World Upside-Down

World Upside-Down

Perhaps it is cliché to say something along the lines of “the Gospel changes everything.”

For most of us these days, the “good news” that God, in Jesus Christ, entered the world to establish His Kingdom, died a criminal’s death at the hands of those “in charge,” and then rose from the dead, throwing a wrench into the fear and sin that chokes us and leaves us in exile, too often gets watered down into some nice story, some fun fact to believe, or some myth to outgrow.

But as we’ve seen in Acts, this news, this proclamation of what God has done in Christ and what he is doing by His Spirit, challenges the status quo, each of our own equilibriums, “the way things are.”

And this is true not just for a certain type of person. Not just for someone who’s obviously broken or whose God-shaped-hole is especially apparent. Last week we read about Lydia, the well-respected businesswoman, whose life and imagination was captured by the good news of Jesus. This week, Paul and Silas encounter two others whose individual stories were well-worth Luke highlighting: a possessed fortune-teller, who heckles Paul into healing her, and a jailor who beats on Paul and Silas until he has his world, his job, his reputation, his very life, completely threatened.

Join us for the next installment of Living in God’s Story, as we vividly see just how potent this good news was (and still is!) for real lives.