Acts 1:1-16

¹Dear Theophilus I wrote to you before about all the things Jesus did and the things he taught to people.

²He kept doing these things until God took him up to heaven. But before God took Jesus up to heaven the Holy Spirit helped Jesus tell his close followers the things they had to do.

³It is like this, Jesus died, and then he came alive again, and his followers saw him a lot of times in the next 40 days. Jesus showed them that he really was alive, so they are really sure that this is true. He talked to them too, and told them a lot of things about God’s family.

⁴At one time Jesus was eating some food with his followers and he said to them, “Don’t leave this city called Jerusalem yet. I already told you that my Father promised to give you the Holy Spirit. Well, wait here until God does that.

⁵Do you remember John the Baptiser? He baptised people with water, but God will baptise you with the Holy Spirit very soon.”

⁶After that some of the close followers of Jesus met together with him. (At that time the Roman government people were the bosses over the Israel people.) The followers asked Jesus, “Sir, are you going to fight the Romans at this time and beat them, and give us back our own country, Israel, with our own boss?”

⁷Jesus said to them, “My Father controls all these things. He knows the time that all these things will happen. You don’t need to know that time.

⁸But the Holy Spirit will come to you and he will give you power, and then you will tell people about me in Jerusalem, and all over Judea country and Samaria country, and you will go to people everywhere in the world and tell them about me.”

⁹Jesus told them this, then God lifted him up to heaven. His followers were looking at him as he was going up. Then a cloud came in front of Jesus and his followers couldn’t see him any more. They kept looking up into the sky, and suddenly 2 men wearing white clothes stood next to them.

¹¹They said, “Hey, you men from Galilee, why are you standing here looking up into the sky? God took Jesus up into heaven, but he will come back again. You saw him go up into heaven and he will come back in the same way that you saw him go.”

¹²Then Jesus’s followers left that place, the hill called Olive Trees, and they walked about a kilometre back

¹³to Jerusalem, and then they went upstairs to the room where they were living. These were the close followers that came back from Olive Trees Hill – Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James (his father was called Alphaeus), Simon (he used to be one of the mob that wanted to fight the Roman people), and Judas (his father was called James).

¹⁴All these men met every day to pray together. Some women met with them too. One of those women was Mary, the mother of Jesus. And his brothers came to pray with them too.

¹⁵After a few days these people that believed in Jesus had a meeting. There were about 120 people in that meeting. Peter stood up and talked to them.

¹⁶He said, “Listen, friends, a long time ago the Holy Spirit talked to David about Judas, the son of Iscariot. David wrote the story in God’s book, and now that story has come true. Judas used to be with us and he worked with us. He was one of us close followers of Jesus. But the Jewish leaders paid Judas to take a mob of bad men to catch Jesus.