The 260 Journey

Day 112 Today’s Reading: Acts 23 My father used to use a phrase when we were about to get spanked when we were kids— The bag is getting full . It meant that a bunch of things we did were adding up, and he couldn’t take anymore. Have you ever just got so full that you could not take anymore and you lose it? Words come flying out. Maybe even a profanity or two. Things are said that if somebody heard...

Day 111 Today’s Reading: Acts 22 The apostle Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus in Acts 9. That was AD 34. It was an amazing story of Paul encountering the resurrected Jesus. Our chapter today is Acts 22, and we find here, thirteen chapters later, that Paul is telling his story from chapter 9. This was in AD 59, twenty-five years after his conversion, he is still telling about his encounter wi...

Day 110 Today’s Reading: Acts 21 In order to talk about Acts 21 today, I have to tell you a story with a big gap. Technology has made the world a neighborhood. Because of technology, people get famous real fast today. If you have a smart phone, you have a camera. And with social media, you have an audience. And if enough people watch it, you can be viral. Did you know that 42 percent of the world...

Day 109 Today’s Reading: Acts 20 Nodding off. We have all done it. In church, a board meeting, a lecture, a conference, while someone is talking, in school on all levels. I have nodded off while praying and while others are praying. My favorite nodding-off story is from one of my dear friends in Michigan. While he was at university, his friend always slept in one of their large lecture classes, so...

Day 108 Today's Reading: Acts 19 In Acts 18 we were introduced to the first pastor of the Church of Ephesus, Apollos. This pastor had everything going on: he was eloquent, mighty in the Scriptures, fervent in spirit, committed to Bible accuracy, and spoke boldly in public about Jesus. Paul’s traveling companions, Aquila and Priscilla, heard him preach and noticed something missing in this impressi...

Day 107 Today's Reading: Acts 18 I had a discussion with a friend who believed the gifts of the Spirit were only for the first century and not for today, that the gifts ceased. That is called “cessation” theology. He keyed in on one gift he said he had a hard time with, and that was what “you Pentecostals call the filling of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues. It’s the last and least of all the...

Day 106 Today's Reading: Acts 17 Quaker minister and advocate of religious freedom, who also founded Pennsylvania, wrote about the dangers of jealousy: Jealousy is a kind of civil war in the soul, where judgment and imagination are at perpetual jars [odds]. . . . Nothing stands safe in its way: nature, interest, religion, must yield to its fury. It violates contracts, dissolves society, breaks wed...

Day 105 Today’s Reading: Acts 16 Welcome to one of the most important New Testament chapters, Acts 16. This chapter is the reason we meet for church, and it all started with God saying "no" to the apostle Paul. Let me tell you that my “no” story changed the direction of my life. In the summer of 1983, I had the opportunity to go on two mission trips. The first was to Jamaica and the other to Detro...

Day 104 Today’s Reading: Acts 15 I’ll always be thankful for my friend and mentor, Dr. R. T. Kendall, who during a critical time in my life quoted these words from an unknown source: “Always remember that the best of men are still men at best.” We all have our faults and flaws, even the greatest Christian leaders. In today’s reading, we will see how true these words are. First let me tell you a re...

Day 103 Today’s Reading: Acts 14 C. S. Lewis wrote, “Miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” Lewis was saying that a miracle was retelling the big story that God exists and God is good. Seeing a miracle should help us to see the big letters. Unfortunately, as we find in today’s rea...

Day 102 Today’s Reading: Acts 13 In her children’s novel, The Candymakers, Wendy Mass wrote, "If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.” Well, in today’s reading we see that the butterfly is about to come out, because a change is coming. Can you imagine having Sunday school teachers in your home church named Paul and Barnabas? I mean the Paul and Barnabas. The church in Antioch did. Acts...

Day 101 Today’s Reading: Acts 12 Today we come to a challenging passage of Scripture. We are about to see two men in prison, yet those same men’s lives have a different outcome. And it seems there is something that happened that changed one of these men’s future. Let’s read the story: About that time Herod the king laid hands on some who belonged to the church in order to mistreat them. And he had...

