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***The following is an unedited auto-generated transcript and may contain serious errors and speakers other than Dallas Willard. It is included here to assist your study. Please check the original audio for an authentic record of the event.

Rick Hess: I’ll introduce Dallas Willard to you. Dallas and I have been in association with each other ever since 1967 when I came to USC and taught there in the School of Business, and Dallas was holding forth in Mudd Hall, which is the School of Philosophy. I don’t know. It’s two Ds in Mudd. It’s not really having anything to do with philosophy or a commentary on it. So that’s how I felt, I guess, about it. And Dallas and I got to know each other because each in our own way are rabble-rousers, but I tend to be the kind that’s very explosive. We met in the faculty senate, and I would be the one who would get up and yell and scream and rant and rave. After an hour and forty-five minutes of that, it would be Dallas’ turn to raise his hand and to stand up and clear his throat and simply say, And well, you know, it seems to me that we had this conversation last month, and the month before, and in fact ever since I’ve been here since 1965, we seem to talk about the same things, and I think the real point is, and then with great clarity of mind, to be able to jump right to the main issue. And I think that’s one of Dallas’ strong points. Another is that he’s a man who really loves the Lord. He has a very mellow and wonderful spirit, and I really look for great things from him, so I introduce to you Dallas Willard.

Dallas: Well, I can’t reply to that very well, you know. Rick certainly underplays his effect. He had a tremendous effect on many people there. I have students who still come in, and I get to talking with them, and they talk to me about problems they had with mathematics or something, you know. It turns out that Rick Hess is the one who got them through, and he doesn’t even teach in the mathematics department. He’s a real teacher, and I can’t say too much for Rick, so I won’t start, but I really love him and think highly of him, and I wish we could have spent more time doing other things than sitting in these committee meetings. Rick, I have a theory that some of these sayings which we find in Ecclesiastes were written when Solomon returned from the committee meeting. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

Now I’m very happy to be here. This is a good thing, this kind of intensive study, and I hope you’re able to clear the decks and arrange your business so that you can give some concentration to study of these books and the thoughts which will be laid before you. I’m afraid our ordinary way of educating is very like a man who tries to take a shower by putting a teaspoon full of water on his head every three hours. You know, if a fellow were to come to you and say, how about that as a shower, you’d say there’s something wrong with that. There’s a little lacking of intensity of moisture. You need a little more of it all at once, right? And that’s what we need if we’re going to make much progress in our understanding of the things of God and of the things of man. We have to do that. And we can’t allow convenience to stop us altogether if we’re serious. We have to really concentrate. Concentration alone will do it.

Let me ask you as you read this week, and I hope you may find it useful as you go through all of the books, to read them as critically as possible. And I mean by that three things. Now ask yourself three things. First of all, what was really happening here? What was really happening here? Now if you will for the moment, just disregard what’s on this thing up here, and I’ll return to that in a moment. I want to make this as a preliminary remark. First of all ask yourself, what is really happening here? Use your imagination. You know, role playing would be a wonderful way to teach the scripture. For example, suppose we were just for fifteen minutes to find a hundred and twenty people, or some number around that, and play out the scenario of the day of Pentecost. Or suppose we were to take fifteen people, and we were to say, now this is the upper room, right here. And you’ve been here for eight days, and you don’t know where you’re going from here, right? Now just play that out. Use your imagination. You want to understand what’s happening? Use your imagination. Remember that these were people. They were human beings. They were made out of flesh and blood. They got tired. They were ignorant. They were bothered by questions. They were bugged by other people. They were confused. They were also inspired. They saw clearly. They were powerful. They were triumphant. And in all of it, they were human beings. They felt it all. They felt it all. Use your imagination. What’s really happening here? Fill it in. Fill it in.

And then the second question, if you would ask yourself kindly. Ask yourself, why is this happening here? Why is this happening here? The book of Acts is a book of events, mainly. Book of Acts. Acts are events, right? Acts, Jesus. Why are those things happening? For example, why did Jesus hang around for 40 days after he was resurrected? Do you ever ask yourself that? Why did he do that? Why did they wait just 10 days? What’s 10 days got to do with it? What was going on? Why was that? Why did the particular manifestations which came on the day of Pentecost, why did they come? Why did they come just where they did, just when they did? Why did a Gentile write the book of Acts? Ever ask yourself that? Why did Gentiles write the book of Acts? Why are these things happening?

Then ask yourself finally, please, could this happen to me? What would it be like if it happened to me? Three questions. I hope that you will be able to take the book of Acts and read it at least three or four times. It looks like a long book and it is until you compare it to really long books. Actually, it’s a very short book. You set aside a couple of hours and make yourself read on to try to get a total picture of what is happening. Try to read it three or four times.

Now, finally, if you can, work on an outline. You may wonder, and I thought it was very interesting, Dave, that you independently, by the way, neither of us have seen one another talk of one another before today, but independently on those written things that were handed out, you’ll see that both of us ask you to try to make an outline of the book. And I’m sure the reason for that is simply that we have both struggled with the problem of teaching, which is really the problem of learning. And we find that trying to make an outline is one of the most useful devices by which you can render a student active. And you’ve got to be active if you’re going to learn. There is no such thing as passive learning. There’s passive conditioning, but not passive learning. You have to be active. You have to think about this that you’re working on. You have to carve it up. And someone may say, well, but I may do it wrong. Yes, you may. But do you know that most of the things you’ve learned, you’ve learned from doing things wrong? Nearly everything you’ve learned, I’ve learned, you’ve learned from doing things wrong. You’ve learned to speak that way. You’ve learned to walk that way. Everything you’ve learned, you’ve learned from doing it wrong.

Now, the function of people who are further along in the path is to correct you when you’re wrong. They did that when you walked. They did that when you talked. The process of learning is a process of energetic falling forward. That’s the process of learning. And others around you love you, and they keep interacting with you. And we fall forward as energetically as possible, and that way we learn the most.

