This arvo I was reading Acts 7. Stephen gives a cracker of a sermon in the court. He recounts the history of Israel and says that their forefathers were idiots for rejecting God and his prophets. He then completes the smack-down by calling them double-idiots for being doubly stupid for killing Jesus, THE Prophet.
They get cranky pants. Big time! They gnash their teeth at him and then proceed to play a massive game of stax-on with the nearest rocks they can find.
As they’re stoning him, Saul (now known as Paul) is there in the thick of the action. It was at that point that I started thinking about what Stephen and Paul’s relationship is like now in the presence of Jesus. Do they have some probs? Does Stephen joke about the time that he got ‘stoned’? Does Paul just keep saying “I’m sooo sorry about that…”?
Then I read the next verse: Stephen prays a very Jesus-esque prayer upon death. That prayer is answered in the conversion of Saul, the chief of all sinners.
What are they both doing now? Being stoked in Jesus.
