00:00: Please pray with me.
00:03: Father, as we come here in ease, not facing persecution, having a building in which to meet and worship and preach and hear the word preached, able to freely pray in Jesus' name, even enjoying air conditioning, the story of martyrdom can seem far and distant from our lives.
00:38: But we pray that you would lay upon us the gravity of your kingdom and the good news of Jesus Christ, that you would shape our hearts and our lives, even as you did Stevens and the earliest church believers.
00:57: Whatever you call us to, we will praise your name as you provide the strength to walk faithfully in it and through it.
01:06: We pray specifically that you would make us faithful witnesses here in the Green Bay area, that you would help us to love and treasure Jesus, not for an hour on Sundays, but all day, every day, all week long, and that that would overflow for your glory as we live as your ambassadors.
01:32: I pray specifically for this morning's message that you would burden each one of us in a particular way, that there would be some portion that your spirit would bring to bear on our lives, perhaps corrective, perhaps instructive, but certainly according to your perfect wisdom.
01:55: We pray these things in Jesus' name.
01:59: Amen.
01:59: Amen.
01:59: I want to begin by asking you two questions.
02:05: The first is this.
02:05: Does being a Christian make your life better?
02:12: Does being a wholehearted, fully surrendered disciple of Jesus Christ make your life better?
02:19: And I believe the answer is absolutely yes, without hesitation.
02:24: Yes, your life is better as a genuine Christ-following believer.
02:30: The second question is similar but different.
02:35: Does being a Christian make your life easier?
02:38: Does being a wholehearted, fully surrendered disciple of Jesus Christ make your life easier?
02:45: And I think the truth of the matter is yes and no in different ways.
02:52: Your life becomes easier as a Christian in that the Holy Spirit takes up residence inside you and will guide you.
02:59: He will give you wisdom.
02:59: He will direct your paths.
03:02: He will help turn your attention to Jesus time and again and help keep you on the straight and narrow.
03:08: He'll give you power to live in the ways that God is calling you to live.
03:12: And so your life is easier in those ways.
03:16: But the Holy Spirit will also call you to walk in paths that you would not otherwise choose.
03:22: He'll ask you to do things for the glory of God and to live your life for the glory of God in ways that can be very challenging, very difficult, and very costly.
03:34: So does being a Christian make life easier?
03:38: Yes and no.
03:39: And we can't ignore the fact that being a genuine Christian will make life harder in some respects and perhaps never more so than when we look at a passage like we have before us today where we hear recounted for us the story of the death of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, the first believer recorded in Scripture who is executed for his faith in Jesus Christ.
04:07: Now if you remember last week, we were looking at the beginning of Acts chapter 6 where we saw that there was conflict in the local church between the Hellenist Jewish background folks and the Hebrew Jewish background folks and there were widows of the one group being overlooked in the daily distribution and the apostle said, we can't tackle this.
04:29: We've got to keep our focus on our responsibilities and so the solution is that there are seven men appointed to oversee this area of responsibility and Stephen was one of those seven.
04:40: He's described for us in verse 3 as being of good repute, full of the Spirit, and of wisdom.
04:46: In verse 5 we're told he was a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit and in verse 8 we were told that he was full of grace and power.
04:57: This guy is a good guy.
05:00: He's exactly the kind of guy you want to see in positions of responsibility and leadership in the church.
05:07: Stephen had a good reputation.
05:09: He was empowered and led by the Spirit of God.
05:11: He was known to be wise, someone who made good, godly, appropriate decisions.
05:16: He was powerful, which in context is not talking about his authority, but rather his ability to do even maybe hard things.
05:28: He did good work and he did it well.
05:32: And just after meeting him in the beginning of chapter 6, the second half of 6 and 7 tells us about his death.
05:41: We see him faithfully living for Jesus inside the church and in the public sphere alike.
05:48: And then we see him executed.
05:51: Angry religious men throwing stones at him until he died.
05:58: How did that come to be?
05:59: How did such a godly, spirit-powered, spirit-led man end up executed so early in his journey?
06:07: And what lessons are there for us in Stephen's final moments?
06:14: I think the first lesson, straight out of the gate, might be this.
