Will Vaus

Paul Preaching in Athens, by Raphael If you were to choose the words to be written on your tombstone, what would they be? Perhaps you have heard of the hypochondriac who had the following epitaph on his tombstone: “I told you I was sick!” My mother has told me what she wants on her tombstone: “Alive and well!” Acts 28:31 would have been a fitting epitaph for the Apostle Paul’s tombstone if he had one. “Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.” Those few words serve as the ending to the book of Acts. Many have wondered why the book ends so abruptly. The answers are varied. However, this much we can say, Luke set out to write about the Gospel being taken to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). Having set forth the fact that Paul preached the gospel in Rome, the center of the empire, Luke achieved his purpose. It is significant that Luke ends his second volume on the note of p...

Have you ever prayed for God to open a door in your life? I’m sure you have. How about closed doors? Have you ever prayed for a closed door? We don’t like closed doors do we? And yet, a few years back when I was facing a change in life, my friend Douglas Gresham encouraged me to pray for closed doors. Beginning in Acts 21:27 we read about a door that was slammed in the face of the Apostle Paul. I find this one brief statement in our text today to be very dramatic and evocative: “. . . and immediately the gates were shut.” From Acts 9 all the way through to this point we have been reading about Paul’s virtually unhindered witness throughout the Roman Empire. Yes, Paul has been persecuted by the Jews on numerous occasions. Yes, he has been arrested before. Yes, he has even been stoned and left for dead. But on this occasion when Paul is arrested he doesn’t get out of it. In fact, we will see Paul under arrest throughout the rest of the book of Acts. What do y...

The Olympic Torch is a symbol of the Olympic Games. Commemorating the theft of fire from the Greek god Zeus by Prometheus, its origins lie in ancient Greece, when a fire was kept burning throughout the celebration of the ancient Olympics. The fire was reintroduced at the Olympics in 1928, and it has been part of the modern Olympic Games ever since. The modern torch relay was introduced for the Berlin Games of 1936. The Olympic Torch today is ignited several months before the opening celebration of the Olympic Games at the site of the ancient Olympics in Olympia, Greece. By tradition, the Olympic flame is delivered to the officials of the host city in a ceremony taking place in the Athenian Stadium for the start of the relay by the city authorities of Athens. The torch is then transported to the host city of the upcoming Olympics by a torch relay. Though traditionally, the flame is carried on foot, other means of transportation have been used as well. The ru...

When Paul and Barnabas decided to go on a second missionary journey together they ran into some problems. I think we can learn something from them about how to handle the problem of differing opinions in the Church. Barnabas wanted to take his cousin John Mark along with them on the journey. Paul did not think it wise to take him because John Mark had deserted them on their first missionary journey. Who was right in this situation? That is hard to say. From a distant vantage point, one can see both points of view. Barnabas wanted to give his cousin a second chance. Paul didn’t want to potentially sacrifice the success of their mission and the lives that could be won to Christ. This difference of opinion led to an impasse. Maybe if Barnabas had appealed to Scriptural precedence for a second chance, like the second chance that God gave Jonah to go to Ninevah, maybe Paul would have been won over. Or maybe if they had discussed the matter with others in the Chur...

It was Paul’s pattern to proclaim the word of God first in the Jewish synagogues in the towns he visited. Why? Paul says in Romans 1:16, I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. Paul recognized that he was part of an ongoing story. The good news of God did not begin with him. He did not invent it. The story began with God’s chosen people Israel and so they should be the first to receive the next installment of the continuing story. As N. T. Wright has written: The earliest apostolic preaching was neither a standard Jewish message with Jesus added on at the end, nor a free-standing announcement of a new religion cut off from its Jewish roots, but rather the story of Jesus understood as the fulfillment of the Old Testament covenant narrative, and thus as the euangelion , the good news or “gospel”–the creative force which called the...

Of course, one of the recurrent themes in the book of Acts has to do with  the power of the Holy Spirit . In our reading for today, we came across these verses.... “The apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders among the people. . . . As a result, people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those tormented by evil spirits, and all of them were healed.” Perhaps if we recovered more of the power of the Holy Spirit in our own day then more people would be attracted to the church. C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, the woman who became Lewis’s wife, had such an unusual relationship that a movie was made about them called Shadowlands . Davidman was a secular American Jewish woman who was led to faith in Christ partly through reading Lewis’s books. She wrote to Lewis in Engl...

