins with concepts about which they agree: the existence of God and the fact that this God is to be worshipped.
DAY 16
Read Acts 18:1-28
We now find Paul is in Corinth, ministering to the gentiles who were present there. He is brought by a mob of Jews before Gallio, the Roman governmental authority of the area. Jesus had just encouraged Paul saying, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent.”
DAY 17
Read Acts 19:1-20:38
Paul gathers the Ephesian elders together to speak to them one more time before he travels to Jerusalem, where he knows that persecution awaits him. As he offers his parting words, what he warns them most strongly about is false teaching.
DAY 18
Read Acts 21:1-22:29
When Paul arrives in Jerusalem and goes to the Temple, some of the Jews in the city accuse him of false teaching and of defiling the holiness of the temple by bringing some gentiles into a portion of the temple in which they were not permitted to enter.
DAY 19
Read Acts 22:30-26:32
Towards the end of the book of Acts, Paul is passed from one trial and one judge to the next. In this section, Paul stands trial, or is examined by a set of three rulers: Felix, Festus, and Agrippa.
DAY 20
Read Acts 27:1-28:10
In the last section, we saw that all the human powers of government were unable to thwart God’s plan to send Paul to Rome. Although there was delay, and Paul spent years in prison awaiting his transferal, God still was not defeated by human authority.
DAY 21
Read Acts 28:11-30
In the final section of Acts, Paul arrives in Rome and continues to preach the Gospel. The final line of the book is a powerful one. It reads that he was “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.”