Luke opens his account of the acts of the apostles by referring back to his first book, his gospel. There, he says, he recorded all that Jesus had ‘begun to do’. What an amazing thought! That all we have in the gospels is the beginning of what Jesus wants to do in this world. He hadn’t finished his work – it had merely begun. And Luke closes the gospel by referring to Jesus’ ascension which brings his e...

So far in this series I have been looking at how Jesus applied the term ‘apostle’ to his disciples. It is not a term he is reported to have used widely and yet there is enough detail in the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) to say something about how he saw things.

The four key things drawn from the previous posts have been i) they are appointed by Jesus; ii) they are to preach the Kingdom; iii) they have ...

For those with long memories (!) I have been looking at what the NT says about the apostolic ministry. You can see previous posts here and here. In those two posts I looked at Matthew 10 – the first mention of the apostles in the NT. In this post I want to look at the parallel passage in Mark 3. It is, of course, a much shorter passage and does not include the long discourse by Jesus as recorded in Matt 10. But it does se...

My first post on the apostolic (read it here) drew some good responses from Ben, Mark, and James – thanks, guys. In this topic I really am trying to grapple with a subject that I don’t have any answers to – and yet feel that the answers so often given in church life today do not quite reflect what the NT says about being an apostle. Ben makes a very valid point that the apostles were called to plant the gos...

I have a bee in my bonnet about the apostolic. In fact regular readers of the blog would say I have several bees in several bonnets about a whole host of things, but I think especially the concept of the apostolic is stirring something in me these days. I’ve already posted some thoughts, but I’d like to develop more over the next few weeks. They’re not going to be fully thought out truths about what an apos...