Day 31: Acts 20:7-38

In verses 7-12, we read about a meeting in an upper room where Paul was preaching and teaching. We’re not sure when he got going, but he was still carrying on with no sign of quitting when the clock struck midnight.

Let’s conservatively estimate that the meeting started at 9 p.m. Eutychus is enjoying Pauls’ message in the closest thing to a recliner in the room—leaning against the equivalent of what we would call a window “frame” today. Even the eloquent and erudite apostle could not hold Eutychus’ attention captive for more than three hours.

If Eutychus had been sitting on the floor or leaning against a wall, hitting the ground could have passed for being slain in the Spirit. But when you nod off from your lofty perch on a window sill with no bars or screens to break your fall, you hit the bottom floor. Paul sure knocked him dead with his preaching, didn’t he?

How does he respond to this emergency right smack in the middle of Point 7 of his sermon? He puts the sermon on pause. “Excuse me for a minute, folks, while I attend to a situation that has arisen that needs my attention.” He “went down, fell on him, and embracing him said, ‘Do not trouble yourselves, for his life is in him.’” (v. 10).

Notice the casualness of the entire episode. A guy drops dead while I’m preaching? No big deal! I’ll just go raise him up. “Don’t go away, folks! I’ll be right back to finish my sermon!”

Eutychus comes back to life.  What does Paul do next? “Now when he had come up, had broken bread and eaten, and talked a long while, even till daybreak, he departed.” (v. 11). The pause turns into a midnight lunch break. Paul packs some carbs into his system, gets another shot of energy and keeps going for a longer stretch than before–until daybreak. Conservatively, let’s say he got going again at 1 a.m. and finished at 5. He finishes his seven hour, 77 point sermon and hits the road again.

What strikes me about Paul is how natural it was for him to perform a supernatural act in raising Eutychus from the dead. There was no big fuss. No panic. No cause for concern. Raising the dead was no different than healing someone of a headache.

While, on the one hand, it is a striking display of God’s power, yet, it is exactly what Jesus sent his newly-minted disciples to do on their very first ministry trip: “And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons.” (Matthew 10:7-8)

Raising the dead is not even given a climactic place at the end of the directives; it is sandwiched between cleansing lepers and casting out demons. It’s no big deal!

Paul says in his farewell visit with the elders in Ephesus that all he did was “preaching the Kingdom of God” (v. 25). As he writes elsewhere: “And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of humanwisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power…” (I Corinthians 2:4). And again in Romans 15:19: “…in mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God, so that…I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.”

Signs and wonders were not an exception, but the norm. They were part and parcel of preaching the gospel of Christ. Yes, indeed, for Paul, the supernatural was so natural.

How about you, dear friend? Jesus said: “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father.” (John 14:12)

That promise was not just for Paul in the Upper Room that night. Do you believe in Jesus? If so, it is also for you right now. Amen?