Now, when you come to outline, remember this. You can, as Dave has put it so well, I mean, if you outline books, different people outline different, the same book, they get different outlines. But do you know that often several outlines are equally well justified and equally well instructive? Do you know that when a person writes a book, there is what he has in mind, and then there’s what he actually does? And then thirdly, there is what actually comes over to the person who reads it. Now, when you think of inspiration, you have to think of inspiration in that complex process. Inspiration is not a matter. The scriptures is not a matter of God dictating some words to be written down on a page, and then he walked off and left it. Inspiration is God dwelling in the process of communication and directing it for his purposes. That’s inspiration. God dwelling in the process of communication and directing it for his purposes.

Now, there are some very special situations of inspiration. There are very different kinds of inspiration, circumstances of all kinds where there is inspiration. But when we read the Bible, do we just depend upon the word in front of us? Do we just depend upon the word in front of us? Do we just depend upon the word in front of us? No? The ink marks on the page? Jesus said to people who studied the scriptures as probably none of us ever will, He said, search the scriptures, for in them you think you have life, And they speak of me, but you won’t come to me. God speaking. The word of God is God speaking. That is the word which goes out of his mouth and doesn’t return to him void, because it’s a creative word. It creates. And the most important thing for us to understand is that it creates faith. Faith is the gift of God, and it comes through the word of God. God speaking in our hearts gives us faith.

Now as we read, as we think, as we study, we want to be free, we want to be open, we want to believe that God is over this, and that God is controlling, and God is guiding, and God is bringing us where he wants us, and he’ll do it. Now just those preliminary words, and I hope that you will, I hope there will be a lot of chances for you to discuss the material you’re working on with others. I don’t know what the arrangements are, but I certainly hope there’ll be, at least on Thursday and Friday, after you’ve begun to really get warmed up, or before, that there might be some place where those of us who are trying to teach could be for those who wish to come by and just talk. Perhaps that can be arranged, we’ll see about that. But I hope there will be a lot of opportunity for you to talk with one another, for you to share your ideas. You know where God dwells? In his people, isn’t that right? He dwells in his people. How many is a people, is it one, there’s two, more, how many is a people, people’s a bunch of them, isn’t it? God dwells and works in his people. You’re going to study the book of Ephesians next week, do you know why there is a church to be the habitation of God? That’s what it’s here for, it isn’t here to uphold San Diego, right? It isn’t here to just make a nice place for you to spend a couple of hours on Sunday, it’s here for God to dwell in. You see that when you get to the book of Ephesians, a habitation of God, a habitation of God, that’s what the church is.

Now the book of Acts is a book which we have to approach quite carefully. Let me tell you that the book of Acts has made many fold more skeptics than the book of Ecclesiastes ever will. Does that surprise you? It has made many fold more skeptics, believe me, than the book of Ecclesiastes ever will. For one reason, there’s been many more people who’ve read it than the book of Ecclesiastes, you know, kind of. Book of Ecclesiastes, that’s right next to the book of Hezekiah, you know where that is, don’t you? Yeah, but no, that’s not what I’m getting at, of course. What I’m getting at is simply this, the book of Acts presents a form of life as a reality which many people who read and hear and listen in the churches have no experience of. And it puts them in a tension which makes them begin to doubt and begin to doubt and begin to doubt and begin to doubt their own experience and their relation to God.

And I have known many, many persons who have wound up so far out precisely because they saw something, if not in the book of Acts, at least presented in the same manner, which they had to say in the end, there’s no reality in that. The book of Acts has made more skeptics also because it has acted kind of like loco weed in the minds of many people. They read the book of Acts and they say, hey, let’s do these things, you know? And so they do them, God doesn’t do them, they do them. And they fall into the category of those at the church of Thyatira. They have a name that they are alive, but they’re dead. Lots of action, lots of muscle, lots of impressing things, but they’re doing every bit of it. And that’s one thing you have to say about the book of Acts. It stands there, it says the book of apostolic Acts doesn’t, but it isn’t. It’s the book of the Acts of God, and you’ll see that, you’ll see that as we study it. It’s made so abundantly plain all the way through that men are not doing this. If men had been doing it, it wouldn’t have happened. The men who were involved in it didn’t know what was going to happen. If you’d said to them, hey, what’s going to happen, they would have said something else, not this, not a one of them knew what was going to happen.

As outlined in the book, there was no that, they weren’t doing it. You go up in the upper room, you say to those people, what are you doing, they say, we’re just hanging on, see what’s going to happen, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Go up to Antioch in Syria and say, hey, did you know this was going to happen, no, we didn’t know this was going to happen, we thought this was for the Jews. And they went up to preach to some Jews up in Antioch, and the Gentiles heard it and caught fire. Kick the Jewish Christians out of town, and they start preaching to the Samaritans, and pretty soon they’re down preaching to the descendants of the Philistines, and the Ethiopians have got it. They didn’t intend that, they had no idea that that was going to happen. This isn’t people doing things.

So I have to be very careful with the book, and what that means, I think, above all, is that we take it as a whole, and that we try to place it in the context of the whole Bible. Let me say something which you may find distressing, but I think it is so important to say it, especially the topic of inspiration has already come up in Dave’s lecture, and it’s very important to get right to it. And what I should say is this, there is not a single part of the Bible which is the Word of God. There is not a single part of the Bible which is the Word of God. The whole thing is, the whole thing is, and anything short of that is not. There is not a single part of the Bible which is the Word of God. If you want to know why you have so many groups running off this direction, and that, and the other, it’s because they take a part of the Bible and say this is the Word of God, and they set up a system, and they say this is it, now everyone else either line up, shape up, or ship out. And that’s it.

