How Discipleship Yields Restoration
Transformation by the Spirit
The Acts of the Apostles is basically an account of how the Holy Spirit, the powerful and personal presence of God, transforms the earliest followers of Jesus into the restored people of God, the beginnings of God’s new creation. “You will receive power,” Jesus tells his disciples at the story’s beginning, “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 ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Luke (the author of Acts) then describes how the Spirit guides and empowers the first Christians to carry out their mandate of gathering a new people of God composed not only of Israelites but also of people from the earth’s many nations.