Who are you, Lord? And what shall I do, Lord? — James Montgomery Boice

"When we read Acts 9, we find Paul asking Jesus, “Who are you, Lord?” (Acts 9:5). In response Jesus told him, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do” (vv. 5–6). However, when we read Acts 22, we find that Paul also asked a second question: “What shall I do, Lord?” (Acts 22:10). This is an important addition to the story and a significant combination of ideas, because together the two questions form a sound basis for a strong Christian life…

Christianity begins with the question, Who are you, Lord? (Acts 9:5) That is because the deity of Jesus Christ is the foundation for everything that follows. Without that foundation we rush around doing things that appeal to us, things that seem good, but are not necessarily the Lord’s plan for us. But having established that base, we also need to ask the second question: What shall I do? (Acts 22:10) This is because God has appointed certain good works to be done by every Christian (Eph. 2:10)."

— James Montgomery Boice, Acts: An expositional commentary (155–156).

kerygma, that is, basic gospel facts — James Montgomery Boice

"Peter had a chance to give a brief sermon in his defense before the Sanhedrin (Acts 5:29-32). The sermon contains what in formal New Testament studies has come to be called the kerygma, the fixed structure to almost all New Testament presentations of the gospel message.

C. H. Dodd distinguished kerygma from didachē, which means “teaching.” 

The latter word refers mostly to ethical instruction, the kind of thing we find in the Sermon on the Mount and large portions of the New Testament letters. 

Kerygma, by contrast, refers to the basic gospel facts. These facts include: Christ’s death for sins, his burial, his resurrection, his ascension to heaven, and his appearance in his resurrected form to chosen witnesses. We find perhaps the clearest example of this proclamation pattern in 1 Corinthians 15. But it is also found elsewhere and is the basic structure for the four Gospels. It is precisely what we find in Peter’s short sermon to the Sanhedrin:

  •      The crucifixion: “whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 5:30)
  •      The resurrection: “God … raised Jesus from the dead” (v. 30)
  •      The ascension: “God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior” (v. 31)
  •      The witnesses: “We are witnesses of these things” (v. 32)

Where is the ethical teaching of the New Testament? It is not present. Most of what Jesus taught in the Gospels was ethical teaching—sometimes in the form of parables, sometimes in more formal discourses. But when we come to this early Christian preaching we find that the apostles did not do as he did. Why not? Did they consider Jesus’ ethical teaching unimportant?

Obviously, the reason the disciples began with the kerygma is that they knew, as we should also know, that a person must first come to Jesus Christ as Savior before he or she can take on the burden of his teachings. It is true that we cannot have one without the other. But unless a person first believes on Jesus as his or her Savior and thus has the new life of Christ within, that person cannot even begin to live the life Christ commanded. As a matter of fact, unless you first confess your sin and find forgiveness, you only go on into increasing sin, which is what these leaders did.

The apostles did not tell the Sadducees to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Instead they told them to repent of their sin and come to Jesus Christ for cleansing from it. That is the message we have been given for a perishing world today."

— James Montgomery Boice, Acts: An expositional commentary (108–109). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

on importance of Bible study and prayer — James Montgomery Boice

"Two things go together in the Christian life: prayer, in which we talk to God, and Bible study, in which God talks to us. Prayer is of great importance. But somebody once said, I think wisely, that when we’re talking to God and God is talking to us, we had better let God do most of the talking. In other words, we should spend most of our time in Bible study…

We as Christians sometimes say, “We want God to bless our church” or “We want God to bless our family” (or our Bible study or nation or whatever it might be). But if we are serious, we must learn that the way God blesses is usually through a study of the Bible—as people come to know what God has written, respond to it, believe it, and proclaim it to other people in the world. If you find yourself in what seems to be a time of waiting or inactivity, redeem the time, as these disciples did. Become a better student—a more knowledgeable student—of the Word of God…

A Spirit-filled church always studies the apostolic teaching. It is a learning church that grounds its experiences in and tests those experiences by the Word of God…

Let’s put that in terms easy to understand: A Spirit-filled church is always going to be a Bible-studying church. Those two things go together… Wherever the church has been greatly blessed, where the Spirit of God has come upon God’s people and the gospel has gone forth in great power and people have responded to it, these have always been ages in which the Bible has been studied carefully. Why? It is because the closer men and women come to God the closer they want to get to where he speaks to their hearts, and that is in the Bible.

What is true of the church is true for individuals also. If you are Spirit-filled, then you will be drawn to this Book. If you are not drawn to this Book, if you do not really want to study it, if you say, “Well, you know, I look at the Bible from time to time, but it seems rather boring to me: it never really does much for me,” you ought to question whether you are really born again. Or if you are born again, you at least ought to question whether you are filled by the Holy Spirit. Because the Holy Spirit, whose chief task is to bear witness to Jesus Christ, inevitably draws the people of God to Jesus through the Scriptures.