The whole Bible is the written Word of God. If you take it whole, you’ll come out right. If you take it in part, God only knows where you’ll come out. That’s right, that’s right. You know, you can kill yourself with the Bible. Let me read you a verse of the Bible, which some people don’t even know is in there. That has that in common with a lot of them, I guess. This is 2 Peter, and this is talking about, now I want to tell you, this is talking about the part of the Bible which everyone, especially in evangelical circles, everyone thinks is the easiest to understand, Paul’s Epistles, all right, those are the easiest ones to understand. Let me tell you what Peter says. In the third chapter of 2 Peter, 15th verse, ah, let’s read the 14th, it all goes together. Therefore beloved, seeing that you look for such things, be diligent that you be found of him in peace without spot and blameless. And account that the long suffering of our Lord is salvation. Now if you ever want a good definition of salvation, may I recommend that one. The long suffering of our Lord is salvation. Even as our beloved brother Paul, also according to the wisdom unto him, hath written unto you, as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable, rest, twist, as they do also the other scriptures unto their own destruction. Dangerous book, it’s a dangerous book. The dangers of it are many fold. It’s dangerous to stay away from it, and it’s dangerous to get next to it. I’d like to enlarge on that more, but I think I just want to leave it at that and say take the thing whole, okay? Put the book of Acts in the whole Bible. Put it in there with Ecclesiastes. It goes there, right there with Ecclesiastes. I’m glad we’re reading these two books together. And I hope that you may reflect some on just how they do go together. What after all is happening here? What’s going on? Ask yourself those questions. Why is that book in there right along with Acts? Why is Acts in there right along with it? Put it in the whole Bible, okay?

Now I want to talk about the book itself some. Now if I can find this crazy transparent thing, I can scarcely find it. It’s like a person you know who loses their glasses. How can you find your glasses if you can’t find your glasses? And this crazy thing is very hard to find, okay? And it’s very hard to see even up there, as you can see, maybe. Okay, I’ll learn how to write with that pencil better.

Now if you would take the sheets which were handed out, the salmon colored ones, I think that’s the right flavor, and look at the one called Monday. And you might like to take down some of the notes which I’ll be giving, some I’ve written up here under this heading. I want to talk about the book of Acts and put it in the context of the gospel of the kingdom of God. Because that’s what the book is about. That’s where it begins and that’s where it ends. And it begins in the middle, as I shall say in a moment.

Well first of all, it’s John though. What kind of book is it? You may or may not know that what we have in the New Testament as it now stands is really a selection from a really very vast literature which existed in the first and second centuries and third century possibly after Christ. And in that literature there are really four main classes and we have samples from all of them in our New Testament. First of all, of course, is the gospel. Do you know that there are many gospels besides Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Many gospels, occasionally some windblown publisher finds a gospel and says, hey, hey, look what we found. Here’s a new gospel. And it sells a lot of books because people go out and buy that. And if, but gee, these things have been around for a long time. If you want, if you just read any good introduction to the literature of the New Testament such as Goodspeed, I think Goodspeed has a really very excellent introduction to it, you need to try to balance, in all of these matters of criticism and commentary, try to get your more conservative as well as some more liberal authors and read them both. Read them both. There’s some point in you asking Dave and me and other people who are scholars to go up somewhere in a corner and read them and come back and tell you the truth alone. I mean there’s some point in that. We give it more study, see. But I mean the object is for you to develop your spirits and your minds under the guidance of God. Read the literature. Find out what is known about the manuscripts of the New Testament. By the way, that’s the answer to many of the people like the witnesses. Find out what is known about them. Don’t take their word for it. And don’t run, don’t just go find out what the preacher says about it, right. As you come back and say, well the preacher says this, and they’ll say yes, but what about this? And then you’ll ask, you’ll spend your life running between your house and the preacher. So dig into this, give it some thought, you can do it. You have the capacity to do it, especially where you’ve got a church like this which is obviously concerned for your development. And if you want to go on and spend the time that Dave or me or someone else does reading in these matters, fine, you can do that too. There are much worse ways to spend your life, believe me. Much worse ways. To put it in the mildest form possible. And there are many rewards which come simply from the careful scholarly study of the scripture. Spiritual rewards. And well, I won’t go into that.

But you take a good introduction to the literature of the New Testament, you find that there are many gospels. You find there are many acts, did you know that? Many books called Acts, Acts of the Apostles. And some of them take this apostle and some of them, I think there are three or four on Paul only, Acts of Paul. They get rather strange, there’s one that has a story about how Paul meets this lion, you know, that has a thorn in his paw. You’ve heard that story, I can tell. Right. And you know what happens later in the Colosseum? The lion won’t eat Paul. I mean, these people were imaginative. And I don’t mean to say that didn’t happen, but that just illustrates, I mean, there was a lot of literature around called Acts of the Apostles.

Now if you had to say of whom the Acts are here, they’d have to be Peter and Paul, wouldn’t they? I mean, you study this, you see that there are two main characters here, Peter and Paul. And there were epistles of all kinds floating around. And there were many revelations, many revelations. And those are the four main kinds of literature in the New Testament period, Gospel, Acts, epistles and revelation. Now it’s interesting that there has been only one of the Acts which was incorporated in the canon. There are various speculations as to why that is. I don’t know that it would be fruitful to go into those. But I think, frankly, that the best way to look at it is simply to say that there was a close association of the Book of Acts with the Gospel of Luke. It was carefully done. It was not filled full of fancy stories which one is apt to get out of really truly astounding events, by the way. It’s interesting to see the book on the book table back about the Indonesian revival. A good comparison to many of the things which you find in New Testament literature is to take the literature that has come out of the Indonesian revival, compare it. Some of it is highly imaginative. Some of it is written in a very different vein. And you can see how a person could in all sincerity get carried away and say things that weren’t really quite true. And you can see if you look at how the canon of the New Testament was formed that the early church had a very good sense under the guidance of God for what was sober, what was written in a moment of sanity, coolness.

