By Faith Alone

If you were opposed for some reason to a wedding taking place, maybe one way to approach that problem would be to just snatch away the bride, right? No bride, no wedding, and your problem would be solved. And as you know, we as born-again Christians, being marked with the Holy Spirit, we are the bride of Christ and we have an enemy who's opposed to our wedding and has been trying for 2,000 years to destroy the bride. And we have studied last week, some of his tricks have included persecution, which we learned doesn't destroy a bride. In fact, it may make her more flexible in the endgame. Corruption, which will always destroy the bride if left unchecked and unconfessed. And so this week we're going to move into that third one that we alluded to, which is distraction. And although it may not destroy a bride, it could potentially lead to her instability and her ineffectiveness. And so it is the problem of distraction, the potential of distraction, that we are going to have on our minds as we start reading these first eight verses. And so Acts chapter 6, starting with the first verse, says this,

And the Twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said,

And Stephen, full of grace and power, was doing great wonders and signs among people. So let's pray. Father, thank you for these words, thank you for these chapters and the study that we're going through. We ask again this morning, Lord, that you would open our hearts to hear from your Spirit. Lord, even if we have spent the week studying these passages, we know that you always have something new to enlighten us with, and so we ask you'd walk among us and do your work among us, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, well in our study guide we titled this section, The Foiled Distraction, and it really needs to be said in that snidely whiplash sort of way, Curses! Foiled again! Okay, that's what was in my mind when I wrote that. But we see that it was a victory for the Apostles. They won over the tyranny of the urgent, the temptation to just take care of the needs that were urgently sent before them, and in order to do that they would have had to set aside their spiritual calling and spiritual gifts. But an urgent need did arise, and this was legitimate. It was a growing pain of the church, and the widows, apparently the Greek-speaking widows, were being neglected in some manner that was not being seen among the Hebrew widows, and so that creates a perfect storm right there when you have some kind of conflict that is even set up among different, you know, races or classes, if you will. But it was not the time in the life of the early church for conflict and neglect to happen, and this problem needed to be solved. And growth creates problems. It always does. And there are good solutions to problems, and there are not-so-good solutions to problems. And a not-so-good solution would have been for the Apostles to just continue meeting this need themselves. And if they would have done that, this is all the things that would have resulted. First of all, they would have lost precious time in their day that they needed to devote themselves to prayer and to the study of the Scriptures. Because do you remember when we were studying at the end of chapter 2, we learned that as the believers began to gather together, what they did was they were devoting themselves as groups of believers to fellowship, to prayer, to breaking bread, and to the Apostles' teaching. And so the Apostles, if they were teaching, they needed time for prayer and study of the Scriptures. So that would have been a problem. The Apostles would have been working contrary to their calling. Peter, almost every time he has said something in this book so far, has brought out the point, we are witnesses. They were eyewitnesses, but he knew that they'd been given the charge to be witnesses of the life and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, not to be social agents and take care of the social needs. Also, the seven men who were appointed wouldn't have been able to walk in their calling, and their ministry may have been underdeveloped because they wouldn't have a chance to use their gifts in that way. But mostly we read that phrase that said the Word of God continued to increase, and I don't think that would have happened had the Apostles themselves sort of turned from the teaching of the Word to a social gospel of make sure everybody's needs are met. That is important, but it wasn't their ministry to do. So we have this narrative with a real win, you know, for the Apostles, and it all seems it moves along so smoothly and so seamlessly and agreeable. It's like, problem, pick seven men, lay hands on them, pray, boom, problem solved, and deacons were born in a way. And I wish every need in the church was that easily met, and so does Beth Nisinger, and so does our nursery coordinator. But you know, this was a special time in the life of the church right here. We're still in the first 10 seconds, and it was a special time when so many believers were filled with the Spirit and very agreeable to use their time to apply their gifts and even make themselves vulnerable for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of the Bride of Christ. And the reason I mentioned that vulnerability is because it's one of these servants that became the first martyr of the church. It wasn't an Apostle. It was one who served, and I think that that's interesting. Now, I mentioned that this was a time when I feel like a lot of people were willing. When Peter writes his first letter, maybe 15, 20, 3 years later, I don't know, I'm losing track of time here, but it's a ways later that he's going to write his first Apostle, 1 Peter, which we went through. In chapter 4, we get to an exhortation where he now needs to exhort for people to serve, and this is what it says starting in verse 8. Peter says, "'Above all, keep loving one another earnestly. Show hospitality without grumbling.' He says, 'As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace, whoever speaks as one who speaks the oracles of God, and whoever serves as one who serves by the strength that God supplies.'" So I thought two things