Give Us This Day Devotionals, Volume 5: Acts

By Charles Erlandson

Give Us This Day is a unique daily devotional commentary for the entire New Testament based on the ancient method called lectio divina. Lectio divina, or "divine reading," is the method used by the early church and countless Christians through the centuries to read the Scriptures to form and transform the soul more than merely to inform the mind.
Give Us This Day deals in depth with entire passages and their contexts. Rather than selecting only certain portions of the New Testament to write about, Fr. Charles has written a devotional for each and every passage of the New Testament.
Fr. Charles writes for the whole person: he's not afraid to use his sense of humor, and he carefully relates the Bible not only to the individual's life but also to the life of the Church. At the end of each day's devotional, an appropriate Prayer is offered, as well as Points for Further Reflection on the day's lesson. Each devotional concludes with a suggested Resolution to put into effect what the Spirit has stirred up in the heart of the reader during the course of his reading, meditation, and prayer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781725282599

Charles Erlandson

Charles Erlandson is a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church and serves as the assistant rector at Good Shepherd Reformed Episcopal Church in Tyler, Texas, where he resides with his wife and children. He is a professor of church history and the director of communications at Cranmer Theological House in Dallas. His previous works include Orthodox Anglican Identity: The Quest for Unity in a Diverse Religious Tradition; Love Me, Love My Wife: Ten Reasons Christians Must Join a Local Church; and Take This Cup: How God Transforms Suffering into Glory and Joy.

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Introduction

Welcome to Give Us This Day, the daily Bible devotional I’ve written for every passage in the New Testament. I began to write Give Us This Day in the summer of 2006, in response to the promptings of the Holy Spirit for me to write a daily Bible devotional based on the ancient way of reading the Scriptures known as the lectio divina. Originally called Daily Bread for the first five years of its existence, my daily devotionals began as a daily e-mail I sent out to a growing readership. However, for some time it has been my goal to publish the entire series of devotionals so that there would be a daily Bible devotional for every passage of the New Testament. Some of you have been reading Give Us This Day from the beginning, and I thank all of you who have been its faithful readers over the years.

While I originally wrote Give Us This Day primarily for the Reformed Episcopal Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas at which I was serving as rector (St. Chrysostom’s then, but now called Christ Anglican), I became aware that many others might profit by these devotionals. When I first began writing, I surveyed the other daily devotionals that were out there and immediately noticed some differences between what I was writing and what others had written. I was concerned that most of the other devotionals only dealt with a verse of the Bible for each day, and I could find none that provided a devotional for every passage of the New Testament. I also noticed that what I had written was usually longer than the uniformly bite-sized devotionals that seemed to be the publishing norm. In addition, most other devotionals did not include suggestions for further meditations, and virtually none offered suggested resolutions to help put into effect what God had revealed through a given passage. At the end of each Give Us This Day meditation, I, therefore, offer not only a Prayer but also some Points for Further Reflection and a Daily Resolution.

This particular volume covers the Acts of the Apostles and is the fifth of an eight-volume series that covers the entire New Testament. Give Us This Day will be made available as a printed book and an e-book and is also available as a daily devotional that is sent each day to those on my list.

Give us this day our daily bread is the most fundamental prayer we can ask on behalf of ourselves. Knowing this, our Lord not only commanded us to pray for this every day but also offers Himself to us as our daily bread.

As the Bread of Life that offers Himself to us each day as true spiritual food, Jesus comes to us in many ways. The feedings of the four thousand and five thousand (especially in the Gospel of St. John) remind us that it is through faithful participation in the covenantal meal of the Holy Communion that Jesus feeds us. Through the creatures of bread and wine, Jesus gives His Body and Blood to us and feeds us at His heavenly banquet.

But He feeds us in other ways. In one of his sermons, St. Augustine expressed his belief that the feeding of the four thousand isn’t just about filling the bellies of men with bread and fish, nor is it solely about the Holy Communion. For St. Augustine and others, the Bread of Life is also the Holy Scriptures, upon which we are to feed every day, for they are the words of life. That the Word of God is also the Bread of God is satisfyingly illustrated by the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent in the Book of Common Prayer, in which we ask God to Grant that we may in such wise hear them [the Scriptures], read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.