Luke was a researcher. He was a physician. And in those days learning was much more unified. And it was not at all difficult for a person who had learned in one area. Even though he may have been a slave, Luke may have been a slave, it was very common for physicians to be slaves then. And by the way, when we talk about slaves in the New Testament, this is not at all to say it was a good thing. But we want to remember there are all kinds of them. And many of the slaves in the New Testament were extremely well off, had a lot of freedom. It’s quite possible that Luke was the slave of a man named Theophilus. And that actually he was directed to spend his time chasing around with Paul and writing up the results. Because Theophilus was a Christian. Now this is speculation, but again the imagination can help you somewhat fill in the real life possibilities for what was going on here.

Luke was a Gentile, probably from Troy, difficult to say, but if you look in the book of Acts like in the 16th chapter of Acts, you see that immediately as soon as Paul leaves Troy, the narrative ceases to talk about Paul and them and starts in talking about we and us. And if you’ll notice how the we and us passages show up in the books of Acts as you read it, I think you’ll get some impression of just where Luke circled around. And of course Luke is also mentioned by Paul in some of his letters as being with him. And it gives us some insight into just what kind of a person Luke may have been. Now there’s an awful lot that could be said on that and I don’t want to go much further than just saying that he was a physician. You can tell from the first chapter of Luke that this was a consciously undertaken process of writing and research. Notice how he leads into this in the first chapter of the gospel of Luke and it’s fairly certain, at least many scholars are quite certain, that for a long while in the early years of the church, the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts circulated together and only subsequently were divided when the canon was set up in terms of gospels, acts, epistles and revelation. So this I think should be regarded as one writing project, the book of Luke and the book of Acts.

And Luke says, for as much as many have taken in hand. See this was a kind of a pastime with the Christians. They spent a lot of time in setting in hand, taken in hand the job of setting forth in order chronological provision of the facts, the events. A declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us. Even as they were delivered unto, as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses. So this is a man who is going to the people who saw the things. He’s relying on reports from people who saw them. It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, why, that thou mayest know the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed. Theophilus was pretty certainly a Christian. Most acquaintance of Luke, very likely. Maybe a very dear friend, maybe a master, as I mentioned a while ago. We don’t know the relationship, but Luke was concerned to get to him the facts. There was a personal relationship there. Theophilus viewed Luke as a man who could tell him the truth, who would tell him the truth. Luke made a point of finding out what the truth was and getting it to Theophilus. Why? Because he might know, he might know the certainty of those things. It was a fabulous story, you know. If you don’t occasionally have the experience of being overwhelmed with the events in the Gospels in the Book of Acts, you’re not reading with your eyes open. This book talks about people being raised from the dead. You believe that? It hasn’t happened to me for three or four days. This book talks about astounding things. That’s why it was so important that there be witnesses, that it be recorded, that it be carefully studied, let it be studied out.

The Bible is so concerned with questions, it’s so concerned with skepticism, yes it is. It’s so concerned with it because it knows that it is an ever-present fact. The person who believes, that to believe you must never have any questions. I think personally, and I may be wrong, I’ve been wrong before. I may be wrong. I think that the person who believes that to believe is never to question does not know what the issues are. If they knew what the issues were, if they looked clearly at the issues, and there are many people like that by the way. Life protects some people. Some people never have the problems of the preacher, simply don’t have them. And for them, who needs the book? God deals with us differently. We are not the same. Our lives are very different. And sometimes we do not know the issues. I thought I knew the issues of life a long time ago. I have only known just recently what in the world was going on when Job every day went down and offered sacrifices for his kids. Because I’ve now got a seventeen year old boy. I know what it’s like now, and now I can say, oh boy Job, I’m right with you. I know what it’s like to have a kid completely out of your control. Completely gone. He’s grown. You know, he thinks he is. For all practical purposes he is. I can’t control that kid any longer. I’ve done my due with him. And if it was good, well, if it was bad, terrible. But there’s very little more that I can do for him except insofar as he comes to me. And I know what it’s like to go before God daily, hourly sometimes. Not because the boy is bad, it’s because he’s a boy. Because he’s out with some several thousand pound monster of an automobile driving around where there are thousands upon thousands of other like monsters. And what, I mean what couldn’t happen, anything could happen, right? And usually does. That’s right. That’s right. It usually does. So I know what that is, see. I didn’t know what the issue was before. It was easy for me to say to people with kids at that age, ah, trust God. Now I still say trust God, but believe me it’s in a different tone. More something like, trust God, trust God, trust God.

The issues change and when we face the issues we have the questions. And the Bible is a book to answer questions. If you have the questions bring them to the book and throw them at it, throw them at it. Bring them to God, give them to him, say answer me. You know what, many people have so little faith in God that they won’t do that. And then they walk off and say ha ha, I have wonderful faith, I never ask questions. But they’re afraid if they ask a question they won’t hear anything. The awful sound of silence. The person who has faith is the person who has asked the question and got the answer. That’s faith. Faith is not a blind leap in the dark. Faith is a vision, it is a seeing. The Bible speaks of seeing him who was, or touching him who was invisible, right? That’s what Moses did. He touched him who was invisible. And Paul speaks in the fifth chapter of 2 Corinthians, of seeing what is unseen. Faith is vision. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith is evidence, it is substance. And it comes from the kind of energetic life which lays itself on the line questions and all and says now, now you never saw a group of people with more questions than those people in the upper room in the first chapter of the book of Acts. You never saw people with more questions than the disciples of Jesus Christ. And they had plenty to ask questions about. They had on their hands something that they couldn’t dismiss and something they couldn’t understand. And every time they thought they understood it with very few exceptions and they stated it or blurted it out, he stuffed it back down their throat. That’s right, there were some exceptions. The great confession of Peter, he said, blessed art thou Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto me. What he was saying was, Simon, I know you, this didn’t come from you, this didn’t come from you. And he was right, he was right, oh he was right. But Simon had the question and he threw them and he threw himself and God met him. That’s the kind of book that book is, the book of Acts.

