{"id":10018,"date":"2022-01-04T06:37:15","date_gmt":"2022-01-04T12:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/devotional-on-acts-8\/"},"modified":"2021-12-28T15:00:04","modified_gmt":"2021-12-28T21:00:04","slug":"devotional-on-acts-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/devotional-on-acts-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Devotional on Acts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2014 – Mt St Helens, WA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Philip and the Ethiopian <\/p>\n

Acts 8: He met an Ethiopian eunuch coming down the road.<\/p>\n

Philip is deeply involved in a great revival in Samaria. Miracles are taking place, and people are coming to faith in Jesus by the hundreds and, probably, thousands. The Holy Spirit is filling lives and Philip is at the heart of a real move of God. Then, the Lord speaks to Philip, sending him away from the action and out to the wilderness. Rather than ministering to thousands, he\u2019s to watch for just one man, the one known in history simply as the Ethiopian eunuch. This person is more or less a mystery in the Bible. Here\u2019s an African traveling to Jerusalem to worship. What\u2019s up with that? Some think this proves the, mostly fictional, connection between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and that because of her visit to Solomon hundreds of years earlier that there\u2019s now a pocket of Jehovah worshipers in northern Africa. Perhaps this man is one of those worshipers and, because of his standing in government, he\u2019s able to make the long journey to Jerusalem to worship. It\u2019s fun to speculate about stuff like this. However, for Philip, none of this matters. He\u2019s on a mission from God to tell this mysterious man about Jesus and that\u2019s what he does. The man believes in Jesus, asks to be baptized, and, as he\u2019s baptized, Philip is whisked away by the Spirit to a town thirty miles away. As I read this story, I not only enjoy thinking of the mystery of the Ethiopian, but of Philip\u2019s obedience to the seeming unreasonable orders of the Lord. If I\u2019m in the middle of a great revival and the Lord tells me to leave it all and head out to the wilderness to find one person, I might be a bit hesitant, wondering if I\u2019m hearing the Lord\u2019s command correctly. Philip, though, just obeys and the result is this incident. Why this Ethiopian? My guess is that he becomes the first missionary for Jesus in Africa, boosting the spread of the Gospel in the direction opposite from Rome, which will soon be Paul and Silas\u2019 territory. I may be wrong here, but it\u2019s fun to think about stuff like this.<\/p>\n

Take Away: The Lord\u2019s definition of success is often quite different than ours.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Philip and the Ethiopian Acts 8: He met an Ethiopian eunuch coming down the road. Philip is deeply involved in a great revival in Samaria. Miracles are taking place, and people are coming to faith in Jesus by the hundreds and, probably, thousands. The Holy Spirit is filling lives and Philip is at the heart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1485,1428],"tags":[1268,726,1008],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10018"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10018"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15920,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10018\/revisions\/15920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}