Marilyn D.’s Journal

We will all have a birth date and an date of death on our tomb stone (if the Lord should tarry) and in between those two dates is a dash...which represents our life...This verse is Barnabas's dash...a life given over to living wholeheartedly for the Lord and allowing God full reign as He used his life to impact eternity!!! May the Lord please help us through the power of His Spirit to live lives that are worthy of being called His children and to do better than we even know how to do!

These kinds of verses have been a conformation to my understanding, since I came out of a religious background that taught infant baptism and that baptism administered some type of grace. Here we see that the people heard the truth first... (faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God). Secondly, he believed the message and received the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior.(for by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God...) We know this because they received the Holy Spirit (...the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children) and thereby we are able to follow the Lord in obedience to scripture through the waters of baptism which is simply an outward confirmation of our inward decision! Hence, "Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water...They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have."

Very intriguing passage about the signs that Philip performed. It almost connotes that the crowds paid attention to Philip's teaching of Christ because of the signs...We are in an age of grace, the age of miracles was clearly during the life of the apostles. I believe that God is still in the business of miracles but not to bring people to Himself. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. We can easily identify through Scripture how experiential minded mankind is and how quickly it becomes disenchanted as we read many accounts of God's grace and mercy throughout the O.T. especially in the accounts of Exodus. Although they saw Jesus healing people by the groves of incurable diseases and conditions including raising people from the dead, they still had "stiff necks" and " hardened hearts" as they rejected and impaled Him to the cross. We have God's heart and mind penned out in Scripture which is the infallible, inherent word of God. It is given to us for the Holy Spirit to use as God molds, shapes and transforms us into His Son's likeness. Satan is cleaver and does all He can to engage our flesh and our sin nature. He has many schemes and uses them under the guise of Christianity. My prayer is that the Lord will help us to keep our eyes focused on Him and the finished work of the cross and that we will faithfully worship God by loving Him wholeheartedly, obeying Him supremely and trusting Him completely as we study His word!

Stephen was obviously given incredible boldness and confidence through the power of the Holy Spirit and an extra measure of Grace as he begins to endure incredible hostility, through a mob attack and horrific scene of murder...God obviously demonstrates His compassion, and what great comfort it must of been to Stephen as God reveals His glory and Stephen see's the Lord Jesus...ready to usher him into heaven!!!. A beautiful display and reminder of God's promises that He will never leave us or forsake us and that only through trusting and obeying Him can we have a peace that surpasses all understanding!

I love the progress report recorded by Luke...and that God gave great liberty to Stephen, a man full of grace and power! It amazes me that the Sanhedrin (and possibly those that resided over the trials of the Lord...)saw his face and professed that it was like the face of an angel...Yet still reject...This is evidence of the hardening of the heart and that the heart is desperately wicked...!