about that. First of all, the need for exhortation as time went on, but secondly in that passage, that's the passage where we get this beautiful, he just drops serving into two very nice categories for us, the speaking efforts, the speaking gifts, and the serving gifts, and I think that that's always useful to us. But the application, and I want to spend probably most of our time this morning on this aspect, this first part, because I think the application is just so relevant to us, both as the collective church, the whole church, to be a witness to the gospel, and as individuals within that church. And so I thought of three points that I want to make, and as you discuss you'll probably have some others, but the first point is that the Church of Jesus Christ, the Bride of Christ, needs all of the gifts. We can have a very professional view of ministry now in our culture, because like churches do have to hire people, that's just a thing, that there's things that need to be done, but we want to be careful that a professional view of church doesn't, to every single believer, sort of wash away that question of, what is my contribution? Where is my place within the church? And so whether you have a gift of compassion or mercy, and you do have a place to be following up and inspiring people and connecting with those who are hurting physically, or in the hospital, or have needs, or whether you have gifts of, like we saw in this lesson, administration and serving, and helps. You know, for those widows it required a system, a sustainable system. Somebody had to to think up a way that this was going to keep going on, because it said the daily distribution of food. And some people are gifted with seeing systems in their mind and putting them into place that are sustainable and easy to do. Other people, I won't even go there. I have to be careful what's on the recording. Or maybe you have the gift to make the gospel plain and simple to understand. Do you have the gift to make things plain and simple to understand? And then clearly, your place is among those speaking gifts, the Sunday school teachers. And you should be a discussion leader or a small group leader of some kind and hone that ability to speak and to share. But the simplest of commitments for a believer can make a huge difference in blessing people. Think about the blessing to those widows that those seven men were. Food, on time, every day. That was really, really important to them. And I have thought through my mind about some of the very simplest of things that people do around here that are a huge blessing. There's one guy that comes in on Saturday. He drives in on Saturday and sets the coffee pot for Sunday morning. And so at 8 o'clock in the morning, there's coffee ready to roll. And just all kinds of things. People that come in and clean small areas of the church. And people that do things for the body outside of the organized ministries of the church that are so unseen. But my point is that the church needs all of the gifts. And that even the smallest of thing that a person commits to and does is very useful and important. Second is, I want to borrow from our 2011 women's retreat. And for point number two, one thing I see in this passage is the importance to stay in your lane. The apostles in this passage were very confident of what their lane was, that the Lord had given them, and what the boundaries of that lane looked like. And when they realized that there were needs that needed to be taken care of outside of the boundaries of their lane, they saw fit to make sure someone else did that. Because that need should be in their lane. And the apostles should not be lane jumpers and run and do something three lanes over that was not given to them to do. Same thing is for us. We should take the time to dialogue with the Lord and say, Lord, what have you put in my lane now, this week, this year? What does my lane look like? And even if I see needs outside of my lane, to have the assurance that that's not for me right now. Or to see, we get into comparison and envy. You might see somebody doing something three lanes over, and you're like, oh, that looks fun. I'd like to do that. But oh, look, I have four children under five. This is not the season to do what I see you're doing. But to be mindful, the apostles were also extremely mindful of not only what was outside of their lane, but what was in their lane. What was in their lane was devoting themselves to prayer, devoting themselves to the study of the scripture. And they were faithful to do what was in their lane. And the last thing is just for us, at Women's Retreat, we brought up distractions. Beware of distractions that lure you completely outside of any ministry, in the church, or to the lost. And like I said, we talked about that a little bit at retreat. A little vacation, a little remodeling project, a little sports season. And all of a sudden, we can find that a diversion or distraction has arisen that has taken us completely out. And when that happens, and maybe it's happened to you, I know if we're just on vacation for two weeks, when I come back, I kind of look around and I'm like, I just don't feel like I belong. I'm the pastor's wife, so that's weird. But have you ever felt that? You're gone for a while, and you're like, I didn't know she had a baby. I didn't know this. And all these things kind of roll around in your heart, and the enemy can get a hold of it, kind of whisper to you, you really don't belong. You know what I'm saying? And so we need to be mindful of distractions that can take us completely outside of the things that the Lord wants us to be doing. And so the summary is, we need to willingly offer ourselves, even in a small way. But this doesn't give us a free pass from persecution, as we're gonna move on to now. So we've reached the narrative now. We're gonna go on here in verse eight in just a minute. But we've reached the narrative in the first days of the last days, that the church is going to launch now into a great missionary endeavor. Do you remember in our opening, Acts 1, verse 8, set the tone. It was the theme verse for what we're doing. And Jesus had told his disciples,