However, Christians in the twenty-first century often do not properly eat or digest the Word of God. I’ve noticed some of you snacking in a sort of hit and run fashion, as you rush to lead your real life. I’ll squeeze in a chapter of Bible reading today, you think. Some of you are to be commended for devoting yourself to studying the Scriptures, but unfortunately it is in such a way that only the mind is fed. Meanwhile, the soul gets spiritual kwashiorkor, which may easily be identified by your distended spiritual belly.

Scripture must, therefore, be eaten with prayer, which may be likened to the spiritual blood into which the bread of life must be digested and ingested. Through a life of prayer, the Word of God is carried into every part of your life and becomes your life, just as a piece of digested food is broken down, enters the blood, and is carried to every part of your body. Only through a life of prayer, which is a third means by which Jesus becomes our daily bread, will the Word of God become spiritual food for us. After all, haven’t many of us had teachers of the Bible in college who have read and studied the Word but who, apart from a life of prayer and obedience, use their studies to starve themselves and others?

The most fruitful way I know of to receive my daily bread of Scripture is through the ancient practice of the lectio divina, or divine reading, with which I hope many of you are familiar. The essence of the lectio divina is not just another Bible study to inform our minds. Instead, the lectio divina is formative reading, in which we allow the Holy Scriptures, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to form our very being. There are four basic steps in this divine reading:

1.lectio—reading/ listening

a.Cultivate the ability to listen deeply.

b.Your reading is slow, formative reading.

c.Your reading is based on previous reading and study.

2.meditation—meditation

a.Gently stop reading when you have found a word, phrase, or passage through which God is speaking to you personally.

b.Ruminate over this passage, as a cow ruminates or chews its cud.

c.Say the passage over and over, noticing different aspects—taste it!

d.Allow God’s Word to become His word for you at every level of your being and to interact with your inner world of concerns, memories, and ideas.

3.oratio—prayer

a.Pray—or dialogue with God—over the passage.

b.Interact with God as one who loves you and is present with you.

c.Allow God to transform your thoughts, memories, agendas, tendencies, and habits.

d.Re-affirm and repeat what God has just told you.

4.contemplation—contemplation

a.Rest in the presence of the One who has come to transform and bless you.

b.Rest quietly, experiencing the presence of God.

c.Leave with a renewed energy and commitment to what God has just told you.

Daily reading of the Holy Scriptures through the lectio divina is just the food we need to nourish and correct our impoverished spiritual lives, our over-emphasis on the intellect, and our random forages into the Bible that leave us unsatisfied.

A Few Words of Advice

1.Use what is profitable, and don’t worry about the rest.

2.Don’t feel the need to meditate on every part of every Give Us This Day. It’s not good to exhaust yourself spiritually. Also, don’t feel it necessary to keep up with a different Resolution every day: you’ll drive yourself crazy in the process and unnecessarily feel like a failure! Work on what God is calling you to work on. Use the Give Us This Day as it is most profitable for you.

3.If God stops you and tells you to do something different—for example, to meditate on one small part of the lesson and apply it to your life today—drop everything else and listen to Him!

4.Most importantly: once you’ve developed the godly habit of meditating on the Bible every day—don’t ever let go of it!

Ways to Profitably Eat Give Us This Day

1.Find and use some system for reading Scripture daily. I’ve organized Give Us This Day in the canonical order of the New Testament: from Matthew to Revelation. But many church traditions use a lectionary system of reading the New Testament. With your favorite lectionary in hand, you can read Give Us This Day with the daily New Testament assigned by that lectionary.

2.Give Us This Day was written with the conscious aim of encouraging the reader to think more actively about the act of interpretation. While the literal meaning of the text is always the beginning point, the Bible can legitimately be applied in other ways. I’ve especially tried to suggest that the Bible is best read with the interpretation of the entire Church in mind.