Now the thematic unity is simply the continuation of the incarnation. The incarnation is not something which began and ended with the earthly life of our Lord. What does Paul and Colossians say is the hope of glory? Christ in you, Christ in you is the hope of glory. That’s the incarnation continued in us. The best way to understand the book of Acts is to take it in the light of 2 Corinthians 4, 7 I believe it is, where Paul says we have this treasure in earthen vessels. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. Why that the excellency of the power should be of God and not of us. The continuing incarnation is the theme of the book of Acts. And I’m going to develop a part of that as the theme of this series of lectures or studies. And that can be put in blunt terms as the tendency of the pot to overwhelm the treasure. The tendency of the pot to overwhelm the treasure. And when this happens what we go around is we get offered the pot for the treasure. You ever have someone offer you a church to save your soul? All kinds of things that are merely pots get offered as treasure.

You may have heard the story of Norcom the Tailor, a rich man in Boston was a finely built and equipped and wealthy person, well educated but he was not well dressed. And he thought that he should take care of this and so he had heard of Norcom the Tailor and he went to get a suit. Norcom measured him and fixed all of the things up and said now come back in a few days and your suit will be ready. So when he came back with his suit he started to get into it. Well he sort of threw him out of shape and his legs all twisted and spread apart because the suit didn’t sit right. Tried to get in his coat and said I can’t get in and Norcom said well here I’ll help you and so he just jammed him in and he came out something like this. And Norcom had a wonderful reputation. And so the man said well this must be the latest style and he went out and got on the bus, the subway, and the man walked up to him and said that must have been made by Norcom the Tailor. Only he could make a suit to fit someone as deformed as you are. Our religion is a lot like that. See he got the pots, he didn’t get the traits. So the tendency of the pots to overwhelm the treasure is what I want to talk about. The treasure is wonderful.

Jesus spoke about it in such powerful terms that it is almost hard to comprehend. Jesus said greater things than these shall you do referring to the things that he did. And you look at those people sitting around, greater things than he, these, will they do? Greater things than these shall you do. But if you’ll notice in that passage in John, he gave a reason for that. On the 14th chapter in the 12th verse, verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me the works that I shall do, that I do, shall he do also, and do the works of Jesus, and greater works than these shall he do. Now I want to ask you what’s the reason, because I go to my Father. Now what does that mean? What does that mean? You mean that we’re going to be able to do greater works than Jesus did simply because he’s not going to be around? Look at verse 16, chapter 16, verse 7, nevertheless I tell you the truth, chapter 16, verse 7, nevertheless I tell you the truth, it is necessary that I go away. For if I go not away, the Comforter, the Helper will not come unto you. Now I want, one of the things I hope you will ask yourself, especially during the rest of this hour, is why in the world couldn’t the Comforter come if Jesus was still here? Ah, you’ve already your head up, you’ve already asked. Why couldn’t he have just come and Jesus still been here? Now if you ask and answer that question in the light of the Bible, you’re going to understand a sweep of holy history, and you will see why the Book of Acts is where it is, and is what it is. But I want, I’m just for the moment, just stressing this theme of the pot and the trays, and I want to ask you to keep those verses before you if you will, and I’m going to return to them in a few moments.

There are some basic assumptions that you have to have before you if you’re going to understand and appreciate the Book of Acts. One that I have put first you may find trite. You can’t make any sense out of the Book of Acts unless you believe God exists. There is a God. That’s one of those questions which many people don’t throw out because they’re afraid only to silence my answer. But now let me tell you something, believing is a determinant state of mind. If I ask you if you believe that you have a nose, you wouldn’t hesitate to tell me that you believe it, as you believe it. If I were to ask you if you believe that you’re seated in this room or that this is the Skyline Wesleyan Church, you’d say yes I believe that, because you believe it. If I were to ask you do you believe that I am John D. Rockefeller, you’d say no I don’t believe that, right, because you don’t believe it. Now in many of our churches on Sunday a creed is spoken and the first words of it are I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Those are among the most breathtaking words any human being can ever utter. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Do you know, I even know churches where the ministers lead this as an affirmation, not a confession, because they are sure that many people can’t confess it. Now if you were to ask to confess that you don’t believe I’m John D. Rockefeller you could do it, because you don’t believe that. You could confess it. A confession is a what, an affirmation, a resolve, no, it isn’t a resolve, it isn’t an ungodly, or oh would that I believe, or isn’t it nice that we say these words is what it comes down to me. A confession is a revelation of a discovery, I believe in God, I believe in God the Father Almighty, I believe that, that’s a confession. Oh, there’s so much of this resolve business, oh sure resolve is fine in its place, but you can’t replace belief with resolve, and you can resolve all night and all day and all week and all month, and still read the book of Acts and it’ll look like fairy tales to you because you don’t believe in God. This is a book of the Acts of God, that’s what it’s the Acts of, it’s the deeds of God, if you don’t believe in God there isn’t anyone to act.

One must believe if one is to understand the book of Acts that God exists, and secondly one has to believe that God is accomplishing a global purpose, a worldwide purpose, a purpose which is not restricted to Jews or Greeks or men or women or poor people or, or, or a global purpose, that’s what the book of Acts is about. The book of Acts is about how the treasure was stuck off in this little Jewish pot, right, and how the pot got broken, and what happened as it spread to the corners of the known world. Until finally, as I have in one of your outlines for subsequent days, Paul puts in, even the Scythians, do you know who a Scythian was? Look up Scythia, find out what the Scythians were, we’ll talk about it later, even the Scythians, God doesn’t make any distinction between a fully developed Jewish male rabbi and a Scythian. In Christ Jesus they’re just the same, see, God has a global purpose.

