NIV Application Bible Podcast: Episode 25 (Acts 8)

• To the people who’ve been told by culture, “You’re not good enough for God.” That’s not true. Our God loves the least of these, and he wants us to love the least of these. [Music] Welcome back to the NIV Application Bible podcast. Can you believe we are all ready to the book of Acts? This has gone by so fast.
• Um, before I dive into Acts, I actually want to tell you tell you a story that I think kind of sets up where we’re going in Acts. I spend a lot of time here in Nashville, Tennessee, working with women in recovery. And I I like to take a lot of my friends who are in recovery to church. And a lot of my friends who are in recovery come from TPW, Tennessee Prison for Women.
• And they haven’t been in that particular setting in church in a long time. they’ve gone to chapel uh while they were incarcerated, but they haven’t been in a church environment. So, we have a couple of rules when I pick them up and drive them to church. Uh, one is they can smoke. A lot of them smoke as they’re getting off hard drugs.
• They smoke for a little while, but they’ve got to roll the windows down because I I don’t like the smell of cigarette smoke. And then they can listen to their music as long as it’s not trashy or ratchet. But then every other song we play worship music because I’m trying to introduce them to this amazing worship music.
• So, all that being said, usually I pull into the parking lot at church and you know the windows are down, smoke’s billowing out and Commodores is playing and we get lots of side eye on on the way on the way into church and we come rolling in not too long ago. We were sitting up front. I’m sitting next to this amazing young woman named Lindsay who just um unbelievable story of redemption in her backstory, but she hadn’t been in church in a long time.
• And she’s sitting next to me and she’s listened to our pastor. Our pastor was talking about how the disciples were such a mly crew. How Jesus intentionally picked messy, mistakrone people as his disciples. And she’s listening. And maybe five minutes into the sermon, she elbows me real hard in the in the ribs.
• And she went, “Miss Lisa, Jesus had a thing for losers, didn’t he?” And everybody heard and everybody got tickled. And I thought, “That is theology 101. That is awesome. Jesus has a thing for messy people. That could be the underlying theme of Luke’s writing. Luke wrote both the Gospel according to Luke and he wrote the book of Acts.
• Some scholars think he wrote those together as a seamless document, kind of like Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back. Here’s what we know definitively about Luke. And I’m reading this from right toward the beginning of Acts. There’s this little profile called People to Know Luke. And here’s what what the scholars who made up all these amazing notes in the NIV application Bible said.
• They said, “Luke wrote more words of the New Testament than any other human author.” A remarkable fact. Paul wrote more books, but Luke used more words. I like that too because I’m a windbag given the fact that he is also the only certain gentile author. In other words, he wasn’t a Jewish Jewish author as most of the authors of scripture were.
• Luke was also a physician who wrote his gospel in the book of Acts to someone named Theophilles in order to strengthen his faith in Christ. Luke’s writing is characterized by careful descriptions and details demonstrating his high level of education and providing us with welldocumented accounts of the lives of Jesus and his disciples.
• Here’s my favorite part. Again, comes from that purple application note. Luke shows us God’s love for outsiders, for messy people, for losers, if you will. According to Lindsay, whether people are considered outsiders because of health, ethnicity, gender, wealth, or any other reason, we need to remember that God does not judge people as the world does.