20 Wednesday May 2026
Guard yourselves and all the flock; the shepherd is never exempt from danger. Wolves will come from outside and distortion will rise from within; Paul is not naïve about the church’s future. Yet his final gesture is to commend them to God, not to a strategy. The church survives not by its plans but by the grace to which it is entrusted.
21 Thursday May 2026
Paul stands before the council and the room erupts into faction. He is not above using the division between Pharisee and Sadducee to his advantage. The resurrection is always a dividing line; it splits every room in which it is honestly spoken. God’s truth does not always bring peace; sometimes it first brings clarity about what we truly believe.
22 Friday May 2026
Festus explains Paul’s case to Agrippa and admits his confusion; the dispute, he says, concerns a dead man whom Paul claims is alive. This is the scandal in a single sentence. Every generation of rulers finds the resurrection incomprehensible, and every generation of believers finds it indispensable. The gospel always sounds strange to power.
23 Saturday May 2026
Paul arrives in Rome not in triumph but in chains, and yet he speaks boldly. The kingdom of God is proclaimed from a rented room; this is not failure, it is pattern. The story ends without an ending, the door left open. The unfinished book of Acts is an invitation; the next chapter is ours to write.
24 Sunday May 2026
The Spirit arrives as wind and fire, not as a memorandum from the head office. Each person hears in their own language; Pentecost is the reversal of Babel, not through uniformity but through radical translation. The church is born multilingual; every attempt to reduce it to one tongue is a betrayal of its origin. Unity in the Spirit is not sameness; it is the miracle of mutual understanding across difference.
25 Monday May 2026
Blessed be God, who has given us a living hope through the resurrection. This hope is not optimism; it is something fiercer, born from the far side of death. We are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed; the “not yet” is as important as the “already.” Suffering does not cancel hope; it is the crucible in which hope proves itself genuine.
26 Tuesday May 2026
The prophets searched and inquired carefully about the grace destined for us. They served not themselves but future generations; every honest seeker is a servant of those who come after. Holiness is not purity withdrawn from the world; it is the discipline of remaining awake. To be holy as God is holy means, above all, to be fully present.