3.I’ve also written Give Us This Day so that it could serve as a reference point for Bible study: in other words, as a kind of commentary to be consulted and not only a daily devotional to be used only once.

4.The Resolutions found in each Give Us This Day are another resource that should not be neglected. It may be neither desirable nor possible to follow the prescribed Resolution for each day. But these Resolutions can be returned to for further reference and used even apart from the devotional for the day.

5.The Prayers of Give Us This Day, many of which have been taken from a variety of historical sources, are also a rich resource that bears repeated use. Together, the prayers form a kind of treasury of prayer that can be used in any of a variety of ways. They especially include several different ways to think about how to pray the Lord’s Prayer.

A Note on Interpretation

Most of us who believe the Bible is the Word of God naturally assume that God intends it all for me, but even if this is true, the question remains as to how it applies to me. This is the task of all interpretation, including teaching and preaching. Historically, the Church has read the Bible in four senses or kinds of interpretations: the literal, allegorical, moral (or tropological), and anagogical. The allegorical meaning, of which so many Bible-believing Christians are afraid, is simply applying a given passage to Jesus Christ or the Church Militant (the Church still here on earth). We interpret the Bible allegorically all the time whenever we read the Old Testament and find Jesus Christ in it, for the literal meaning may be about the entrance into the Promised Land or about kings or about the delicate art of sacrificing animals. Yet we know that such passages also teach us about Christ. The moral sense is also one we use all the time, even if we claim we are only being literal. A moral interpretation of a passage involves applying it to yourself or other Christians. The anagogical interpretation means applying the passage to the heavenly realities and is thus (here goes another big word) eschatological in nature, applying the Word of God to the end things, or the world to come, on which we think too infrequently.

Give Us This Day is designed to be primarily moral in its interpretation because I want each of you to apply the Word of God to your life. But your life is not merely your own: it belongs to Christ, and so we seek Jesus Christ in His Church (allegorical interpretation). And all who are truly Christians are part of the Body of Christ and hopefully part of a local body, and therefore much of what the Bible says must be allegorical in this sense.

May God bless you through Give Us This Day, however you choose to use it, however you allow God to use it in your life. It is, in essence, but one way to make sure God’s people are meditating on His Word even as they pray. Feel free to share it with friends and pass along those parts that may be profitable to your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Acts 1

The former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began to do and teach . . . (Acts 1:1).

I find this to be one of the most illuminating verses in the New Testament. Yes, it is a little strange to think so, but then if you’ve been reading Give Us This Day, you have seen strangeness and oddity (and even weirdness) bubble up from the surfaces of the page, like crude oil, black gold, Texas tea, bubbling up in Jed Clampett’s back yard.

Luke’s former account is, of course, the Gospel According to St. Luke, and if you read Luke 24 and Acts 1 back-to-back, you’ll realize they belong together like man and wife or like peanut butter and jelly (or banana). What does Luke say about his Gospel? That in it, he wrote about the things that Jesus Christ began to do and to teach. This can only mean that in his present book (The Acts of the Apostles, which some later editor added), he will be writing about the things that Jesus Christ continues to do and to teach.

Which brings us to verse 9. In verse 9, Jesus ascends into heaven, never to be seen in the flesh again until we get to heaven. But this presents an interesting little tension in the lives of Christians: how can Jesus Christ be around to continue to do and to teach when He’s sitting at the right hand of the Father?

The answer to this question is why I think this little, odd verse is so illuminating. In the book of Acts, St. Luke is writing about the words and works of Jesus Christ as the Spirit of Christ lives in the Body of Christ to be the presence of Christ on the earth. The main character of the book of Acts is therefore not St. Peter or St. Paul, the greatest tag team in history, but Jesus Christ Himself, as He works through the Holy Spirit who indwells His Body, the Church.

