rch. Beginning with what might be described as "home missions," and culminating with a record of Paul's "foreign missions," Acts demonstrates how the Church received the empowering of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, how God chose to reveal Himself to all who will hear by allowing the Word of God to be spoken in all languages at that time, and how the Church experienced phenomenal growth each time the Word of God was spoken.
Acts records the pressures under which the early Church labored as it began to grow and diversify. As the Church evolved from a relatively local Jewish sect into a world religion, questions concerning adherence to Jewish customs and rituals were brought to the Apostles and adjudicated in the power of the Holy Spirit. This allowed the Church to continually go forward instead of bogging down in things which ultimately do not affect one's faith in God yet which certainly have the ability to shift our focus from the spiritual to the temporal.
The relevance of Acts to contemporary Christianity is found in its worldview. Although the Hebrew nation had been chosen by God to be a light to all nations, it had forsaken this responsibility. In Acts, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we find the emerging Church acting upon the Great Commission of Christ to take the Gospel to all the nations, particularly as it endorsed the missionary travels of Paul into the Gentile world of Mediterranean Europe and Asia Minor. Paul was able to use both his Jewish heritage and Roman citizenship to maximum advantage in order to preach the Lordship of Jesus, and the necessity of salvation.
Paul's Epistle to the Romans is the foundation of Christian doctrine. Even if none of Paul's other letters had survived, Romans contains all the essential elements necessary to a complete understanding of what separates man from God, how that gap can be bridged, and how the newly restored relationship between man and God can be nourish...