06:17: Following Jesus will be costly.
06:19: Now, I'm not saying that every one of us is going to be martyred.
06:21: Based on our current historical context and cultural placement and so on, good chance none of us will be martyred, at least as things seem to be at the moment.
06:33: And yet, I tell you this, following Jesus will still be costly.
06:38: It will cost you your entire life.
06:40: Because we cannot embrace Jesus as Savior without embracing him as Lord.
06:46: He is both for us or he is neither for us.
06:49: Jesus is Lord and Savior.
06:53: And so it will cost us our everything to follow Jesus.
06:55: It's not that our submission to Jesus earns us salvation.
06:59: It's not that we get some sort of entitlement or merit by surrender to Christ.
07:06: But such surrender is the overflow of changed hearts, of being a new creation by the work of God's Spirit, of being born again.
07:15: We will surrender day by day, ever more fully to Jesus as Lord.
07:21: And so all of our hopes and dreams and time and treasure and talents will be surrendered to him and he will do as he sees fit.
07:30: We don't get to retain final authority or final control over the slightest little sliver of our lives as we follow Jesus.
07:40: It will cost us everything.
07:45: Whether you die a martyr or not, we surrender all to Jesus if we are faithfully following him.
07:53: How was it that Stephen became the first martyr?
07:57: Well, he was living for Jesus.
08:00: Privately, he was living for Jesus in his ministry in the local church, helping to take care of the widows.
08:08: And he was living for Jesus publicly, preaching, teaching, doing miracles and signs and wonders.
08:15: And his religious opponents didn't like what they were seeing and hearing.
08:18: They didn't like that he was preaching and teaching in Jesus' name.
08:23: And so they opposed him.
08:24: They got into a dispute with him.
08:26: Tells us specifically in the passage they disputed with him, an argument.
08:31: But Stephen was so wise, so spirit-led, that they could not defeat him in this verbal conflict.
08:42: Sounds a lot like somebody that preceded Stephen, doesn't it?
08:45: You read in the Gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, about the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Sanhedrin and the Scribes, mixing it up with Jesus and opposing him.
08:55: And they would get in these verbal conflicts.
08:58: And every single time, save one, Jesus won the argument.
09:04: The only time Jesus didn't win the argument is when Jesus refused to engage so that they would put him to death on the cross and he could be the Savior.
09:11: You argue with Jesus, you lose.
09:15: Here we see the one who represents Jesus going through much the same thing.
09:22: And so they responded in like manner to the way that they had responded to Jesus previously.
09:27: They conspire to have some scoundrels make false claims against Stephen.
09:31: They get him arrested on trumped-up charges and they arrange for liars to lie in court against Stephen.
09:38: Maybe our second lesson is right there.
09:44: It never ceases to blow my mind how despicable religious people can be when they aren't getting their way.
09:53: Being a religious person counts for nothing in God's sight.
09:59: Being a religious adherent can make you even worse than you were before you got involved in religion.
10:07: Being transformed by God from the inside out through faith in Jesus Christ that counts for everything and everything else is as nothing.
10:21: Acts chapter 6 verse 11 we read that they secretly instigated men who said we have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.
10:32: Acts 6, 13 and 14 they said a false witness who said this man never ceases to speak words against this holy place that is the temple and the law for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us.
10:52: You know me my propensity is to dig deep in small portions of scripture not to do a big passage like we have today.
10:58: I want to dig in and do a whole sermon on that alone and look at okay well what did Jesus teach about this and what exactly did Stephen say about this and what made these false witnesses and how does Luke understand it as he's writing the story down.
11:17: But to summarize very simply I think Stephen was faithfully teaching what Jesus taught and I think Stephen was faithfully teaching what the death and resurrection of Jesus implied namely this that with Jesus' death and resurrection the entire temple system with the sacrifices and the old covenant law the Mosaic covenant law were rendered obsolete because Jesus perfectly and finally fulfilled them in a way that rendered them pointless from that moment onward.
11:59: The old covenant the Mosaic covenant was fulfilled and replaced by the new covenant in Jesus Christ.
