“And every day, in the Temple and from house to house, they continued to teach and preach this message: “Jesus is the Messiah.””
Acts 5:42 (NLT)
In Acts 5, the apostles are arrested, beaten, and told to never speak the name of Jesus again. Their lives are spared—yet they walk out rejoicing that they suffered like Christ for obeying Christ. And then we see this: every day, in the Temple and from house to house, they shared the good news. Their obedience didn’t wane. They continued to teach and preach the very message they were forbidden to say: Jesus is the Messiah.
What I can’t get past is that they did it in two places: in the Temple and from house to house. In the Temple, they’re speaking to people who already serve the God of their ancestors—helping them connect the Old Testament to Jesus, and then Jesus to them. But house to house could be doing ministry like Jesus did, eating with unbelievers and helping those who don’t regularly go to the Temple see why they need a relationship with Jesus the Messiah. The apostles didn’t expect everyone to come to them.
The home is a more intimate place to share the good news. It’s where we go deeper. It’s the difference between information and transformation or theory and practice. What we can cover in an hour or two at church can skim the surface of our walk with the Lord, but in-home, throughout-the-week instruction is what helps us actually live out what we’ve heard.
I don’t know what “house to house” fully looks like, but I do know this: we need both the church and the home. If there’s no place where we work out how our rhythms and practices match the theology we’re learning—community groups, bible studies, parents discipling kids through the week—we can end up stuck in surface-level Christianity and stay frustrated. Lord, make us steady like the apostles: speak of Jesus without hesitation, and be willing to go to people, not always expect them to come to us.