Acts Daily Devotional Podcast

This is the third time Luke records Paul’s conversion, each version shaped for its audience. For Agrippa, Paul collapses the whole event into a single conversation on the road and adds a detail the earlier accounts left...

Two years, two governors, one assassination plot, and finally a king who actually understood the categories. For the first time since his arrest, Paul was speaking to someone who could follow the argument. He stretched...

Luke chose a phrase used for royal parades. Great pomp. Agrippa in royal purple, Bernice in the finery that had made her famous in Rome, five tribunes, the prominent men of Caesarea. Then a side door opened and a Jewish...

Festus had a problem. He had to write a legal brief for Caesar explaining charges that did not exist, and sending a Roman citizen to the emperor with a confused memo would be career suicide. Then King Agrippa and...

A new governor, Festus, had been in the province three days before the Sanhedrin had his ear, asking to move Paul’s trial to Jerusalem while planning an ambush along the road. Two years had passed, and the murderous...

Felix already knew about the Way. He had a Jewish wife and two years of governing a region full of Christians. He knew the honest verdict was not guilty, and he could not bring himself to deliver it. So he adjourned...

Where Tertullus opened with flattery, Paul opened with a fact. Then he took the prosecution apart piece by piece. Twelve days in Jerusalem is not enough time to start a revolution. No one found him arguing or stirring...

Five days after Paul’s escort galloped out of Jerusalem, the high priest himself came down to a Gentile port to ask a corrupt pagan governor to do what God’s law would not let him do. He hated Paul more than he loved...

Forty men with knives. Four hundred and seventy Roman soldiers marching out of Jerusalem at nine at night to escort one small Jewish preacher safely to the coast. Two hundred infantry, seventy cavalry, two hundred...

The night before, Jesus had stood beside Paul in a Roman barracks and told him to take courage, because he was going to Rome. By sunrise, forty men had gathered in a back room and bound themselves under a curse not to...

The crowd had been listening respectfully until Paul named the Gentiles as fellow recipients of God's love. Then the courtyard exploded. They tore at their clothes, threw dust in the air, and screamed for his death just...

Paul keeps telling his story. Notice the man he highlights. Ananias. A devout Jew, well-spoken of by all the Jews in Damascus. The crowd would have caught that immediately. The first person to lay hands on Saul of...

Paul has the floor. The mob is quiet. Whatever he says next will either save him or get him killed. He doesn't argue the false charges. He doesn't quote Roman law. He tells them his story. Three Aramaic words lower...

The soldiers carry Paul up the steps because the mob keeps surging at him, screaming the same words a different crowd had screamed at Jesus on these same streets: get rid of him. Halfway up, Paul turns to the commander...

Six days into a peace plan, and Paul is being beaten on the temple steps. Look where the trouble comes from. Jews from the province of Asia. Ephesus territory. The same people who watched Paul's two-year ministry...