Set the tone for this whole book that we're going through. And now we're coming to the point that we're gonna turn, at the end of this lesson now, we're gonna turn from Jerusalem and start heading into those directions. And simple little outline as it starts with Stephen's martyrdom here, and then the early ministries of Philip outside of Jerusalem, the conversion of Saul. And we're gonna end with Peter bringing the gospel to the Roman Gentiles. But it was God's plan from the beginning for the early church to take the gospel message to all men. And it's still God's plan today for the church, the bride of Christ, to take the message of Jesus to all people. Luke's MO throughout this, his method has been to narrow in on an example of one particular person. We studied it last week, Barnabas, Ananias, and Sapphira. So now he's going to narrow in on Stephen. And we remember, I just want to remind you from the verses that we already read, that Stephen's character is portrayed as someone who was full of faith, full of the Holy Spirit, full of grace, full of power. And if you have our illustration of our little glass in your mind from last week, the implication is that Stephen is someone who emptied himself regularly of anything that related to the deeds of darkness, anything related to unnecessary distractions, so that he could be filled with the Spirit of God. And we know from the text, he was doing great wonders and signs among the people. So now we have his character down pat. Now let's start in verse nine. It says,

And so just to punctuate it, their accusations were that he was blaspheming against Moses and God. He was speaking words against this holy place, meaning likely the temple that was before them. But also just Jerusalem and the land that God had given them and the law. And then a couple notes about the people that were opposing Stephen. I don't know if you noticed when you read that, but they all seemed to be from somewhere else, right? And so they were Jews who had lived somewhere else and returned to Jerusalem. And maybe that gave them a very misplaced nationalistic sort of feeling. I don't know really, but Stephen was talking about the centrality of Jesus of Nazareth in God's redemptive program. And he was probably talking about it in a way as Jesus and the redemption being greater than the law and the land and the temple, which is true. But if you're very nationalistic in your thinking, you have something inside of you that wants to hold on to those things. So we turn to chapter seven and we have the longest recorded sermon in the whole book of Acts. I always keep saying this, so this sermon should be a six week Bible study. And here I'm gonna review it in four or five minutes. And so there's so much, it's an awesome history lesson. There are things in this sermon that were not told in other places in scripture. So it's an amazing thing. I just want you to know we have to sprint right through it because our point is the big picture. But again, Stephen is explaining to them in his defense that God is not as interested in the law and the land and the temple as he is in the people that he wants to redeem through the work of his son Jesus Christ. And so can I just summarize this? You won't be able to read along, I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I just want to summarize what Stephen was saying in terms of God's work outside of this holy place. His work from Abraham all the way through Moses. First of all, he says God spoke to Abraham in Mesopotamia, even before there was a land. Abraham wasn't even given a foot's length of land by God to personally own. God even told him that there was going to be 400 years when he would send his descendants to a different land. And he said that God was with Joseph in Egypt, that is a different land, by the way, and the family was rescued in a miraculous way through the land of Egypt. Moses was born and instructed in the land of Egypt. God provided him for 40 years in the land of Midian, and God commissioned him for his work at the base of Mount Sinai. These are all some of the things that Stephen said, and the implication is God is at work. God has been at work all this time. He has a plan and a program even outside of this holy place. See God is bigger than this place. And then as it relates to Moses and the law, Israel had a history of rejecting this Moses from the beginning when they said, who made you judge and ruler over us? And yet these men were accusing Stephen of being the one who was rejecting Moses. That was the accusation, you're rejecting Moses. And Stephen is trying to explain to them, no, I think you're the ones that were rejecting Moses. And starting in verse 35, this is what he says, he goes, this man, Moses, God sent as both ruler and redeemer. 36, this man, he led them out performing wonders and signs in Egypt and at the Red Sea and in the wilderness for 40 years. This is the Moses who said, God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers, speaking of Jesus Christ. So Moses was pointing to Jesus of Nazareth. Verse 38, this is the one who received living oracles to give us. And in verse 39, our fathers refused to obey him, but thrust him aside and in their hearts, they turned to Egypt. And so God turned away and gave them over to the worship of the host of heaven. So do you see his point? What he's saying? He's saying, God gave you Moses and all that, but you thrust him aside. And this has been your experience. And then the last thing in the verses 44 through 47 with regard to the tent of witness, the tabernacle, which became the temple, he said, you know, this tent of witness was made according to the pattern that was seen and its point was to enable worshipers to view a drama of the sacrifice that was to come. That was the point of what was going on. And it did have an important place in the life of God's people and David even asked to build the temple and God even gave instructions to Solomon to actually do it. But yet the temple itself was never meant to be worshiped. The natural man always has a tendency to want to worship the natural stuff. And we need to know that about ourselves too, because we have a natural man within us and we always want to worship the stuff. But God wants us to worship the spiritual rather than the natural. And so in verse 48, Stephen recaps that and he says, yet the most high, he doesn't dwell in houses made by hands. As the prophet said, heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. And so his summary and conclusion now, we'll read it. I'll read the verses starting in verse 51. In summary, Stephen says,

