Acts Daily Devotional Podcast

John Mark went home. The journey ahead meant crossing the Taurus mountains, a treacherous stretch known for bandits and brutal conditions. Whatever drove Mark's decision, the team was now smaller. Paul and Barnabas pressed on to Pisidian Antioch, walked into a synagogue on the Sabbath, and waited. When the leaders offered the standard invitation for a visiting rabbi to speak, they had no idea what...

Barnabas and Saul crossed to Cyprus and preached their way across the island with nothing dramatic to show for it. Then they reached Paphos and walked into a spiritual showdown. A sorcerer named Elymas tried to block the Roman governor from hearing the gospel. Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, called him exactly what he was and pronounced blindness on him. The governor believed. In this episode,...

Five leaders in Antioch: a Cypriot landowner, an African, a North African, a man raised in Herod's palace, and a reformed religious terrorist. They were worshiping and fasting when the Holy Spirit spoke: "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul." For twelve chapters, the gospel had been spreading reactively, pushed outward by persecution. Now, for the first time, the church sent missionaries on purpose...

Herod put on a silver robe, stepped into the morning sun, and let a crowd call him a god. He didn't correct them. An angel struck him down, and he was eaten by worms. The man who had just been hailed as divine died in agony, consumed from within. Luke's reason is devastating in its simplicity: "because he did not give the glory to God." At the beginning of this chapter, James was dead, Peter was i...

Peter showed up at the door of a prayer meeting that had been begging God for his release. And they didn't believe it. A servant girl named Rhoda recognized his voice and was so overjoyed she forgot to open the gate. She ran back to tell everyone, and they told her she was out of her mind. Meanwhile, Peter kept knocking. In this episode, we discover one of the funniest scenes in the New Testament...

The night before his scheduled execution, Peter was sleeping. Chained between two soldiers, facing death in the morning, sleeping so soundly that an angel had to hit him in the side to wake him up. Chains fell off. Guards stayed asleep. An iron gate swung open on its own. Peter walked out into the cool night air, convinced he was dreaming until the angel vanished and he realized it had all really...

Herod Agrippa executed James, the brother of John, with a sword. One sentence. No dramatic buildup. One of Jesus' inner circle, gone. When Herod saw it pleased the Jewish leaders, he arrested Peter too, throwing him into maximum security with sixteen soldiers standing guard. The same God who would soon deliver Peter allowed James to die. There's no explanation given. No theological justification o...

A prophet named Agabus predicted a severe famine across the Roman world. The Antioch church heard the news and didn't panic, didn't hoard, didn't look out for themselves first. Their immediate instinct was to help the believers in Judea who would be hit hardest. Each person gave according to their ability. No pressure. No arm-twisting. Just grace-fueled generosity from people who understood they w...

Jerusalem sent Barnabas to investigate what was happening in Antioch. He could have come looking for problems. Instead, when he arrived and saw the grace of God, he was glad. Then he did something remarkable: he traveled a hundred miles to Tarsus to recruit Saul, the man God had set apart for exactly this kind of work. Together they spent a full year teaching and building up the church. And it was...

The persecution that was supposed to destroy the church scattered its embers into dry tinder. Believers who fled Jerusalem after Stephen's death carried the gospel north to Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, 300 miles from where they started. At first, they spoke only to Jews. But then some unnamed believers from Cyprus and Cyrene did something unprecedented: they started telling pagans about Jesus....

Peter built his case layer by layer: the vision, the messengers, the Spirit's command, six witnesses, Cornelius's angel, and then the moment the Holy Spirit fell on the Gentiles "just as on us at the beginning." His closing question silenced the room: "How could I possibly hinder God?" The critics became worshipers. "So then, God has given repentance resulting in life even to the Gentiles." That w...

Peter returned to Jerusalem expecting a welcome. He got a trial. "You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them." The circumcision party wasn't interested in what happened to Cornelius's household. They went straight for the social offense: a Jewish man at a Gentile table. In this episode, we watch Peter respond with pastoral wisdom. He doesn't pull rank or get defensive. He just tells the story...

God didn't wait for the altar call. The moment Peter spoke the words "forgiveness of sins," the Holy Spirit fell on every Gentile in the room. The six Jewish believers who'd come with Peter were stunned. They watched it happen: tongues, worship, the unmistakable evidence of God's presence landing on uncircumcised people who had never set foot in a synagogue. It was the Gentile Pentecost, the third...