Now I’m going to talk about that purpose a little bit. That purpose is to bring to fruition and to fulfillment the dream of the ages, the peace and prosperity, the thing all the politicians talk about and tell you they’re going to bring you if you will vote for them, you get it. The fulfillment of the dream of the ages, the time when as Habakkuk says, the knowledge of the glory of God will cover the earth like waters cover the sea. Why does it say the knowledge of the glory of God, why doesn’t it say the knowledge of God? Well because the knowledge of God pretty well already covers the earth, but people don’t know his glory, they don’t know what’s good about him, see, but that day is going to come and study that passage in Habakkuk, it’s fascinating, it is really a scathing denunciation of people who are grinding the life out of others in labor situations. Labor and capital and all these other big things and it says it isn’t God’s will that people should labor in the very fire to get their food and the things they need, that isn’t God’s will, for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

That passage in Jeremiah talks about the time when God’s law will be written on the heart. Now what that means is simply that people will as naturally act, will as naturally do the things in the law of God as they now do good things, bad things out of the nature which they have, the law of God will no longer be something which stands over them, it will no longer be necessary to say, thou shalt not steal, people just will not steal. And if you say, why don’t you steal? They look at you and say, what, steal, the law is written in the heart. And that passage, beautiful passage, speaks of how that they will no longer say one to the other, brother know the Lord, for all shall know him from the greatest to the least, the knowledge of the glory of God.

The Micah passage is so beautiful because it shows how this applies to all of the world. In Isaiah, the Isaiah passage, the same way, I won’t read them, but see this is what Jesus was talking about in the verse which is at the head of your sheep. And I wish you’d look at it with me for just a moment, the head of your sheep for money, the one that Rick or the secretaries or someone very nicely had typed up. This is out of the book of Isaiah, is it not? The sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, the first verse, and Jesus quotes it. He quotes it, I believe it is in his own hometown. And he comes into the synagogue and he says, give me the role, and he reads it. He says, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to give poor people some good news. He has sent me to proclaim the captives are free. He has sent me to give recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those that are downtrodden, and to proclaim that this is the year the Lord is in favor of us. That’s what it says, the favorable year of the Lord, I don’t know what that means to you. But what it means is Jesus was saying, hey, right now the Lord is in favor of us. The Lord’s in favor of us. And he sat down and he said, this day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears. That’s what that vision is about. That vision is about people who suffer, people who want, people who are oppressed, who are downtrodden, who are beat to death. And you have to understand that that is the vision which the Lord is bringing to fulfillment in the book of Acts. I’m going to return to that in just a few minutes.

Thirdly, we must understand that this is accomplished not by his running in a bunch of special little mechanisms and giving everybody everything they want, because the main problem is not outside of us, it’s inside of us. This is going to be accomplished by his intimate interaction with individuals and groups. It is through that that the provision is going to be made, that the people are going to be set free. God is not going to steamroller us. He’s sure going to surprise us, but he’s not going to steamroller us. Some of you always want to keep in mind about the purposes of God. There may be exceptions to them, and I don’t want to, especially in a Wesleyan church, to get involved in the discussion of Calvinism. But the purposes of God are sure, but possibly with very few exceptions, I won’t even allow those, I just say possibly. Those purposes do not dictate who is going to participate in the fulfillment. You have a choice, and others have a choice, and you can get left out by your own choice and it can be tragic, but God’s purposes are going to triumph. And it’s God’s purpose to bring in the kingdom of God. And he’s going to do it, rain, shine, or whatever else he’s going to do it. Now wouldn’t you like to be a part of it? Well don’t get hooked up in your vessel. That’s what happened to the Jews, and that’s what’s happened to a lot of Christians. And in fact a lot of Christians are in the Jewish vessel. Well that’s a long story, but same old vessel.

You know there are Christians who think, who still think, that God is going to institute the kingdom of God in the same way that the disciples expected Jesus to do it, by force, by leveling everyone out, wiping them out. There are some people who still think that. They think that the best God can do after all these centuries is to do what a man could do if he were strong enough, if he were smart enough. And the way many people paint the kingdom of God, it is an exact replica of Orwell’s 1984. Big Brother has got your mind wired. You even have a wrong thought, and you’re decimated. I’ve heard that preached, that that’s the way God was going to bring in. There’s nothing good about that. I can remember, I don’t even like to remember. I can remember when I used to think that passage in Philippians where it says, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. I could, I used to think that someone had their nose drowned in the dirt, and they were saying, well, all right, I don’t want to admit it, but I’ll confess it, I’ll admit it, you know. The terrible thing, you know, that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father, and I can’t think of anything worse, but I’ll admit it, because I know if I don’t, he’s going to whack me, right? No, it isn’t going to be like that. People are going to say, isn’t it wonderful that he’s Lord? Isn’t it wonderful that God’s glory is like this? They’re going to understand, God’s going to bring that to pass. There’s going to be a stone cut out without hands, which is going to come and fill the whole earth, and it’s going to crush all of the human mechanisms for manipulating and coercing and making the lives of other people misery, and it’s just going to set them aside. They’re not needed. It’s going to fill the whole earth. God’s going to do that, you know. You say, well, I don’t expect that. Well, sure, there isn’t anything to make us expect that. All we’ve seen is this old human, yang, yang, yang, yang, you know, grind away, make them go, make them do, knock their heads off. And so we say, well, now that’s what God’s going to do. He’s going to come down, he’s going to get all those, those people. All those over in the other pot. Oh, not this pot. No, not this one. All those others, right? All those Scythians. Bad people. See, he’s really going to put the clamps on them.