Day 100 Today’s Reading: Acts 11 In today’s reading we see a word that we use all the time but it’s used for the first time in the entire Bible. In fact, the word is used only three times in the entire New Testament. It is the word Christian . That sounds impossible, but it’s true. Pastor Sam Pascoe once said, “Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a...

Day 99 Today’s Reading: Acts 10 I’m excited about today’s chapter. Acts 10 is one of my favorite chapters in the New Testament. It gives the thirty-thousand-foot view of why we pray. And it does this by telling a story of two separate guys, an Italian and a Jew, and how their worlds intersected through prayer. It reminds me of something I’ve often heard said: “The more I pray, the more coincidence...

Day 98 Today’s Reading: Acts 9 Today we read about the incredible conversion story of the greatest Christian who ever lived, the apostle Paul. We find his story in Acts 9. Before his conversion, Paul was murdering and persecuting young Christians. But he was about to be changed forever: Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, and asked f...

Day 97 Today’s Reading: Acts 8 All of us, as children, heard the warning about playing with fire. The combination of youth and fire can be destructive. This is true both naturally and spiritually. In today’s reading, we learn about a great revival that came to a city called Samaria. The city faced two kinds of fire, and thank God, the right one came: When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samar...

Day 96 Today’s Reading: Acts 7 One of my favorite books by C. S. Lewis is called God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics . In it, he includes a chapter called “Cross Examination,” which is a question and answer time with Professor Lewis. One of the questions: "Do you think there will be widespread travel in space?" His response: “I look forward with horror to contact with the other inhabite...

Day 95 Today’s Reading: Acts 6 God sees beyond anything we can ever see. That’s why the Bible is quick to point out to us in Isaiah 55:8 that His thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are higher than our ways. That’s important for us to remember as we look at today’s reading in Acts 6, because this is where the early church starts to get organized. It’s all brand new for them, as there has ne...

Day 94 Today’s Reading: Acts 5 Ananias and Sapphira are well known in church history. For those unfamiliar with their catastrophic ending, listen closely as we discuss Acts 5. They are a couple who sold some real estate, brought a portion of the money for the offering at church, and were called out by Peter and judged by God on the spot. Listen to the scariest offering section of a church service...

Day 93 Today's Reading: Acts 4 Today’s reading in Acts 4 is connected to a miracle story in Acts 3. In Acts 3, Peter and John prayed for a man they had seen every day at the temple, but this time with the fresh power from the Holy Spirit they received in Acts 2, they see this lame man walk and he's healed. Peter and John told the people that Jesus did this miracle. That’s where we pick up our stor...

Day 92 Today's Reading: Acts 3 When a big event is over and life starts up again, how do we cope? How does that look? Or how do we look? After an inspiring Sunday church service, Monday will be there. Monday is always coming. There will be no lights, no band, no greeters at the door, no hugging . . . because it’s Monday and we have a job and a schedule to keep. The biggest event in church history...

Day 91 Today’s Reading: Acts 2 The church was entering a time that would prove to be the most difficult to be a Christian. Believers would die or be persecuted for following Jesus. The persecution started in the first century and continued for three centuries under the orders of Roman emperors Nero to Diocletian who ordered some of the most horrific things done to Christians. Jesus knew this diffi...

Day 90 Today's Reading: Acts 1 Dr. R.T. Kendall recalls words his mother told him once about an old saint who had great influence on his mother’s life—and consequently on his. She said, “I have served the Lord for so long now that I can hardly tell the difference between a blessing and a trial.” She understood something important: that what you call a problem can really be an answer to prayer. Wha...

Day 89 Today's Reading: John 21 We know that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1879. Back then they didn’t have mass production, so each bulb had to be created separately. He and his colleagues worked twenty-four painstaking and meticulous hours straight to put just one together. The story goes that when Edison was finished with that light bulb, he gave it to a young boy to deliver up the s...

Day 88 Today's Reading: John 20 What if Jesus showed up to your Sunday night service today? I know we talk about Resurrection morning, but not many talk about what happened that night. Resurrection night was a huge event for the disciples. I’m afraid if Jesus showed up to one of our twenty-first-century Sunday evening church services, He wouldn’t find many there. And Jesus had an important Sunday-...