For the next seven days, as we read through the book of Acts together, I offer for your contemplation, some excerpts from my book, Keys to Growth: Meditations on the Acts of the Apostles.  Each chapter focuses upon a different "key to growth" in the life of the individual Christian and the life of the Church as a whole. This first excerpt comes from the first chapter entitled simply Jesus.... My eldest son, James, brought two pumpkin plants home from school one day when he was about thirteen years old. When he brought the plants home they were small, perhaps an inch or so in height. He planted them in two clay pots with good soil, rich in nutrients, and he placed the pots by the window in our living room. Every day James continued to pay attention to those plants. He checked their soil to see how dry they were. If they needed water, he watered them. When we went away for a few days we left the light on the table where the plants were located so that...

"St Peter & St John Run to the Sepulchre" by James Tissot Who was "the disciple whom Jesus loved"? This phrase is used six times in The Gospel of John. By a process of examination of the text and elimination of possible candidates, scholars have deduced that the Apostle John was the Beloved Disciple. A second century quote of Polycrates of Ephesus  (c. 130s - 196), recorded by Eusebius  in his Church History , supports the idea of John as the Beloved Disciple. In John 21:24 we read… This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true. The Apostle John, an eyewitness to the events he recounts, has written down for us the words and deeds of Jesus. He has written down for us an account of what other people following Jesus looks like. In fact, John gives us more individual portraits of the followers of Jesus than any other Gospel. Those portraits are detailed; they provide us w...

I just realized that I have been reading the Gospel of John at least since the age of 12 when my parents gave me a Living Bible for Christmas. That is almost 40 years. I do not know how many times I have read this Gospel. However, from that first reading forty years ago until now I have continued to underline many verses, and in some cases, whole chapters in this Gospel as I have read it in multiple translations and even in Greek. There is much that speaks to me in these four chapters for today’s reading. Space permits me only to comment on one thing. One of John’s themes, both in his Gospel and in the letters, is love. In John 13:34-35 Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” What might the world be like if Christians were known universally, first and foremost, for their love? Loving i...

George Watson with Will Vaus, 1997 I read today in The Independent  an article about the largest donation given to the Liberal Democratic party in the UK in a decade. You may read the article here:  The Independent . What surprised me was to discover that I met the donor, George Watson, in 1997. Watson was a student of C. S. Lewis at Oxford and a colleague at Cambridge. He wrote some essays about Lewis' literary criticism many years after Lewis' death.  I was introduced to Watson by Walter Hooper and asked Watson if he would give a lecture to a Lewis tour group I was bringing through Cambridge. He agreed. And not only did he do that, but he also, very kindly gave us a tour of his college, St. John's, and Lewis' Magdalene. Watson gave a very erudite lecture to our group in the conference room of our hotel. Despite being an avowed atheist/agnostic and a very unemotional character, he got choked up in the middle of his lecture when he was about to read a brief ex...

There is much that is worth comment in this section of John's Gospel: the healing of the man born blind, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and so much else. However, one of the quieter stories of this section, really has a lot to say to us in our busy culture that is so concerned with externals.... I remember well what Christmas and birthdays were like when our boys were very young. We would spend time picking out the perfect gifts, ones we thought they would enjoy, and ones we found delightful too. Then the time would come for one of our sons to open his gift. Of course, being very small, they needed help opening the presents. Once the presents were open, as every parent knows about young children, our boys would inevitably show more interest in the box than they would in the present inside. As God’s children through Jesus Christ, we have been given the most wonderful gifts of all: the gift of God’s grace, the gift of his love and forgiveness, the ...

Since I jumped right in yesterday to comment on the text of the Gospel of John, today I would like to stand back from it for a moment and share what some scholars think about the date of this Gospel. Here is what Perrin and Duling have to say in The New Testament: An Introduction …. The reference to the destruction of Jerusalem, the paucity of traditional Jewish Christian apocalyptic thought, and the conflict of the Johannine community with the Jewish synagogue all point to a context in the late first century A.D. This is reinforced by John’s knowledge of Mark and possibly Luke. Moreover, textual evidence at the other end is supportive. The earliest text we have of any part of the New Testament is a fragment of the gospel of John. It is a papyrus fragment containing parts of John 18:31-33, 37-38, discovered in Egypt, and scholars consider it to have been written in the first half of the second century. The gospel must have been written early enough for it to have ci...