How would you describe a healthy church? We typically evaluate the effectiveness, the viability, or the health of a church based upon its buildings, its programs, its preaching, its worship music, or the friendliness of its people.

How is your prayer life? A lot of ink has been spilled over the importance, the practice, the form, and the blessings of prayer. But in my experience, the discipline of praying is still one of the most difficult things for believers to engage in. Most of us find it hard to strike a regular rhythm of praying, it can be difficult to see prayer as a conversation with our Heavenly Father who is invisible to us, and oftentimes it is hard to know what to say.

Opposition to the name of Jesus is nothing new. History is absolutely littered with the stories of saints who have faced the horror of hell’s fury as they sought to live in obedience to God while proclaiming his name on hell’s doorstep.

The healing of the crippled man (Acts 3:1 – 10) was a miraculous thing to behold. In the blink of an eye, forty – plus years of suffering, for the crippled man, were over as God fixed the seemingly unfixable.

The text in front of us is the beginning of an episode in the early church that takes up nearly two entire chapters of the book of Acts.

Whenever I read this passage, I am awestruck by the awesomeness of the early church or better yet, the awesomeness of God as he plants the early church within a yard of hell. Think about the things that you and I call awesome. What experiences have you had that you would call awesome?

Peter’s Pentecostal sermon was very different than what you might hear in today’s so-called Pentecostal churches. The main differences are that…

The day of Pentecost in the book of Acts has been described as a day that was full of fireworks, much like our Fourth of July celebrations.² It was a day that had always been full of historical significance and anticipation of the promises of God being fulfilled.