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Acts
Jesus saves unlikely people and he does so in spectacular ways, but in every unlikely conversion, there is a personal revelation of Jesus Christ, maybe not one that leaves you blind for three days, but one that makes you see the world through new eyes. Saul thought he was going up to Damascus to arrest these followers of Jesus, but he now it is revealed to him that he is persecuting the Lord himself.
When we say, a church for all, do we actually mean a church for all? The big idea of this section of the book of Acts is how the church goes from a mono-ethnic Jewish church located in Jerusalem, to a multi-ethnic church in Antioch. I had told you that along the way we’d be introduced to five groups of people: the Hebrews, Hellenists, Samaritans, “good” Gentiles, and “bad” Gentiles in this expansion. Yet in the passage today, we’re introduced us to someone who is not singled out because of his ethnic identity, but nevertheless his inclusion in the church is highlighted by Luke. And he is going to press the boundaries of the church even further as we ask the question: When we say, a church for all, do we actually mean a church for all?
The Bible describes each of these troubles in great detail: ignorance, guilt, and weakness. Isaiah 53 declares that when Messiah comes he will bring good news countering these troubles that plague us. The three major Christian holidays (Christmas, Good Friday and Easter) demonstrate that Jesus is the servant of whom Isaiah spoke.
Every once in a while I am asked as a pastor, what is my plan or strategy regarding how to reach ABC type of people, whether it’s university students, young adults, members of our community, high school students, whatever. My answer, I am sure, is always a bit disappointing. What do you mean, what’s my plan? I don’t have one. What I mean by that, is that I don’t have any answers, any program or any event by which we are try to manipulate or contrive the process of outreach. Yet that doesn’t mean that there is no strategy. As we are going to see in this text, there is indeed a very clear strategy for the spontaneous expansion of the church. I believe that if we as a church were to follow this strategy and understand our roles, then we would see people come to know Jesus.
We are being sent to a new mission field - does that mean that we need to change our message? You hear this a lot in ministry, "If we want to reach people, we need to adjust the message to match our modern sensibilities." They were saying this 100 years ago. "Modern man doesn’t believe in these myths." The german school of theology sought to de-mythologize the texts. Theological liberalism battled the fundamentalists in the early 1900’s but while they won some of the seminaries like Harvard and Princeton, they lost the pews. 20 years ago it was John Shelby Spong, “Why Christianity Must change or Die” meaning why we must rid ourselves of the surface meaning of the texts of Scripture and our tradition and find the deeper truer truths - which of course were the same ones of the theological liberals 100 years before. In the past decade you have Brian McClaren’s “A New Kind of Christianity”. Today, you have calls for the church to change its sexual ethics, and emphasize the red-letter social justice-y parts of the Bible and not focus so much on the individual sin, and heaven and hell stuff. All of these movements sought to rebrand Christianity and repaint it in the image of the modern ethic. Amazingly, even though the stated motivation of each of these movements was to save the church for the next generation, each of these movements shared one thing in common, and that is … I’ll tell you at the end of the sermon.
Here in Acts 6, we see the first real internal tension in the Jerusalem church. And we’ll see that the tension arises, before the “bad” Gentile’s come in. Before the “good” Gentiles come in. Before the Samaritans come in. It’s a tension that arises between the Hebrew Jews and the Hellenistic Jews. Now, we don’t know how identifiable these two groups were in the church - we don’t know if they had separate services for different languages our churches does, but we do know that they were distinct enough that tensions at times did arise between the groups, and here in Acts six we see the heart of the issue is that one group is feeling neglected, not only feeling - they were being neglected - as if they were not fully part of the priorities of the church.
What marks a genuine believer? Sometimes its hard to tell. I see you are at church but I don’t know your homes, your thoughts, your heart. Luke doesn’t record everything about the Jerusalem church for us, so what he does record is significant for us. Luke highlights the two things in the passage were looking at today, the generosity and the integrity of the Jerusalem church.
Today we have an exciting day ahead of us as we get to celebrate the baptism of one of our sisters. Hers is a unique case, she was baptized as in infant in a gospel preaching church, but she stands here today to testify of her faith in Jesus Christ and to follow him in baptism as a believer. She will come up later and give her testimony about what God has done and is doing in her life, and we celebrate with her.
But I want to first take a minute and look into the scriptures and explain our position as a church, not only why we baptize, but also why we would re-baptize someone who received infant baptism in another church. This is not without controversy. So why do we rebaptize? Well to answer this, I think it will probably be sufficient to explain why we baptize. And so were going to look a little deeper at a text we quickly looked over in Acts 2
AGM Sunday. What kind of church are we to be? What is uniquely characterizes a thriving, expanding church? The Jerusalem church was a bold church. Remember that in Acts 2:42-47 we stated the Luke intends for us to see this Jerusalem church as foundational, as they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to the fellowship and to prayers and to the breaking of the bread, those are the activities that the church in every generation would participate in. Nows in chapters 3-4 we have this story of Peter and John in the temple, healing a man and its aftermath, and we get another characteristic of the Jerusalem church - its a church of bold proclamation. If the church of Jesus Christ fails to be bold in its proclamation, then we might as well give up - we will not make disciples if we’re not bod enough to proclaim the gospel. In Acts 4:1-22 we saw last week the boldness of the apostles, in Act 4:23-32 we see a portrait of a bold church.
Martin Luther famously resisted his accusers, "I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen." And my question for you this morning is this - what will you do when that moment finds you in which you must stand or speak out? What sorts of things are at the centre of your conscience? What would cause you to stay seated, or cause you to take a stand? When the moment comes to you - you may not be heralded as a hero. You may just be getting up one day and going to work or to school, and God might thrust you into a scenario in which you’ve got to make a choice as to whether you will sit or whether you will stand. You’ve might have one chance to speak, and when you do I pray that you will not minimize Jesus, but that you will magnify him. Choose you this day what you will do, if that day should come to you.
