Stepping into Luke-Acts

We have a nasty habit. All of us do. I chalk it up to the Fall and to our troubling, prideful desire to be “like God.” We tend to want to read the Scriptures from a place of privilege, from the top. We assume that we have it right and, since we do, we can read the text at others. But that is not what the Scriptures are meant for, and we do ourselves, as well as the Word of the Lord, a disservice when we treat them this way.

It is time for us to take a step back, a step of humility. It is time for us to step down from the stool of our pride and allow the Scriptures to read us. It is time to set aside our own understanding of the world and allow the narratives of Scripture to shape our worldview. It is time for us to step into the biblical text as a community of faith.

I have been spending some precious time reading Luke-Acts this summer. It has been a wonderfully challenging look at the life of Jesus. My theological imagination has been sparked. Sin has been revealed. My life has been challenged and critiqued. All of this has come from the Scriptures, the Living Word of God.

Reading Luke-Acts can be invigorating. Luke’s vision of the place of the Holy Spirit as the power of God for the work of God is both empowering and terrifying. His understanding of the importance of prayer is convicting. But reading Luke-Acts can also be an excruciatingly painful task, especially if you are one of the privileged (and most all of us fall into that category). Luke’s narrative cuts to our self-centered, self-absorbed hearts like Aslan’s claw cut into Eustace’s greedy, scaly, dragon-skin in C. S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Luke’s theology of the great reversal is nothing less than a stinging critique of our lives. Very early, it becomes perfectly clear that Luke’s understanding of salvation and his vision of how the Kingdom of God has broken into the world in the person of Jesus Christ are very different from the most common understanding of salvation.

Luke is not just giving an account of the life of Jesus. He is also trying to shape the way we understand the world, calling us to respond to the visitation of God in Jesus Christ. He is calling us to share life together in a subversive community that undercuts the social structures of the world.

So now, I ask you to join me on this journey. Over the next several months, dive into Luke's narrative. Find ways in which you can connect the text to our world. The goal is to step into the world of Luke-Acts, to live there and allow the world of Luke’s narrative to critique and shape our lives, to rekindle the fire of our conviction, to open our eyes to what God is doing in the world, and to challenge us to be the church, a creative minority that embodies God’s will. May God bless us all as we embark on this journey.