The Words of this Life

Acts 5:19-20

But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out, and said, “Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

What the apostles were doing was quite simply to live in a wholly new way.

[I]t wasn’t just a “way of life” in the sense of “a way of conducting your personal day-to-day living,” though it was that—a way which involved living as “family” with all those who shared your belief in Jesus, a way which involved a radically new attitude to property and particularly to the sacred symbol of the holy land, a way which meant that, though you would still worship in the Timple, the center of your life before God cam when you broke bread in individual houses, in remembrance and invocation of Jesus. It was all of that, but it was much more. It was a “way of Life” in the sense that Life itself had come to life in quite a new way; a force of Life had broken through the normally absolute barrier of death, and had burst into the present world of decay and corruption as a new principle, a new possibility, a new power (88).