By Bill Lamar
Take a few moments to review the readings and your own reflections from this week’s study. Use the questions below to deepen the impact of Acts on your life and your world.
- What character in the texts that you read helped to strengthen you? How can you emulate that character?
- What confuses you about how God worked in the texts that you read?
- How will you live your life differently as a result of reading these texts?
Prayer: Lord, thank you for all that we felt while reading these texts. We offer our confusion, our understanding and our resolve to you. Amen.
Focus Passages and Questions for Small Group Discussion
Consider reading together these two passages and reflecting on their significance for our lives, our church, and our world.
1. Acts 10
- How must Cornelius, a Gentile, have felt knowing that God had received him even though he was not a Jew?
- How do you feel knowing that God receives you as you are and wants to transform you into a new creation? How do you and your church treat outsiders, whoever they may be?
- What must Peter have felt knowing that God had made clean what his religion had called impure? What will it take for you to defy religion and follow God?
2. Acts 11
- Peter has a big job. He has to convince the church that God has set a new course for the proclamation of the gospel. How well does he make his case? Were you convinced by his argument? Would your church be convinced?
- How can we trust a God who seems to improvise along the way? Is the God of our liturgy and theology static or dynamic? How does this square with the texts that we have read?
