The Bible Is for You: 5 Days in the New TestamentНамуна

The Acts of the Apostles

There is a saying I love: “I want to be where my feet are.” It’s harder than it sounds, isn’t it?

We long to be fully present right where we are. With our friends or family, at a meeting or dinner party, in a boardroom or hospital room, we want to make the most of the time we have in the relationships and places God puts us. Just yesterday, I wanted to be at my nephew’s graduation, my twins’ baseball doubleheader, home caring for my sick child, and helping my mom clean out her upstairs closet—all in one afternoon. But that’s impossible. I can only be where my feet are, and my feet can only be in one place at a time.

In the days leading to His crucifixion, Jesus told His disciples something that must have felt impossible. “It is for your benefit that I go away, because if I don’t go away the Counselor will not come to you” (John 16:7). How can that be? What could be better than walking with the living, breathing Messiah? The disciples did not understand that Jesus’s death would give way to His resurrection, and His resurrection would secure the very thing they longed for—His presence with them forever.

After He rose from the dead and before He ascended to the Father, the resurrected Jesus instructed His disciples to stay in Jerusalem and “wait for the Father’s promise” (Acts 1:4). And on the day of Pentecost, that promise arrived. The Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples, filling them with the power and presence of the same Jesus they walked with just days before.

The Spirit—the Counselor and Comforter—had come to be with them forever.

While Jesus lived and ministered here on earth, He had to be where His feet were. He was human, after all. The book of Acts is the record of how the promised Holy Spirit filled the disciples, empowering them to continue Jesus’s ministry not only in Jerusalem, but “in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Chapter after chapter in Acts, we see the Spirit move among the Church across geographical and cultural boundaries to heal the sick, raise the dead, free the oppressed, and baptize thousands upon thousands into new, eternal life in Christ. By the sending of His Spirit, Jesus’s mission and message was unleashed to bring salvation to the whole world through the faith and feet of ordinary people like you and me.

The promise is for us, too. When we repent and believe that Jesus is the Christ, we receive the gift of that same Spirit. He is the Spirit of God alive in us, interceding for us in our trials, comforting us in our grief, and empowering us as ambassadors of the gospel to a hurting world.

Like it or not, you can only be where your feet are. But wherever your feet are, Jesus is there.

Thank you for reading! This plan was adapted from The Bible Is for You by She Reads Truth co-founders and authors Raechel Myers and Amanda Bible Williams. Click here to learn more or purchase your copy.