12:05: Here's how one theologian describes it he says Jesus became our one and only high priest who lives forever to make intercession for us.
12:14: Hebrews 7.25 So the temple priesthood was destroyed.
12:19: Jesus offered to make himself and his own blood once for all.
12:23: He offered himself his own blood once for all to make an eternal redemption.
12:27: Hebrews 9.12 25-28 10-12 So the animal sacrifices of the temple are destroyed.
12:37: And when Jesus made himself the mercy seat of the temple, Romans 3.25, and made his own blood the blood of the covenant, Mark 14.24, the glory of God, the old Shekinah glory of the temple, came down and rested on him and raised him from the dead, Romans 6.4.
12:56: Peter says God raised him from the dead and gave him glory, 1 Peter 1.21.
13:02: He is, as James says, chapter 2 verse 1, the Lord of glory.
13:08: And so the temple is no longer the place where you go to see the glory of God.
13:12: Jesus is the place.
13:15: Destroyed, and again in three days raised up, Jesus is where you go to see the glory of God.
13:20: So I think at the heart of the accusation against him, this idea that the temple and the priesthood and the sacrifices and the old covenant law are being done away with, is accurate.
13:32: That's true, that's right, because of what Jesus has done.
13:36: Did you notice at the end of last week's section we saw verse 7, as kind of this, this epilogue to the previous passage?
13:45: And it said the word of God continued to increase and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem.
13:50: We saw that as they resolved the issues in the church and continued to stay on focus and living on mission, there was fruitfulness by God's hand.
13:58: And that has this little funny ending, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.
14:06: Doesn't tend to emphasize the priests coming to faith in scripture, and yet here we're seeing that.
14:13: I think what's happening is that as the early church was proclaiming Jesus and testifying about what God had done in and through Jesus, the priests were increasingly coming to faith and realizing that Jesus had put them out of a job.
14:27: Jesus had done their job perfectly, once for all time.
14:31: And so they said, why would we do this when Jesus has done it better?
14:36: Jesus has done it perfectly.
14:38: So far, I think the accusations against Stephen are fairly accurate.
14:43: So why does Luke tell us that they were false witnesses?
14:47: I think because they were saying, not of what they were saying about what he said, but about what they meant.
14:53: Stephen wasn't blaspheming God or Moses.
14:55: He wasn't saying false things about God or about Moses.
14:59: Rather, Stephen was celebrating and proclaiming what God had done in fulfillment of God's promises, in fulfillment of the law, in fulfillment of all that God had spoken through Moses in the Old Testament.
15:13: He was not against the temple or against the Old Testament law.
15:18: Rather, he was for both of them being perfectly accomplished by Jesus on behalf of those who trust in Jesus.
15:28: My heart breaks every time I encounter somebody who gets it in their head that they need to obey the Old Testament law, that somehow they'll be a better Christian, they'll be more pleasing to God, they'll be getting it more right if they start trying to keep the Old Testament rules.
15:52: It's simply not true.
15:56: You don't need to do that.
15:58: You really, really don't.
16:01: Jesus kept the law on your behalf, and you can't do it as well as he did.
16:07: And he didn't leave it mostly done for you to compliment what he did and somehow shore up what was missing.
16:14: As soon as we begin to believe that we are obligated to keep, to obey some portion of the Old Testament law, we are turning away from the gospel of Jesus Christ and abandoning God.
16:34: That's the blunt language of Galatians chapter 1.
16:37: Now, you can voluntarily, without any sense of obligation, do some things required by the Old Covenant law.
16:46: That's fine.
16:48: But as a requirement, absolutely not.
16:51: And so I think one of the lessons we need to remember is the Old Covenant law and the temple sacrifices and all those requirements are no longer required for us.
17:04: In fact, Acts chapter 15, when we get there, is the council at Jerusalem.
17:12: It's where the early church had to wrestle through the questions of, well, do non-Jewish people who come to faith in Jesus, do they have to keep at least some of these rules?
17:20: And the answer is no, absolutely not.
17:22: They do not need to become Jewish in any form, not through circumcision, not through any other law keeping, to have faith in Jesus Christ.
17:31: Stephen is accused.
