Jesus promised power before he sent anyone anywhere, and he sent them through the people they would rather skip.
Forty days after the resurrection, the eleven stand with Jesus on the Mount of Olives and ask the question they have carried since they left their nets. “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6)
They want a date.
Jesus tells them the times and seasons belong to the Father’s own authority (Acts 1:7). Then he gives them the sentence the whole book of Acts runs on.
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
He answers the question underneath the one they asked. They asked when. He told them what they would be given and where it would send them. The when stays with the Father. The what and the where belong to them.
Power is received
“You will receive power.” Future tense. The eleven did not have it standing on that hill. Three years beside Jesus, watching lepers cleansed and the dead raised, and they still needed something given to them from outside themselves.
The word is dynamis (δύναμις, pronounced DOO-nah-mis), the ability to produce an effect. It’s the root of our word “dynamite.” Luke names the giver in the same breath: “when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” The Spirit comes, then the power, then the witness. The sentence runs in that order and no other.
Most of us run it backwards. We walk into the conversation we have dreaded for a month, the dinner with the brother we haven’t really talked to since the funeral, carrying willpower and a verse we memorized years ago. Then we freeze, or say the wrong thing, and drive home ashamed of our own silence.
Jesus put power first. We keep skipping the step he started with.
Keep being filled
Acts will not let us treat that power as a one-time deposit.
At Pentecost the disciples were filled, exactly as Jesus promised (Acts 2:4). Two chapters later Peter and John spend a night in custody for healing a lame man at the temple gate. The next morning they stand before Annas and Caiaphas, the same high priests who handed Jesus to Pilate, and are charged never to speak or teach in his name again (Acts 4:3, 4:6, 4:18). They go back to their friends, and the church prays for boldness.
“And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.” (Acts 4:31)
The same men, filled again, because a threat from the court that condemned Jesus needed more than what they were running on.
Paul builds a command on that pattern: “be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). The verb is plērousthe (πληροῦσθε, pronounced play-ROOS-theh). It’s a command, so we are responsible for it. It’s passive, so the Spirit does the filling. And it’s present tense, the form Greek uses for something you keep doing. The nearest honest English is “keep being filled.”
So ask, and ask specifically. Most of us have prayed “God, help me today” a thousand times. Very few of us have ever prayed, “Holy Spirit, come upon me before I sit down across from my son at four o’clock.” That second prayer is the one Acts 1:8 teaches.
A witness tells what they saw
“You will be my witnesses.” The word is martyres (μάρτυρες, pronounced MAR-too-res), the word for someone who testifies in court to what they personally saw and heard. A court asks a witness one thing: what happened to you?
Jesus says “you will be.” It describes who they are once the Spirit lands on them.
Plenty of believers are waiting for the right words, a platform, a few more years of Bible study before they open their mouths about what God has done for them. The text sets one condition, and it’s the Spirit’s presence. If you belong to Jesus, that condition is met.
So pick one thing God did in your life this year, the thing you know is true because you lived it. Tell one person this week.
Samaria comes third
Look at the order of the places. Jerusalem is where the disciples are standing. Judea is the region around it. Then Samaria, and only after Samaria, the end of the earth.
Luke’s first readers knew what Samaria meant. Jews and Samaritans had despised each other for centuries over bloodlines, worship and which mountain God had chosen. A Samaritan woman said it plainly to Jesus at a well: “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (John 4:9).
Two of the men on that hill had their own history there. When a Samaritan village refused to receive Jesus, James and John asked him, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke 9:54). Jesus rebuked them.
Now he names that region as the third circle of their witness, ahead of the ends of the earth none of them had ever seen.
Then read Acts 8. Word reaches Jerusalem that Samaria has received the word of God, and the apostles send Peter and John. John walks into Samaria, the region he once wanted burned, and prays for Samaritans to receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:14-17).
That is what the power is for.
Name yours
Your Samaria is a person. The in-law who embarrassed you at Thanksgiving. The friend who broke a confidence ten years ago. The coworker you wrote off. The sister you have gone quiet on for a reason you stopped examining.
Many of us would board a plane to tell a stranger about Jesus before we would say one true thing to that person. We stay busy with the far circle so we never have to step into the near one. Jesus named the hard one before the far one.
We can pray for power, mean every word, and spend the rest of the week steering around the exact person the filling was for. The verse moves from “receive” straight to “witnesses,” and it ends in places full of people with names.
So here is the week. Say the names of your Jerusalem and your Samaria out loud. Ask the Holy Spirit to come upon you before that conversation, and to keep coming. Then go say the one true thing you have been sitting on.
John made it to Samaria. So can you.