I think that’s the way God’s going to work, see. God’s going to win people’s hearts, he wins their minds, he sets them free, he loves them. God so loves the world that he’s going to make them miserable if they don’t love him back. No. God so loves the world that he’s going to bring to pass in his time something so beautiful, so good, so mind ravishing, that he can’t even believe it. So he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it by working with people. People are so funny. If you’re, if you’re familiar with what happens to people in counseling situations or many kinds of human interaction situations. You see people who think that some other person is the absolute bitter end of everything. And sometimes within just a few days they’re crazy about that person. Things switch. That’s what conversion, when it’s genuine and informed by truth, not just something pulled out of people by hitting their button, you know. When it’s genuine, that’s what conversion does. Conversion makes the world new, that’s God’s work, it makes the world new. You see things, why, things are solved, things are changed in ways which you ask the person beforehand, hey, how’s it going to be? They have no idea it’s going to be like that.

Book of Acts is a book of surprises along those lines, in that respect we’ve only just begun. The surprises are to come. We know something of what they’re going to be like and if we open our minds we can let our faith grow in God’s goodness and His power to bring to pass what is good. We can really grow along if we just let ourselves open up to the truth which is present in Christ and displayed in the New Testament.

Well I’ve already hammered that fourth point in. You’re going to understand the book of Acts, you have to see over and over that the way God works it does not conform to human expectations, it just doesn’t. You watch these people, Paul and Peter and the rest of them, and you have the, you see them as astounded onlookers to what’s happening. And they come back like Paul goes out on his first missionary journey, as we call it, actually sort of around back up the hills of his hometown of Tarsus, but anyway it was missionary work and tremendous results. And he comes back and he gives a report of what God did with him, what God did with him. It’s astounding the way this works out because we will see, or you’ll see as you read how he goes into these places, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Goes to one place, there’s a guy sitting here, crippled, and so he is moved upon by God and he raises that man up, he’s healed. And Paul, he’s got a revolution there on his hands and they’re calling him as some kind of a Greek god, and he just kind of takes the best handle he can get on it and winds up preaching to them of the kingdom of God and Jesus as savior. And that happens over and over and he had the worst advance committee to plan his meetings that you could imagine. Ah, but he didn’t, did he? He just had God working with him. And as he says, faith was open to the Gentiles. God opened faith to the Gentiles. God did it. Didn’t expect it.

Now finally, the thing I want to stress finally is again back to this point of skepticism. The book will remain a book of fairy tales until you begin to experience parts of it in your own life. Now you see, I have to add to that immediately. Don’t go out and do something that’s in the book of Acts. Well I will, I will forthwith go out and hmm, do something. No, remember it’s God’s act. It’s not your act, it’s God’s act. It’s your openness, it’s your willingness to learn. I want to dwell on that some more next time, I want to come back to that. But let me just say now, I have heard ever since I’ve been involved in the church, people say, boy let’s have a prayer meeting like they had there in the book of Acts and let’s get it on, you know. That’s blind. Those people didn’t just up and have a prayer meeting. Think of where those people had been. I mean before you come to the prayer meeting, go through what they went through, hmm. Spend two and a half years just watching Jesus, listening to him talk, watching him, spend two and a half years. Give up your business to do that. Give the time to it. Watch all of your hopes that you hope to get out of the thing completely dashed and destroyed. Watch it all lost. Watch yourself wind up as a condemned outlaw, yeah, outlaw. They were the followers of a person who had been gassed, who had been electrocuted. And not only were they outcast from their society, they were sick of themselves. They really were. And confused. They were really confused. Believe me, they were terribly confused. They saw things they couldn’t believe and they couldn’t, they couldn’t accept, they couldn’t accept it at all, and yet they couldn’t reject it. They had this strange thing. Jesus kept coming back to them. That’s right, they’d sit down to eat and he’d show up. Door’s not even open, he’s just there. You never knew when it was going to happen. Not only that, but he was talking to them without being told. He wasn’t even there, and yet he talked to them. I’m going to show you that in just a minute from the first chapter. They were confused. They knew one thing. He had told them to stay put, and after what they’d been through, they thought they’d better mind him, and so they did. They stayed put.

So when we talk about experiencing the things of the Book of Acts, I’m not talking about this thing, well, they talked in tongues, I’ll talk in tongues. They cast out a demon, I’ll cast out a demon. Indeed we’ll see what happens to people who go around doing things like that in the Book of Acts. These things you really need to reflect on now as you leave, and I hope that you’ve gotten them clearly, and that you can not so much make some grand decision which will settle them forever, because of course you just cannot do that, but that you will have clearly fixed in your mind the fact that these are operating assumptions of the Book of Acts. That’s what they are. Without them, it will be a fairy tale, and I warn you, without any one of them, you may hurt yourself reading the Book of Acts. You can hurt yourself in spiritual things. I’ve seen more people with spiritual indigestion, because they just tried to go out and do something that they thought they were supposed to do. I’ve seen people get hurt because they heard, well, you’re supposed to bear everything, right? Love beareth all things? They thought they were loved, and they said, all right, bear everything. Love believeth all things, so I believe anything. Oh, trouble. They’re not loved. That passage says love bears all things. Love believes all things. Well, that’s another story, but I just want to use it to illustrate the point that you have to be careful with the Bible, and with the Book of Acts in particular, because it’s an extremely active book, excuse the pun, that it is, and it can get you excited and upset and worried.

And what it must do is, of course, it must enable us to bring ourselves before the Lord and before his people as open, honest individuals. Where do we stand? Okay, you haven’t cast out any demons in the last couple of days. You haven’t spoken in tongues for a while, possibly never, maybe you don’t even want to. If you haven’t done it, well, where are you then? Are you supposed to be doing those kinds of things? If you’re not, who is? Is anybody supposed to be doing this? What about the gifts of the Spirit? What about the fruit of the Spirit? Where do they fit into my life? See, that’s the kind of thing, that’s where we begin, and we learn hard lessons.

