Acts 5:11-23

¹¹Then all the Christians were really frightened. And all the other people that heard about those things were really frightened too.

¹²The close followers of Jesus kept doing powerful things to show everyone that God is powerful. All the Christians kept meeting together in God’s ceremony house, in the part called Solomon’s shade area.

¹³There were other people in that city that were too frightened to join the Christians. But most of the people thought the Christians were really good people,

¹⁴and some of them kept listening, and then a lot of men and women started believing in Jesus, and then they joined up with the Christians.

¹⁵A lot of people saw the close followers of Jesus do powerful things, so they brought sick people and put them on beds and mats on the roads. They thought, “Even if Peter doesn’t touch them maybe his shadow will touch them as he walks past them, and that will make them better.”

¹⁶Big mobs of people that lived in small towns near Jerusalem brought their sick people into the city, and they brought people that had bad spirits in them too. And the close followers of Jesus made all of them better.

¹⁷There were some Jewish people called Sadducees. The big boss of the Jewish ceremonies was a Sadducee. He and all the other Sadducees were really jealous of the close followers of Jesus.

¹⁸So those Sadducees sent some soldiers to grab the close followers of Jesus and lock them up in the jail.

¹⁹But that night God sent an angel messenger to them, and he opened the jail doors and took the close followers of Jesus out.

²⁰That angel said to them, “Go and stand in God’s ceremony house and tell all the people there everything about this new life that Jesus gives.”

²¹So those men listened to that angel and they went to God’s ceremony house very early in the morning, and they started teaching the people there. At the same time the big boss of the Jewish ceremonies and his friends called all the Jewish council men together for a meeting. (They had these meetings to work out if something was right or wrong.) Then they sent the soldiers to the jail to get the close followers of Jesus.

²²But those soldiers got there and they couldn’t find those men in the jail. So they went back to the meeting and they said,

²³“We got to the jail, and the guards were standing there near the locked doors. We opened the doors and went inside but we couldn’t find anyone there.”