The Acts Are Still Being Written

“He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ, with all boldness and without hindrance.” – Acts 28:31 (NIV)

The book of Acts ends mid-story. The last two verses describe Paul in Rome, under house arrest, welcoming all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance. No formal conclusion. No summary of what had been accomplished. No epilogue tying up the loose ends of the various characters whose stories began in chapter 1. The narrative simply stops, while Paul is still active, still preaching, still bearing the kind of witness that Acts has been documenting for twenty-eight chapters.

This open ending is not an accident or a literary oversight. It is, almost certainly, deliberate. Luke, who was a careful and skilled writer, understood exactly what he was doing. He wrote a book about the acts of the Holy Spirit through the early church, and he ended it in the middle of those acts, because the acts were not finished. The story was continuing as he wrote. It was continuing in the communities that received his account. It was continuing in the generations that came after them. It is continuing now, in the communities that gather under the name of Jesus around the world, and in the life of whoever is reading these words today.

Jesus’s promise in John 14:12 is the theological warrant for this open ending: very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. Greater things. Not lesser imitations of the works recorded in the Gospels and Acts, but greater things still, because the Spirit who empowered every work recorded in Acts has been poured out on all people in all generations of the church’s life, and the scope of that pouring across the whole of human history and geography is precisely what Jesus meant by greater.

This month has taken us through stories of wind and fire, of chains falling and prisons shaking, of the dead rising and the lame walking and entire cities turning toward God through the witness of Spirit-filled, Spirit-empowered, Spirit-directed people who had no natural resources sufficient for the work they were given. What they had was the Spirit. What they offered was their availability. What God did with those two things is the record we have been reading.

You have the same Spirit. You are the next chapter. The lame man who needs someone to say walk is in your city. The Cornelius who needs someone to cross a cultural barrier is in your neighbourhood. The Saul breathing murderous threats is on a road that passes through your sphere of influence. The prison that needs a midnight worship to shake its foundations is the situation someone you know is currently locked in. The Acts of the Holy Ghost are still being written, and the chapter being written right now includes your name.

Today, close August with a single, simple, fully meant prayer: Spirit of God, write your next chapter through me. I am available. I am open. Whatever you did through Peter and Paul and Philip and Stephen and Tabitha and Cornelius and the unnamed thousands whose stories Acts did not have room to record, do through me. The era is still open. The Acts are still being written. I am ready.

Prayer

Holy Spirit, write your next chapter through me. I offer you what I have: my availability, my voice, my time, my faith, my willingness to go where you send me and say what you give me and do what you ask of me regardless of how it appears from the outside. The story you started at Pentecost is not finished. I want to be the next verse. Use me. In Jesus’ name, amen.