Sermons on Acts 19
Jesus and Other Gods
I received an encouraging note from a discerning young man in our congregation. This is what he wrote to me by e-mail: “Pastor Ritch, I am in the seventh grade. My social studies teacher brought up the subject of beliefs of certain religions. He said that Jews and Muslims and Christians all believe in the same God. I went to him and asked him what he meant. He said, ‘We all believe in the same God but we all believe…
Our Spiritual Fight with Evil
Every authentic Christian engages in a spiritual fight with the Devil everyday. We cannot enter the day thinking, “Today is a day of peace”. We do not have to look for the fight; the evil one comes to us and engages us in it. An article for the San Francisco Chronicle, Herb Caen writes, “Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning…
The Holy Spirit and You
The book that we have been studying has a one-word title, Acts, and it tells us of deeds and actions. This title appears in many Greek manuscripts. In fact, some of those manuscripts give an even longer title, The Acts of the Apostles. However, many commentators will argue that this book will be more precisely entitled, The Acts of the Holy Spirit Through the Apostles. After all, the work that is described in these pages is super-natural in character and…