Introduction: A Light for Every Nation

“I have made you a light for the Gentiles, to bring salvation to the ends of the earth.” — Acts 13:47

At the end of the last book, the church in Antioch sent Barnabas and Saul off on a ship, to tell people far away about Jesus. On the journey, Luke starts calling Saul by his other name, Paul. And Paul is the name you’ll hear all through this book.

Paul and his friends travelled thousands of miles. They walked along dusty Roman roads and sailed across stormy seas. They went to big cities full of temples to false gods, and to little towns where nobody had ever heard of Jesus.

It wasn’t easy. Paul was laughed at, chased out of towns, thrown into prison, and shipwrecked. But wherever he went, people believed in Jesus, and new churches began.

You will meet a woman who sold purple cloth, a prison guard woken by an earthquake, a boy who fell asleep in a window, and Paul’s own nephew, who saved his life. You will be on board a ship in a terrible storm. And you will read some of the letters Paul wrote to his friends, letters that are now part of the Bible.

At the very end of this book, the last book of Tell Me the Story, you will see what the Bible says about the very end of the whole story: what God is going to do one day for the whole world.

Do you remember how the story began, in a garden, with God making everything good? It ends somewhere even better.

Dear God, thank you for Paul and all the people who carried the good news about Jesus so far. As we read these last stories, help us to see how the whole Bible fits together, and how much you love the whole world. Amen.