Catch The Wave

Catch the Wave

Acts 1:1-3, Luke 16:19-31

Good morning, Happy New Years

If I encouraged you to catch the wave for New Year's, you would probably think I was referring to some new campaign the church is trying to start.

The dictionary defines the phrase, catch the wave, as seizing an opportunity presented to you, especially to do something new.

When it comes to surfing, bodhisurf.com says…

“Catching waves is one of the most important skills in surfing and should not be overlooked.

If you really want to improve your surfing, then you need to know how to catch waves — as many as possible.”

Please open your Bibles to two places, first to Luke 16 and then to Acts 1 as we embark on a new series in the Book of Acts.

The Book of Acts is the history and the beginning of the early church, as it recorded what happened after Christ’s Resurrection.

The Book of Acts was written about a wild time in history.

The beginning of Acts tells how the risen Christ spent 40 days with His disciples teaching them about “the Kingdom of God” while promising them the coming of the Holy Spirit.

The world was taken by storm, by a new belief system that was first referred to as the Way and was later known as Christianity.

Many Bibles name this book, “The Acts of the Apostles”, because it foretells the events of the original Apostles with the infant stage of the Early Church.

Israel had a long history of rebellion against the LORD, which led to their defeat and capture at various times in their history.

Leading up to this time of history, many Jewish people were looking for their promised Messiah to come in and rescue Israel from Rome who was controlling Israel during this time.

Again, the Book of Acts is the history of the early church and its followers. Some of these Christ-followers may have told others to catch the wave of following Christ, to be saved from their sin.

I. Introduction to the Acts of the Apostles.

Read Acts 1:1

As we study the Book of Acts, we will soon discover that the book is divided into two distinct sections:

Acts 1-12 detail Peter’s ministry in Jerusalem and Samaria.

Acts 13-28 detail Paul’s missionary journeys throughout the Roman Empire.

Chuck Swindoll said, “Acts is the only biblical book that chronicles the history of the church immediately after Jesus’s ascension.

“As such, it (Acts) provides us with a valuable account of how the church was able to grow and spread out from Jerusalem into the rest of the Roman Empire.” (Chuck Swindoll)

“In only three decades, a small group of frightened believers in Jerusalem transformed into an empire-wide movement of people who had committed their lives to Jesus Christ.

Acts ends on a high note with Paul on the verge of taking the gospel to the highest government official in the land—the Emperor of Rome.”

In Acts 1:1, we are told a lot of information, so let’s break it down one statement at a time.

The writer begins the book with the statement, “The former account I made”.

The first question to answer is: who is the author?

A man named Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke and then he wrote the Book of Acts sometime around 62-64 A.D.

The Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts are presented as a single book in the Original New Testament (ISBN 978-0062507761) because they have the same author.

We do not know a lot about Luke, but we know Luke is mentioned by the Apostle Paul in three of his epistles; Colossians, Philemon, and 2 Timothy.

Luke was Gentile (Col. 4:11) the only Gentile author in the NT.

Luke was a doctor as well as a friend of Paul (Colossians 4:14).

Because Luke was a physician, it is believed that he was a Roman slave at one time.

Luke was a fellow laborer of the Gospel who was with Paul on his second and third missionary journeys. (Philemon 1:24, Acts 17:1, Acts 20:5)

Luke was with Paul while in prison in Rome. (2 Timothy 4:11)

So, Luke begins the Book of Acts and addresses it to a person named Theophilus.

Who was Theophilus?

There are many different ideas of who Theophilus was, but we cannot be dogmatic because, at the end of the day, no one really knows who he was.

Allow me to give you some of the potential candidates of who this man could have been.

The name Theophilus means loved by God or friend of God.

Some believe Theophilus could have been the High Priest.

Theophilus could be a generic name for all Christians, but in the Gospel of Luke, Luke addressed this person as “most excellent Theophilus”, which seems to address a specific person.