In this concluding message on the explosion of the early church into the Roman empire, we’ll hear some good news about the church and its growth today, then look at two simple facts we’ve learned that would lead us to believe it is God’s plan for the explosion of the church to continue. We’ll then summarize nine things we’ve learned about the dynamic behind church explosion from the book of Acts and apply them to ourselves and to the church today.

Satan tried to stop the church from the outside, by putting governmental pressure on the apostles. That failed. As we’ll see, Satan isn’t finished trying to shut down the church. This time he uses two people inside the church to try to discredit the church and ruin its fellowship. God, however, knows what is going on, and the result does not turn out to be what Satan, or the couple involved, planned for.

Peter and John have been released by the Jewish leaders but threatened to stop speaking about Jesus. They return to the gathered believers and the question had to be, “How will they respond? How will they react to the orders and threats that had been given to Peter and John?” What they did and how God responded to it demonstrated that they were going to be unstoppable. That’s how every church today should be.

Faith in Jesus as the Messiah was spreading rapidly in Jerusalem and the surrounding area. The Jewish leaders had already resorted to threats in order to silence the apostles, but it did no good. Now they tried imprisoning them, but as we’ll see that didn’t work either. First, because God released them from prison, and second, because the apostles chose to put obeying God before obeying man and were willing to pay the price for doing so. The Holy Spirit can help us do the same.

The apostles have been busy people. Preaching, healing, baptizing, discipling, praying, overseeing the gifts given to the church, and, no doubt, doing many other things. How much more could they do without the church suffering from leadership overload? A new problem arose in the church that proved to be a defining moment for the church’s leaders. What the leaders decided to do and how the church responded allowed the church to keep growing and be healthy at the same time. It’s a model with meaning for the church today.

So far as we’ve studied the explosion of the church in Jerusalem, we’ve seen the movement was led by the apostles. We come to a turning point in God’s plan for church explosion as we encounter the first account of the witness of someone other than an apostle. His name is Stephen, and when we first met him he was chosen to help serve the widows in the church making sure all were treated equally. Now we find him sharing the gospel so effectively, that all his enemies can do is try to get the Jewish government involved in trying to shut him up. The courage and calm he demonstrated in the face of their anger and mistreatment remind us of the way Jesus responded to his enemies, and show us how the Holy Spirit within us can overcome our fears and emotions to allow us to be a faithful witness for Christ.

No conversion in the history of the early church was more dramatic or had a greater impact than the one we’ll witness in this passage. No conversion demonstrates God’s love for sinners and his grace toward them any better than this one. The result of this conversion was that the church’s greatest enemy became one of its most effective ambassadors. Should you or anyone else doubt the reality of Christian conversion, this is prime evidence that such things do indeed occur.

Peace returned to the church in Jerusalem and Judea, allowing Peter to travel freely in Judea. Two of his stops result in him performing mighty miracles that lead many more people to become followers of Jesus Christ. We see that miracles in this period were ways God used to validate the message of salvation through Jesus Christ and give his servants a chance to lift up Jesus and share the good news.

Up until Acts 10, with a single exception, the Christian movement spread only among Jews, and half-Jewish Samaritans. In this chapter we will find Jewish Peter doing something he never imagined himself doing – going into a Gentile’s house and preaching the good news about Jesus to him. How this came about reveals God’s heart for the other 98% of the world who were not Jewish in the First century, and for those of us today who are not Jews either.

God’s leading of Peter to share the good news with a Gentile not only surprised Peter, it surprised the church. In fact, the leaders in the Jerusalem church called him to account for why he’d even entered a Gentile’s house, much less preached the gospel to them. Peter carefully explained all God had done to convince him not only to visit a Gentile, but then to baptize those who’d believed in Jesus as a result of preaching the good news to them. Prejudices die hard, but God clearly intends that all people can become followers of Christ without first becoming Jews. The good news is for people of all ethnic and cultural groups, and all nationalities.