17:37: These witnesses are planted to misrepresent him, get him in trouble, and then we move into chapter seven.
17:46: He's given an opportunity to defend himself against the charges, and he does something odd, at least to my mind, odd.
17:53: Instead of saying, wait a minute, I'm not saying what they're saying, I'm saying, I'm saying this other understanding, he doesn't simply clarify what he meant.
18:02: He launches into a recounting of Jewish history, and he spends the next nine paragraphs or so reminding them of the story of the Jewish people from the time of Abraham, which would be the first Jewish person, the person that God set aside for himself, from whom God intended to create a people that we know as the Jewish or Israel people, and moves from that point right on forward through Jewish history.
18:31: And I read this account many, many times over the years, and a lot of ways it just seems like a pretty straightforward retelling of Jewish history.
18:39: I imagine that most of the folks hearing it initially were like, yup, yup, that's what the scripture says, yup, that's what happened in our history.
18:47: I tell you, I'd love to do two or three sermons just working through these Old Testament stories where he unpacks this portion and that portion of Jewish history.
18:59: But instead I'm going to summarize by quoting Stephen's own words in verses 51 to 53, because he gets to the end of this whole history section, and then he provides the point very clearly, piercingly.
19:15: He says, you stiff necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit as your fathers did, so do you.
19:30: Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?
19:35: And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.
19:48: That is a brutal summary of Jewish history, and it's not just, hey, Israel history is bad, they've messed up time and again.
20:02: He applies it specifically to the people in front of him who have put him on trial and who have the power and authority to put him to death.
20:11: His summary could be rephrased as, you anti-Jesus Jewish folks are just like your forefathers, your ancestors, who time and again rebelled against God, hated, persecuted, and killed anybody who was faithful to God.
20:30: Second verse, same as the first, right?
20:37: He's saying you're just like all the bad guys in the Bible.
20:41: You're doing it right now.
20:42: You're doing it not only against me, Stephen, but you did it more significantly against Jesus in the past.
20:48: Everyone that was faithfully pointing the way to the righteous one who is to come, Jesus, your ancestor put to death.
20:56: Now you're in the generation where he actually shows up, but you put him to death.
20:59: If we took time to examine each of the stories that Stephen recounts, we'd see that they all have a few things in common.
21:11: Number one, God's people resisting the work of God, resisting God, not doing what God wanted.
21:19: Number two, God's people resisting anybody who's faithful to God, anybody who's accurately, faithfully, honestly representing God ends up suffering at the hands of God's people.
21:30: And three, the mercy of God nonetheless.
21:35: If God treated his people as his people deserve to be treated, he'd have thrown in the towel long ago.
21:44: It's true in Israelite history, it's true in Christian history, all of us are dependent on God's sustaining grace and mercy.
21:55: Let me give you just one example of this.
22:00: God called Abraham to leave his homeland and to travel to where God would show him.
22:05: So he's supposed to leave Mesopotamia, he's supposed to travel to what we would call the land of Canaan, or contemporarily we call it the land of Israel.
22:12: But God doesn't tell him exactly where that is initially.
22:15: He says, I'll show you as we get there.
22:17: And Abraham and his family leave Mesopotamia, and they get part way to a city called Haran, and they stop.
22:23: They set up shop there and they live there until Abraham's father passes away.
22:28: They didn't faithfully go as far as God wanted them to go.
22:32: They set up shop part way, and so then God has to get them up and get them moving and get them back on the road to where he wants them to go.
22:39: I think there's at least two lessons in this for us.
22:44: Number one is God's patience and mercy and grace.
22:48: God's not...
22:50: mess up so that he can judge us and condemn us.
22:59: I grew up as a non-Christian in liberal New England, and I had a weirdo dad who had an odd sense of humor.
23:06: I think you can see a little bit why I am the way I am with my sense of humor.
23:10: And one of my favorite things humor wise was a cartoon strip called The Far Side.
23:15: You guys remember The Far Side?
23:16: And one of the strips that I remember, even from a little kid, long before I knew anything about God, was this picture of God at a computer screen getting ready to press the smite button and drop a piano on a guy on the street.
