Pastor's Ponderings: Tuesday Bible Study on Acts of the Apostles 1:6-8 (July 8, 2025)

July 8, 2025:  Tuesday Bible Study on Acts of the Apostles 1:6-8

Blessings and Peace be with you on this Tuesday morning.

I want to remind you all that we have a Foodies of Faith meal coming up on the last Friday of July at 11:30AM at the Blue Willow on north Campbell. Please sign up at church, or call the church office, so that we know you are coming with. If you will need a ride, give Pastor a call to plan for that to happen. This Sunday, July 13, Sarah will be available at church to take your blood pressure after service. We offer special thanks to Sarah for this ministry. She is a VA nurse.

My purpose in today's reading from Acts 1 is to help us all understand that there are substantial differences in how we see God's plan for His children and Creation, and how people, those who are faithful and those who are unfaithful, view what they believe God is going to do!  Like the Jews of Christ's time, we too often think of the return of Christ, or for the Jews the coming of the Messiah, that it will mean that God will step in to turn all authority and power over to the faithful. That is certainly what Christ's disciples understood. They were confident that Jesus would return Israel and her people to absolute full power over every enemy that they had ever faced or were ever going to have to face. Way too often our view of what God is doing is about politics, wealth, and power. In fact, this is the exact point of the direction in which the Christian Nationalists are pointed. God will use them to run everything and defeat every perceived enemy of the faithful. That just might include disposing of other Christians who do not think like that. I can tell you that I would be one who they would choose to dispose of! All of this is why Jesus had such a difficult time teaching His disciples about the Kingdom and what it meant for them. I suspect that at the time of the Pentecost event, and the pouring out of the Spirit, there were those in the midst of the disciples who continued to believe that their place would be to sit in power over others who had come to faith in Jesus.  This may well explain why Paul and Peter were often at odds with each other and give us the reason it took them so long to reach a common understanding about the nature of the disciple's place in the kingdom. Then we come to Jesus. How do you think that He looked at the work and its result in the world as He moved through His ministry, His death, and the forty days after His Resurrection as he taught the disciples with intensity and action so that they might hold His own view about the Kingdom of God and the people who serve it?  Basically, where we end up is, one side is determined to hold worldly power, but the other, the true disciples of Christ know that the Kingdom is meant to bear the Love of God into the world through Christ and the work of believers.  Let’s just take a moment to consider a part of the Lord's Prayer. We pray this prayer every week, and it considered to be the perfect prayer by believers. The phrase about which I am speaking is "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven."  It is clear from this perfect pray which Christ has given us, that it is His every intent to bring the LORD'S Grace and Love to every place, and every person on this planet, and more, to the whole of God's Creation. God's Kingdom will not be based on power, but rather on Love. Imagine the trepidation of the people who were called to serve and to go to places outside of their experience, to the corners of their world! But given courage and strength by the Holy Spirit, they went! And because they went, the world has never been the same. Their witness changed everything!

Thanks for being with me today. Please note that there will be no Bible Studies next week, I will be on vacation for the week. I will, however, be at the Sunday worship services.

With Love in Christ, Pastor Kim