This means, among other things, that evangelical, Spirit-filled, Bible-oriented churches should offer many ways for people to get to know the Bible. It must be done through the preaching. In fact, that is the preacher’s chief task: to expound the Word of God. He is to study it and then teach it to others. It may be done through Bible classes and home Bible studies. We are going to see that the early Christians worshiped in their homes. So I am sure they studied the Bible in their homes. If we had been there, we would have said, “They’re having home Bible studies.”

— James Montgomery Boice, Acts: An expositional commentary (57–58).

God delights in using little things — James Montgomery Boice

“Here [Acts 23:12-22] we have another of those startling biblical cases where God, who is able to use the great as well as the little things of life, uses small things to accomplish his purposes.

A woman I have known for a long time once told me something about her background that I had not heard before. She said, “God used a horse to bring me to the Savior.” She saw the puzzled look on my face and asked, “Haven’t I ever told you that story?”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Well,” she said, “my daughter got interested in horses and joined an equestrian team, where she met a Christian who was one of the other riders and a competitor. He led my daughter to the Lord. Then my daughter helped me to find the Lord too.”

I wonder if you have ever thought about this in terms of the Bible’s stories. God does not hesitate to use small objects for his purposes. When he made the first man, Adam, in Eden, he made him from the dust of the ground, stooping to collect and form it. He could have used some more noble substance, I suppose. But in order that we might be reminded later, “Dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen. 3:19), he chose dust.

When God revealed himself to Moses to call him to be the deliverer of his people, he appeared in a burning bush on a hillside in a remote, barren area of the world.

When he sent David to kill the Philistine giant, Goliath, it was with a sling and five small stones.

Samson killed a thousand Philistines with a jawbone of a donkey.

Many of the great people of the Bible were, at least in their early days, hardly great people at all. Abraham, the father of the faith, worshiped idols until God revealed himself to him.

Moses was a son of slave parents, killed an Egyptian, and spent the next forty years in the desert as a shepherd.

David was the youngest son in an obscure family in an obscure town in Judah. Yet God called this nobody to be the greatest king of all.

Most striking, when God was ready to send his own Son to earth, he chose a poor virgin of Nazareth to be his Son’s mother.

That is the way God operates. If that is the way God operates, if God delights in using little things, then God can use us, however small or apparently insignificant we may be. Paul states this principle in 1 Corinthians 1:26-29.

If that is true, then there is hope for each of us. In this story, God used Paul’s nephew to save Paul.

Don’t ever say, especially when you go through dark periods, “Things are really bad for me. I am not accomplishing anything. God cannot use somebody like me, especially not in the circumstances in which I find myself now.” It is usually people like us in circumstances like ours that God uses.”

— James Montgomery Boice, Acts: An expositional commentary (384). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

two great pillars of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the conversion of the apostle Paul — James M. Boice

“In the eighteenth century there were two young men in England whose names were Lord Lyttleton and Gilbert West. They were unbelievers. In fact, they were strong in their unbelief. They were also both lawyers, with keen minds, and they thought they had good reasons for rejecting Christianity. One day in a conversation one of them said, “Christianity stands upon a very unstable foundation. There are only two things that actually support it: the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ and the alleged conversion of Saul of Tarsus. If we can disprove those stories, which should be rather easy to do, Christianity will collapse like a house of cards.”

Gilbert West said, “All right, then. I’ll write a book on the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ and disprove it.”

Lord Lyttleton said, “If you write a book on the resurrection, I’ll write on the alleged appearance of Jesus to the apostle Paul. You show why Jesus could not possibly have been raised from the dead, and I’ll show that the apostle Paul could not have been converted as the Bible says he was—by a voice from heaven on the road to Damascus.”

So they went off to write their books. Sometime later they met again, and one of them said to the other, “I’m afraid I have a confession to make. I have been looking into the evidence for this story, and I have begun to think that maybe there is something to it after all.” The other said, “The same thing has happened to me. But let’s keep on investigating these stories and see where we come out.”

In the end, after they had done their investigations and had written their books, each had come out on exactly the opposite side he had been on when he began his investigation. Gilbert West had written The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, arguing that it is a fact of history. And Lord Lyttleton had written The Conversion of St. Paul.

By treating the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the conversion of the apostle Paul as two great pillars of Christianity, these men were saying that if the apostle Paul was not converted as the ninth chapter of Acts says he was and as he himself declares in his own recorded testimonies both before the Jews and the Gentiles, then Christianity loses one of its two most important bulwarks. Moreover, it loses its most able theologian and is considerably weakened.”

— James Montgomery Boice