But sacred history doesn’t end with Paul in prison on page 1875 (in my Bible): it continues through our lives. The same Jesus Christ who changed water into wine healed the blind, deaf, and dumb, and raised Lazarus from the dead is the same Jesus Christ who had Peter and John heal a lame man and had Paul stand preaching on Mars Hill is the same Jesus Christ who helps me to write Give Us This Day every day and helps you to raise your kids. In fact, now that the Body of Jesus Christ has been broken and blessed and is distributed throughout the world and even populates Paradise again, the truth of Jesus’ words becomes clear: he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father (John 14:12).

The Ascension of Jesus Christ is the turning point in the life of Christ and His Church. The Ascension marks the changing of the guard from Jesus Christ of Nazareth in a local body to Jesus Christ ruling the earth through His mystical Body. In reality, the work of Christ can’t be separated: the Incarnation, His life, His Passion, His Crucifixion, His Resurrection, His Ascension, and His Session are all part of the same centrifugal love that has come down to redeem those He loves.

Sometimes Catholics may over-emphasize the Incarnation, Evangelicals may over-emphasize the Cross, and Charismatics may over-emphasize Pentecost. But they all hang together.

But the Ascension is a very visible and dramatic change in how God works on the earth. At the Ascension, Jesus Christ is glorified and seen for who He is. At the Ascension, man enters heaven for the first time, in the person of Christ, and He is the firstfruit of many more to come. What in heaven’s name is Jesus doing in heaven? He is preparing a place for us (John 14). He is acting as our High Priest and makes intercession for us from heaven. One of the things I’ll bet He’s most fervently praying is that we may do His will on earth as He does it in heaven!

It is with the Ascension, which is but the transition to Christ’s Session or sitting at the right hand of the Father, that Jesus takes his rightful place on the throne and begins to rule. This is why, since we are united to Him, we also are kings and rule with Him. Primarily, we are the kingdom that is ours to rule, and when we rule ourselves and own households well, we get promoted and can begin to rule other parts of the creation. It is, therefore, through us that Christ now reigns on the earth. This is the significance of the Incarnation, Ascension, and all other parts of Christ’s ministry among us and with us.

Christ’s Ascension to heaven is also the ultimate reminder that heaven is most truly our home, and His being there is the sure promise that it is our eternal home as well.

It’s because Christ ascended to heaven that He sent the Holy Spirit, and all of the events of Acts 2 and Pentecost and our lives proceed from His life and work. As He sends His Holy Spirit to us, He is with us, as He promised. As His Holy Spirit dwells in us, we become His Temple and Body that do His heavenly will and participate in the establishment and manifestation of His heavenly kingdom here on earth.

The unity, power, and glory that come from Christ’s presence in us by the Spirit are manifested in the dynamic, creative, inspired relationship between the Church and the Gospel. It’s not entirely accurate to say that the Bible came first, is it? If you remember your Church history, you’ll remember that Peter, Paul, and others speak of the resurrected Christ and begin acting as the Church before the New Testament was written down. In order for there to even be a Word of God for us to receive, there must have been a Church, a body of God’s people who heard God speak, were gathered together, and who eventually wrote down what God inspired them to write. It was in the life of the Church, and never apart from it, that the Scriptures were written, shaped, and received.

But the Word of God, originally oral but now written down, is not only birthed by the Church but also births the Church. For from hearing the Word of God, as delivered by the Church and her ministers, others receive the gift of faith and believe and bring new life to the Church.

Look for this godly dynamic between Church and Gospel throughout the book of Acts and in your lives.

The Gospels, then, are about what Jesus Christ began to do and teach, while Acts and our lives are about what He is continuing to do through us, by the Spirit. If only we could recognize and remember how close the Lord actually is to us and how united we are to Him, the reputation and power and glory of the Church, and especially of Jesus Christ, might be something more than we see it in our day.

What a wonder: that Jesus Christ, who is my Lord and my God, not only lives in me but has also chosen to work and to teach through me! Such a wonder deserves, demands, a wonderful response of faith and faithfulness, of love and humility.

Prayer

Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord, Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen. (Collect for Ascension Day, Book of Common Prayer)

Points for Meditation

1.What was the response of the apostles to Jesus’ Ascension? What should your response be to the Ascension?

