Pastor's Ponderings: Monday Bible Study on Acts of the Apostles 3:17-26 (August 25, 2025)

August 25, 2025:  Monday Bible Study on Acts 3:17-26

Good morning my dear friends in Christ! Please join me in prayers for rain today and tomorrow. The monsoon has been very dry this summer. In fact, our rain totals are only 50% of the normal monsoon this year so far. In our other prayers, let's pray for peace in the Middle East, for our LORD to break into the hard hearts of the government of Israel, that the wholesale murder of Palestinian peoples in Gaza might stop. Starvation and death will be a terrible historic time which will never be forgotten as a time of great evil and the death that it often wields without care. The war in Ukraine is not much different. Suits for peace are falling on the deaf ears of the Russian government as they continue to act with violence toward the Ukrainian people, with a mind to annex portions of sovereign nations who just happens to have a seaport that the Russians desire. Here too there have been countless deaths on both sides of this war, and the Ukraine is now a nation with so much damage that it will take the world to help them rebuild. Pray for peace in these lands that seem so far away from us.

Today’s study takes us on one more step in the growing trust that Peter must speak to the crowds, knowing that the presence of Christ is with him at every turn, and in the face of what might be persecution and death for both him and John.  There are several characteristics of early Christian preaching for which Peter creates a model.

1. At its beginning Peter's message is filled with words of mercy, and of a warning for the people about their role in the death of God's Son, the Messiah. Though ignorance was the cause of the action against Christ which they demanded, now there is no longer an opportunity for that very same ignorance to continue.

2. The obligation which this knowledge now brings is that the people, and the individuals, must repent! And then to allow the Spirit to create in them a change of heart for the actions that they had perpetrated against Jesus, the Messiah. They must turn in regret and to be open to that change of heart, a gift of the Spirit, which will pull them more strongly into this merciful and loving relationship with the Messiah who they have destroyed.

3. Repentance has certain consequences. In this case it will be to step forward from the burden of what they have done and enter in the new future that the Messiah has given them through His death on the Cross, Freedom from the burden of their old, and oft repeated sin.  In all this the sinful notes of the past, the present, and the people's future will be affected.

4. The next great good news that Peter offers is that the Christ of God will come again! Though the meaning of exactly what that means has still been a mystery for thousands of Years, and yet it really does point to the future impact of the Son of God who was crucified at their hands. This means that there is an intentionality of God for how the world and future are going to move forward.

5. Peter calls upon the Jews to look to their own Scriptures and the words of prophet after prophet about what would happen when the Son of God, the Messiah, would come, and Jesus was that long promised Messiah!

6. Peter reminds the Jews that they have a preexisting status with God. They are the chosen ones of God!

7. Peter next reminds the people that their being chosen was not for special honor, but rather for special service. You and I know this one too. We are all called to be evangelists who carry the good news of Jesus Christ in our hearts, and on our lips.

   
   

God bless you on this beautiful day filled with the Love of Christ for each of our lives.

With the Love of Christ, Pastor Kim