ReGeneration Church

Wind roars through a Jerusalem room and fire settles on the faithful, who speak in tongues unknown as three thousand answer the call. Persecution scatters them like seed, yet Philip baptizes an Ethiopian by the roadside and Saul falls blind beneath a blazing light on the Damascus road. At Cornelius’s table, Gentiles burst into tongues, and Antioch sends Paul and Barnabas over the sea. Through Macedonia and Greece the message presses on to Philippi, Thessalonica, and Athens, while ahead wait chains in Jerusalem and a storm-tossed road to Rome...

Paul walks through Athens and sees a city full of idols, so he reasons daily in the synagogue and the marketplace. Before the philosophers on the Areopagus, he points to an altar "To an unknown god" and says this God made everyone so that they might reach out and find him, though he is not far from any of them. He calls them to repent in light of the man God raised from the dead, and some mock him while others want to hear more. A few, including Dionysius and Damaris, join him and believe. What are you searching for that nothing you've found has fully satisfied?

Paul and Silas reach Thessalonica, where Paul spends three Sabbaths reasoning from the Scriptures, and though some believe, jealous opponents stir up a mob and the believers send the missionaries away by night. In Berea, the people receive the message eagerly and search the Scriptures daily to verify it. When agitators follow from Thessalonica, Paul is sent on to the coast while Silas and Timothy stay behind. When you hear something new about your faith, do you accept it at face value, or do you test it against the Scriptures?

Paul and Silas free a slave girl from a spirit that has controlled her voice and her master's profits, and the men who lose money from this stir up a crowd against them. Beaten and locked in the innermost cell with their feet in stocks, Paul and Silas pray and sing at midnight until an earthquake shakes open every door and loosens every chain. The jailer, ready to take his own life believing his prisoners have fled, instead finds them all still there and asks what he must do to be saved. By morning the same chains that held them become the reason a whole household is baptized and the magistrates themselves come to apologize. What chains in your own life might God want to shake loose?