New Sermon Series! Acts: The Spreading Blaze

September 7, 2023

Dear CPC Family,

With the beginning of fall comes the beginning of a new sermon series at CPC!

Our summer series on Titus wrapped up last Sunday. This Sunday, Lord willing, we will begin a series on the book of Acts. I am really looking forward to this series and hope that you’ll join me in praying for the Lord to bless CPC as we study this important book.

The book of Acts goes by many names:

• The Acts of the Apostles (the most common title, likely in your Bible right now)

• The Acts of the Ascended Christ

• The Acts of the Holy Spirit

All of these names are accurate and all of them together capture something of what this book recounts:

The risen Jesus ascends to his heavenly reign, pours out the promised Holy Spirit, and the Son and the Spirit act through the apostles in their ministry of proclamation, prayer, and witness.

We are calling our series Acts: The Spreading Blaze. Acts 1 opens with about 120 people in that initial apostolic band. By the end of Acts 2 about 3,000 more were added to the church, and it just keeps growing from there. Through the gracious work of the Holy Spirit—and even by God’s providential control of persecutions and scatterings—the gospel message continues to spread from Judea, and Samaria, and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8). That story continues today as the gospel spreads around the world.

John Calvin called Acts “a vast treasure.” “Live in that book,” exhorted Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “it is a tonic, the greatest tonic I know of in the realm of the Spirit.” John Stott, likewise, urges the church in every century to “compare itself with the church of the first, and to seek to recapture something of its confidence, enthusiasm, vision, and power.”

We need to hear the message of this book because we, just like the church then, live between the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost and the promised return of Jesus, when time shall be no more.

So, again, let’s pray for the help of the outpoured Spirit that we might understand, believe, and apply this book today!

In the Father’s Love,

Pastor Andrew