Now when they had heard these things, they were enraged because two reasons. Number one, the truth hurts. And number two, Stephen was right. He was right in his doctrine and theology. He was right that Israel was guilty. He was right that the law was temporary. And he was right that the temple was a place of worship, not a place to be worshipped. And when you're faced with someone telling you the truth and you know it and you can't win the argument, you have nothing to do but grind your teeth at them, I guess. That's what it says. I've never had anybody grind their teeth at me, but I know what he's saying. Maybe they did literally grind their teeth, but it says in verse 55, but he, Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, behold, I see the heavens open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. Here we get a complete picture of what Luke told us, that he was a man full of grace. Like that is full of grace right there. That picture, if you can play it out in your mind and see Stephen, that is pretty amazing. Verse 57, but they cried out with a loud voice. They stopped their ears and rushed together at him. And then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses lay down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. And as they were stoning Stephen, he actually died with two prayers on his lips. Look at these two prayers. The first one is, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And the second one is, Lord, do not hold this sin against them, both reminiscent of Jesus on the cross, both very Christ-like in their nature, because he was full of the Spirit. And God had prepared him for that. And it says, and when they had said this, he fell asleep, which is a Christian expression for death because of our assurance of a future resurrection. And the next chapter will begin there to tell us next week that there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. And they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria. What is familiar to you about those three towns, or those three areas named in that Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria? Is that not what God told them at the beginning of all of this? This is my plan. This is my plan for you. Now can you imagine being one of the believers and watching Stephen being stoned, how incredibly difficult it would have been to see God's plan? Because the street view thing, we're all about us. We're all about what we see happening in front of us. It's so easy for us 2,000 years later to read history and go, oh, that's what God had planned. The persecution arose and it scattered the believers out and out and out, farther out. It's like that's a good way to get the believers out there. But at the moment, God's plan does not seem like it's going to work. I'm sure the people at the foot of the cross when Jesus was dying as well just thought everything is ruined. Everything like, you know. So I think the last points that I want to make about this is that, again, for us, how easy it is for us to look back on maybe you can look back three decades back in your life or something and see God's plan at work, but how easy it is for you to see God's plan today. It is not easy. That is a life of faith. By faith, we believe that God is doing, God's plan is moving forward and it's moving forward in my life. It's moving forward in your life. Point number two is to have on me the same grace as I saw Stephen have there. And I really thought about him coming to the end of his days, probably a younger man, probably out of time of what we would think is when someone should die. But of course, none of us knows when the end of our days comes or how it will come. We might die, you know, instantly of heart failure. We might die after a long illness. We might die after an accidental death at the hands of someone else. We might die at the hands of someone else purposefully. We have no idea. But I read this and I thought, Lord, would you prepare me to just have that attitude? However I come to meet you, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. How glorious. I just love that so much. And if there is anyone to be forgiven at that point, that I would have that grace that I see in Stephen's life. And lastly, just the point that Stephen was someone... who was upholding the centrality of Jesus Christ in the gospel message. And as being greater than anything else, the redemptive possibility of Jesus having died to forgive our sins. And the inspiration for me to remember in all ways that to hold Jesus the highest. And as I speak in my life, there may also be people that don't want to hear that, don't want to embrace that, just like we saw here. But to ask the Lord to prepare me, we've gone over and over this in our study. To be bold and to hold Jesus as central in the things that we, just in our life. So let's pray, and then you guys can discuss Father in Heaven. We thank you for this passage that shows us your plan. And shows us the grace that is possible for a believer to have as they are filled with your spirit. Lord, the grace to meet difficult challenges. And as we read this passage, Lord, we don't even get the sense that it was difficult for Stephen. We just see your grace and your spirit upon him so much that it really is a glorious thing. So Lord, we thank you for that. I pray, Lord God, that you would enable each of us as well, Lord, to take a cue from what we see in the apostles. To certainly be running in our lanes and doing what you've given us to do. And Lord, we ask that you would meet the needs that arise, the urgent needs that arise around us. And that we have the possibility to meet them. So we pray about all these things, pray for our discretion groups, Lord, that you would just make them rich and powerful, in Jesus' name, amen.