ACTS
O U T O F J OY / T H E C H U R C H M U LT I P L I E S
GROUP STUDY QUESTIONS
WEEK 1
THE BEGINNING OF THE CHURCH (ACTS 1) VERSE FOR MEDITATION But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. ACTS 1:8 OPENING THOUGHT From the waiting on Christ’s promises in the Upper Room to the coming of the Holy Spirit and the beginning of the Church, the Apostles and disciples were marked by prayer. As the Spirit empowered them to witness, prayer united them to God.
Communicating with God is at the heart of our faith. Seventeenth-century monk Brother Lawrence once expressed, “There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God.” Henri Nouwen, in his book Clowning in Rome, agrees and locates that continual conversation within our thoughts and prayers: Our prayer can only become unceasing communion when all our thoughts—beautiful or ugly, high or low, proud or shameful, sorrowful or joyful—can be thought in the presence of [God]…our unceasing thinking is converted to unceasing prayer moving us from a self-centered monologue to a Godcentered dialogue. It is in our constant thoughts and prayers about God and toward God that we hear from Him. For those abiding in Christ, God speaks into our inner person. He addresses us through