2.In what ways has Jesus Christ worked and taught in your life?

3.In what ways does Jesus Christ desire to work and teach in your life?

Resolution

I resolve to remember to praise Jesus Christ for His Ascension and His work in my life all throughout the day today.

Acts 2:1–21

Who doesn’t want to be like the early church?! I know I do. Who wouldn’t want supernatural signs of the presence of God, such as speaking in foreign tongues, having tongues of fire over one’s head, and having three thousand people turn to Christ in one day?! Who doesn’t want the unity, the joy, the growth, and the excitement?

Then why don’t we have these things?

There are two general answers. On the one hand, we could all be a bunch of spiritual losers who just don’t measure up to the faith, love, and holiness of the early Church. In this theory, the Church has been on the road to de-evolution (Are we not men? We are Devo!) ever since the first century.

But I’ve got a problem with this theory. If the Church has been in decay ever since, shouldn’t we have evaporated by now? Shouldn’t we all have become devils? The truth is the early Church was not as universally holy as we make it out to be, and we’re not as universally on the highway to Hell as we make the world out to be.

Theory B, please. Theory B is that the things of the early Church were needed for a particular time in the early life of the Church and that these things have passed away. We shouldn’t look for such things because God works in different ways now.

Certainly, there’s a lot of truth in Theory B. Most Christians who have ever lived have never spoken in tongues and never will. God’s miraculous manifestations have never been the normal way He comes to us, and they never will be. I’m not holding my breath for Him to place tongues of fire over my head or manifest Himself through me to thousands by a mighty rushing wind around me.

But surely, there’s something about the early Church that we all love and want to emulate. If we don’t have the kind of love, unity, and joy they had, then we ought to examine ourselves for the reasons why. On the other hand, we live in very different circumstances from the first-century Church in Jerusalem, and sometimes our inherited assumptions about the Church and how it ought to be should be re-evaluated.

Maybe there’s a theory C, in which we are to be like the early Church in principle but not in every detail. Maybe there’s a way to affirm the continuing work of the Spirit in our lives without falling into a dead literalism in reading Acts that misinterprets the work of the Spirit today. I sure hope so!

All of this is to say that when we read through Acts, or the letters to the churches in the New Testament, we should look with both of our eyes opened and focused. With one eye, we should see what the Spirit wants to show us about how we should live as His Temple. This may be a painful and challenging process. With the other eye, we should look and see that not every detail about the early Church is normative for our experience today. Just because something happened in the book of Acts or the early Church doesn’t mean that it has to happen that way today.

For today, I choose to allow myself to be both inspired and challenged by the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the early Church. In Pentecost, I am reminded that the Holy Spirit is alive and well on Earth. He may not come in the same way He did to the apostles in Acts 2. But He is just as alive and active. My job and yours today is to look for signs that He is here among us. Think of it as a spiritual scavenger hunt. Only you’d better be prepared to look in some unlikely and ordinary places.

The Case of the Missing Holy Spirit in our lives is like Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Purloined Letter, in which that most important letter was invisible because it was so visible and out in the open that it was overlooked.

By Pentecost, I am assured that Jesus Christ truly ascended and now reigns at the right hand of the Father. Pentecost is a sinew that connects the ascended Christ with His Body here on earth. On Pentecost, Jesus Christ truly began to continue to do and teach the things He began while He was physically on earth.

And therefore, every day in the life of a Christian is a day of Pentecost. Every day is a Feast of Firstfruits, in which we give thanks that the Lord has provided an increase in our lives by His Spirit. Every day is a new giving of the Law, the Law that is written on our fleshy hearts and not on stony tablets. Every day is a day we are enabled to keep God’s holy Law because, by His Spirit, we are united to Christ and His righteousness.

Every day is a new Genesis 1 in which we are given life and renewed in the inner man by the Holy Spirit, and every day is a day that the Spirit of God has breathed new life into us, the life that is the Son. Every day is the day that our dry bones are made alive and the promise of the resurrection renewed, even as it’s rehearsed by our daily ritual of rising from sleep. Every day is