Spend any significant amount of time with me and you'll figure out a couple things about me fairly easily: I am a husband and a father. Since I spend so much of my time focused and engulfed in that area of my life, it's everything I want to talk about. There are people who have never met Phoebe and Faith but who ask about them since I talk about them enough that the practically know them.
As I've been getting ready for the small group that starts in several days, as I said in my previous blog post, God's been speaking Acts 4:13 over and over again.
They couldn't take their eyes off them—Peter and John standing there so confident, so sure of themselves! Their fascination deepened when they realized these two were laymen with no training in Scripture or formal education. They recognized them as companions of Jesus ( Acts 4:13 Msg).
For those of you who don't know the story, Peter and John were just walking past the temple when a crippled person asked for money. Peter looked at him and said basically, "I don't have any money but what I can give you is healing, in Jesus' name get up and walk." This healing started a giant teaching session. Peter and John just stood there and spoke about Jesus, their friend and Lord, and about everything that they had seen and heard. Eventually they were called into the chief priest and stood toe to toe with them and proclaimed Jesus accurately and in such a way that the religious leaders just stood in awe of them. There were two men who a few years earlier were fishermen, and had no education of any means. However the time they spent with Jesus made them able to talk about him. They had spent so much time with Jesus both before and after the Ascension that they had no problem talking about him.
What I take away from the story, and from God's word to me, was that I don't need to fear being able to lead a discussion about God, as long as I've spent enough time with God and his word to know him, to know his character, and what his word means.
The question is will people be able to determine that I spent any time with God, or will I just look like a guy who read a few books? I could read about being a husband and a father, but that is nothing like being the real thing. I'm going to need God's help to be able to speak from experience with Him rather than from reading a book about him.