This is the Join the Journey weekly prayer podcast.

Unlike our new Tuesday teaching episodes, this time is set apart for guided prayer as we abide in Jesus together.

Here's your host, Wes Butler. Well, welcome to

Conversations for the Journey, a weekly podcast to help us commune with our God through prayer in response

to what he has spoken to us through His Word. So thankful that you're here and joining with us this

morning. We are going to be looking this week on the journey at Acts 7.

Acts 7, really almost the entire chapter is what we're going to be looking at.

And it is this, honestly, just a masterclass that the deacon, Stephen, demonstrates for us

on what it looks like to handle the Word of God, to rightly handle the Word of God.

So every time I come to this passage in my own just Bible reading, I'm just amazed at how without

notes in front of him, the Spirit of God allows Stephen to really unpack almost the entirety

of the Old Testament for these Pharisees and religious leaders who are really coming

against him and oppressing him as he was seeking to spread the gospel and to advance the kingdom

there. And so just as I think about this moment in the story of Acts, really what I was

encouraged to and just prompted by the spirit, I think, for us to pray about is one of

our markers here as a church, is that we want to be a Bible revering church. And as I think about

Stephen in this moment, there's kind of three things that jump out to me of maybe what it looks like

for us to pray that we might be a Bible revering church. So one is just a prayer that we might be people who know and understand the story of the Bible,

that it wouldn't just be this kind of collection of stories that don't all fit together,

but that we would increase in our understanding and our wisdom and our knowledge of the scriptures

in such a way that we could explain the Bible

in a one minute or five minute conversation that we might have with someone.

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