"Now I truly understand that God doesn't show favoritism." Peter opened his mouth in a Roman centurion's living room and admitted, in real time, that he'd just figured something out. After a lifetime of assuming God had favorites, the fog finally lifted. What followed was the first full gospel sermon ever preached to a purely Gentile audience: Jesus is Lord of all, he went about doing good, they k...

After a thirty-mile journey, Peter arrived at Cornelius's door and faced a choice. He knew that stepping over that threshold meant answering for it back in Jerusalem. He stepped through anyway. Inside, a Roman centurion fell at his feet, and Peter pulled him up: "Stand up. I'm just a man." Then he named the elephant in the room, the centuries-old prohibition against Jews entering Gentile homes, an...

While Peter stood on the rooftop trying to make sense of the vision, three men knocked at the gate below. Cornelius's messengers had been delayed, stopping to ask directions through the streets of Joppa. Had they arrived a few minutes earlier, Peter would have had no framework for why Gentile strangers were on his porch. Providence doesn't always look like a miracle. Sometimes it looks like gettin...

Peter was hungry, praying on a rooftop in Joppa, when a sheet descended from heaven filled with animals no devout Jew would ever touch. A voice commanded: "Kill and eat." Peter refused. Three times the vision repeated. Three times God replied: "What I have made clean, do not call impure." But this was never really about food. In this episode, we discover that God was dismantling something Peter ha...

Thirty miles up the coast from Joppa, a Roman centurion named Cornelius was praying when an angel appeared with specific instructions: send for a man named Peter. Cornelius was devout, generous, and God-fearing, but he wasn't yet a follower of Jesus. His conversion would open the floodgates of the gospel to the entire Gentile world. In this episode, we see God orchestrating events in two cities si...

Dorcas never preached a sermon, but her funeral became one. She was known for one thing: making clothes for widows. When she died, a room full of grieving women held up the robes she had stitched for them, displaying evidence of love. Peter knelt, prayed, and spoke two words: "Tabitha, get up." She opened her eyes. In this episode, we encounter a woman whose quiet faithfulness shook a city and a m...

A man named Aeneas had been paralyzed and bedridden for eight years. 2,920 days of waking up unable to move. Then Peter walked in and said six words: "Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you." Not "I heal you." Jesus Christ. The source of the power was never in question. In this episode, we watch one healing turn into a regional awakening as the entire Sharon plain turned to the Lord. God often works throu...

The hunter became the hunted. Saul's powerful preaching made him a marked man, and he escaped Damascus in the middle of the night, lowered through a wall in a basket like a smuggled fugitive. When he reached Jerusalem, the believers wouldn't accept him. The wounds were too fresh. Enter Barnabas, the Son of Encouragement, who risked his own credibility to vouch for a man nobody else would trust. In...

Ananias walked through the door and spoke the most unexpected word Saul had ever heard: "Brother." Three days earlier, Saul was hunting Christians. Now a Christian was calling him family. Scales fell from his eyes, and almost immediately the former persecutor began proving in the synagogues that Jesus is the Messiah. The same intellectual firepower that had driven his persecution was now deployed...

God's next assignment for an ordinary disciple named Ananias sounded like a death wish: go find the man who's been arresting and killing Christians, lay hands on him, and welcome him into the family. Ananias pushed back. He had every reason to be afraid. But he brought his fear to God instead of letting it make the decision for him. In this episode, we meet one of the unsung heroes of the New Test...

Saul was breathing threats like a dragon exhaling fire, hunting Christians all the way to Damascus. Then heaven interrupted. A light brighter than the midday sun knocked him to the ground, and a voice asked the question that would rewrite the rest of his life: "Why are you persecuting me?" In this episode, we watch the most dangerous enemy of the early church come face to face with the risen Jesus...

The Ethiopian was reading Isaiah 53. Who is the prophet talking about? Philip opened his mouth and, beginning with that Scripture, told him the good news about Jesus. The suffering servant. The Lamb led to slaughter. Isaiah was pointing to Christ, and Philip connected the dots. They came to water and the Ethiopian said, Look, there is water. What would keep me from being baptized? As a eunuch, he...