Jesus said to Peter, you know, he said, they’re going to come and get me, fellows, and you’re going to split. And they said, not I, Lord. Oh, not I, Peter. He was going to be real strong. And so he said, oh, listen, if they kill me, I’m not going. Jesus looked at him, you know, or looked at the ceiling. Oh, I so wish I could see the expression on his feet, you know. Jesus turned and said, Peter, oh, Peter, how can you say things like Peter? We don’t know ourselves. We don’t know ourselves. And the most useful thing that can come as we study these scriptures is that we begin to see ourselves in relation to God, and we begin to receive from him the things we can receive. And of course, many of us are at different stages. Some of you are a long ways along that path already. Some of you will receive different things than others. But that’s the process we’re in. So that we must never, we must never forget it that this work goes on in us. If we would understand the book of Acts, it’s for our experience.

Now I want us to take the remaining time we have, which is not long, just to read the first 12 verses of the book of Acts. Make some brief comments on it as we go along. Now remember, we’re starting in the middle of the story, okay? This is the middle of the story. This is part two of the book of Luke. The book of Luke consists of the gospel according to Luke and the book of Acts, right? The book of Luke, this is part two. And you have the explicit reference back to the previous part as Luke leads into his discussion. It says, the former treatise, have I made O Theophilus of all that Jesus began both to do and to teach. He began to do it until the day he was taken up.

Now what we have in these verses is going to be a lead over, as I’ve put here, transition from the Acts of Jesus to the Acts of the Apostles. So in these 12 verses now, we’re reading the final Acts of Jesus. Let’s see what he did. Until the day which he was taken up, after that he, now note this phrase, through the Holy Ghost, had given commandment unto the Apostles whom he had chosen. Through the Holy Ghost, what does that mean? You may regard it as speculative, as you may regard anything I say. And I don’t come as an authority, I come as one to just share with you what I think I have and to receive again.

But let me just lead up to that verse by just making a few remarks about Jesus’ work. I won’t even go further back than that. What was the most characteristic thing about the nation of Israel in its early years? The most characteristic thing, if you look at it, among the nations was precisely it had no king. Israel did not have a government as we know it. Things were directly brought to God. Moses was a leader, there were leaders, but there was no government. And all through a long period of time that continued to be the case. You remember the book of Judges. What was a judge? A judge was not a king, was he? It’s hard to say exactly what a judge was because they played many parts and some of them even adopted the stance of a king. Mainly a judge was a person who rose to meet a temporary crisis. He was anointed of God to meet some particular thing and when that was done, you know, he went back and sat in his tent or something, whatever they did in those days, you know, took care of the sheep or depending on it, Samson had certain diversions which he paid attention to, you know, in the slack seasons, let us say. This work was a work of the Spirit. When Samson was set upon by Philistines in the valley of Lehi, the Spirit of God came upon him and with a jawbone of an ass he slew how many Philistines? Thousands of them. Not bad work for a jawbone of an ass. You have to remember, this talk about the Spirit of God is not mythology. The Spirit of God came upon, they were anointed, they were little Christs. Christ means anointed one, doesn’t it? Anointed one. The Spirit of God came upon them for special purposes, but the point is Israel had no government of man, none. It had deliverers and it had judges, but it had no government. That’s a very significant point.

Don’t ever forget it because whenever the kingdom of God comes in and the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our God, there will not be a government as we recognize it today. The kingdom of our God is not like the kingdom of this world.

But the Jewish people rejected that system and in the 8th chapter, isn’t it the 8th chapter of Samuel, 1 Samuel, I believe it is, I can check it if need be, 8th chapter of 1 Samuel, they come to Samuel, or maybe it’s 2 Samuel, and they say to him, we want a king. You know, you read that and you say, your heart bleeds for poor old Samuel because they come and of all the stupid things they could say, they say, we want to be like all the other nations. What could they have had in their mind? What they had basically was what was later called the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. The lust of the eyes goes in for glory. And the pride of life goes in for dominance. We want a king. We want a king to go out in front of us, lead us out.

Now Samuel moaned and wept over that until finally the Lord came to him and said, Samuel, don’t take it so hard. They haven’t rejected you, they’ve rejected me. You see, Samuel was not their governor. God was. That was clearly understood between Samuel and God. And God said, now Samuel, they’ve rejected me. Do what they want.

And so, there you go. You know what was happening? There was being devised a very vigorous and finally poisonous pot to contain that treasure. We don’t want this treasure just loose, we want to bring it under human control. And forever after that, with very little exception, the story of Israel is the story of the prophets against the kings. The prophets against the kings. The way of God becomes an outside route for a remnant. And do you know what the rest of them are? They got just what they wanted. They’re just like the other nations. That’s just what happened. They’re just like the other nations. You know, it’s typical of God to give you what you want when you really want it. It’s typical of that. And actually, people are more in trouble because they get what they want than because they get what they, or don’t get what they want. It’s what we want that gets us in trouble. Not, very rarely, not having what we do want. There are, of course, cases where that’s true. But our main troubles from getting comes from getting what we want. They didn’t like that manner. And so they hollered. They said, we want to meet. God rained quails on them. And the psalm says, but sent leanness into their soul. God gave them the desire of their heart, but sent leanness into their soul. Now, when you’re asking for things, will you remember that? And Israel got just what it wanted. They got to be like the other nations, still like the other nations, right? Look, we’re shooting at one another. That’s the way the nations do it. Over there protesting their superiority to those they’re killing, while those they’re killing are protesting their superiority to those they’re killing. The same old story, just like the other nations, still like the other nations, going to be just like the other nations. So there they are. They got it.

Now then, when Jesus came, the main thing he had to do was move people off of human leadership. That meant, among other things, that he had to move them off of his own human leadership. Jesus Christ was a flesh and blood person. He is not now a flesh and blood person. That is why Paul says that even though we have known Jesus Christ after the flesh, henceforth know we him no more. The New Testament as a whole is best viewed as the attempt of people to come to grips with just what and who Jesus Christ was. And if you think there is simply one conception of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, read it again. Simply trying to come to grips with who he was.