Acts 12-28 GGprep+podcaststudy3

Acts Podcast 3 - Transcript

(This is a transcript generated by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy or content by Crossroads)

Welcome, growth group leader. You're listening to the Prep Plus podcast. This is a podcast to help you prep each week for our studies and acts. You'll need your Bible. You'll need a pen. You'll need your Acts Studies booklet. You might even want to get. Yeah. Cast your eyes again over the ladies' night. The latest guide. I'm joined by Ayesha, who wrote these studies.

How I shower, and we are up to study three, which is looking at Acts 21 to 23, verse 11, say Asia. It's always good to pray before we prep. So would you pray for us? Yeah. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your word and the riches in it. Thank you for your spirit. By your spirit, would you help us to understand your word today?

Yeah. May encourage us and spur our son. As we seek to follow your son, Jesus. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen. Amen. Okay, Asia, we're looking at acts 21 223. What is the big idea of this section? What is our kind of big prayer for our groups as we unpack this part? Yeah, in this section, we're meeting Paul as Christ's ambassador, going out and being rejected.

It's almost a bit of a like a passion of Christ. Passion of Paul, beginning movement. And by passion, you mean suffering. Suffering. Not just. Yeah, no. Easy as I'm. No, there's that too. There is a lot of that. Yeah. Suffering. But he's going out with a message. And so I have prayer and hope is that we would see Paul's faithfulness.

He lives in ways that honour God, and he obeys Jesus, but also that we would be encouraged by his courage to keep on going when things are hard, when you're rejected and downtrodden. So great, right? So why don't you, with that in mind, this is one for courage. This is about fac,e preaching the gospel in the face of opposition.

Press pause. Do your prep work through the questions, and then come back, and we'll work through some of them. Not all of them, but some of them together. So press pause. Beep, beep. Welcome back. So let's have a look at this study. Great intro question about passing on traits. And then you have these notes. Now, initially I thought those questions that I meant to answer.

But they are just rhetorical, like that yellow box. And so then we get into this table, which helps us. So we split into three groups, to each to look at a section, just to kind of, I guess, the books that I was interested in, your thoughts on is that first column, acts 2111 to 36. It kicks off with a kind of agaba is prophecy and then goes into a whole lot of, kind of other things, including opposition that Paul faces.

Yeah. How would we answer that? Top right box. What is offensive here? Is it a legit reason to reject Paul and his message? Yeah. Kind of. Probably. What have we gotten out of the text there? I mean, Paul hasn't even really had a chance to share much of a message. Instead, we're looking at his actions. He's trying to show that he's coming in good faith.

In some ways, he's taking the advice of others. Is that the kind of purification stuff that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And yet they stir up lies. There is not a legitimate reason to reject Paul. So they answer. I guess it's a bit of a trick question in that. Yeah. What is offensive here? Really? Nothing. There's a lot of things that people are accusing.

Paul, before anything's kicked off, just aren't legitimate at all. And I guess that becomes a theme passing through. It doesn't hurt that it's working out. Is it just the gospel, which, you know, the gospel is offensive? So it's fine for that to be offensive, but there's not really anything else that Paul's doing, the harm that is causing the offence.

I love your next question. You understand the question in such good passages that you've got there Romans and from Romans and two Corinthians about Paul's motivation. So that is a beautiful question to pause on. If we jump to the application stuff. Yeah. We, the partners, consider the following. And some of these are quite personal. So you can see why you've, you've, you've suggested that we do them in pairs there.

What do you kind of what kind of discussions do you think might come out in there? For instance, the first question is, how do you behave? Is it mindful of how others will perceive you and your message? Are we meant to be mindful? Is that like, what? Are you getting out with that question? Yeah, I suppose I'm getting at the fact that we are Christians and our whole lives, not just on a Sunday.

And if we are proclaiming the gospel wherever we go, God willing, our actions allow for that to happen. And I think the next question kind of indicates that it's not that we should be perfect in every way. We want to be honest about our feelings and flaws, because we're saved only by what Jesus has done. But are we going out with the intention that we want to be able to proclaim the gospel to our friends and adorn it beautifully with how we're living?

So I wonder if we want that mindfulness of others to come out of love for them, wanting them to be able to hear the gospel rather than a kind of people pleasing. Yeah, I might actually not say things because I want you to think well of me. I don't want to eat it, you know, I'm a Christian or think, yeah.

So Paul goes through that whole purification thing, not because he wants to or because he's particularly worried about being accepted by the people he's going to. Yeah, but he wants to make it as easy as possible for the gospel to come. Yes. Back to Jerusalem. That's his motivation. I would a book that I found really helpful in this space and probably for the next few weeks, actually, if it's helpful for you, for you or your group members, it is a book called Honest Evangelism by Reiko Thais.

I think what really challenged me about that book is that it's not a kind of this is a secret formula that's going to make evangelism easy. If only Paul had that. If only Paul. Yeah, because he he he cops it, doesn't he, even though I'm, I'm pretty sure he knew the gospel pretty well and he's pretty good at evangelism.

But it's, you know what, evangelism at heart. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. Probably means you're doing it right. Here's some courage. Here's a dose of courage. To keep you going. Now, just before we wrap up, I'm interested. We've had these videos. Yeah, we've got these videos that we can use, and we can, to some extent, choose which one we say, which week, but is there one which would be particularly good to play this week?

Yeah, it's a missionary video. I was really encouraged by Dave and his, so the video is, Dave. He shares his practice with Dave and Jenny. Yes. Yeah. And yeah, there's they faced incredible suffering, that kind of passion stuff that we were talking about before. But his heart and motivation and his heart for us is that we would know Jesus and speak boldly.

So this beautiful encouragement from Dave, it gives me courage. Yeah. So, yeah, and that's kind of what we're really shooting at in this study, isn't. So you might like to have a look at that. Is that QR code didn't come through in your study? You will have been emailed them on your own, or you can reach out to your team leader or area leader to get a hold of them.

But they're we're sharing. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us. And all the best with your study.