23:30: That was this attitude that I was exposed to, what God must be like, when I was a little kid.
23:36: That's not what the Bible...
23:37: God is the sort of God who is ready to forgive and restore and continue his good work in and through his people as they repent and trust him, and God is continually drawing us to repentance and faith.
24:00: Christians, knowing our acceptance by God because of our faith in Jesus Christ, we should be quick to run back to God when we find that we've wandered.
24:11: We should be quick to confess, to rebelled...
24:16: in sin, knowing that we don't have to prove ourselves, we don't have to earn forgiveness.
24:22: It's been done for us by Jesus.
24:25: We are loved, we are adopted as sons and daughters of God through faith in Jesus Christ.
24:30: So run home, run to our father when we recognize that we're wayward.
24:37: I think the second lesson from this, though, is also a warning.
24:42: God's patience with unrepentant sinners is not limitless.
24:47: We know this in part because not all end up saved.
24:52: God does not cause every single person to come to repentant, saving faith in Jesus Christ.
24:58: We can also see it specifically in our passage when we look at verse 42, chapter 7 verse 42, says God turned away and gave them over to worship the host of heaven.
25:14: In other words, he said, fine, you want to worship angels, have at it.
25:22: And he lets them have their own way, lets them go in a sinful direction to their own destruction.
25:29: Most, most recently, our sermon series had been in Romans, and we see the same concept early in the book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 24 to the end of the first chapter, where Paul is laying out the universal guilt of mankind and saying, whether you're Jewish or not Jewish, whether you have the Old Testament scriptures or you don't, we all have enough that we're accountable to God, and we've rejected God time and again, and God has let humanity run off after idols and idolatry and sin.
26:01: That should scare us.
26:04: That should scare us, that there can be a point where God says, enough is enough, have your own way, because no one to whom God does that is going to choose the right way.
26:17: Left to ourselves, all of us will choose the wrong way.
26:20: Our attitude towards sin needs to be very, very different than what it will be apart from God's grace.
26:33: Romans chapter 6 deals with this twice.
26:36: What shall we say then?
26:37: Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
26:40: And later, just a few verses later, a few verses later, Romans 6 10 through 11, for the death he, Jesus, died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God.
26:55: So you, Christian, must also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
27:03: We are supposed to say, I am dead to sin because of my union with Jesus.
27:09: We cannot be okay with continuing in sin.
27:13: No, I'm not saying that we go through the life as a Christian saying, oh, I'm panicked if I sin, I'm going to lose my salvation.
27:18: That's not biblically correct.
27:19: But we ought to have a hatred for our own sin.
27:23: We ought to be so focused on Jesus and so reliant on our connection and union with Jesus that we say, sin is dead to me, I want nothing to do with that.
27:35: God, lead me in the way that is right.
27:38: Lead me in righteousness.
27:39: Turn my heart away from sin.
27:40: Cause me to find it unappealing.
27:43: Let me grow in my love and appreciation for Jesus Christ.
27:46: That's where we need to go.
27:49: Something else we need to see here, in 742, Stephen talks about God giving his people...
27:57: This is in the context of Old Testament Israel.
28:00: Stephen talks about God giving his people over to their sinfulness.
28:02: What was it that Stephen talked about immediately before that?
28:07: Well, verse 41, chapter 7 verse 41, and they made a calf in those days and offered a sacrifice to the idol and were rejoicing in the works of their hands.
28:17: So he's talking about the Old Testament golden calf incident.
28:21: Incident sounds so sterile, doesn't it?
28:24: This Old Testament story of when the people promptly rebelled against the God who saved them and built their own God out of gold.
28:34: The issue was God's people trusting in what they could do, what they could make.
28:39: Notice the end of verse 41, they were rejoicing in the works of their hands.
28:46: The works of their hands.
28:47: They were in effect trusting what they could control, what they could do for themselves, rather than trusting in God.
28:53: Which brings us back again to the charge against Stephen.
28:57: What did they say he was talking against?
28:58: This place, that is the temple.
29:01: Now notice in verses 47 and 48, Solomon built a house for him, like he built the temple, yet the most high does not dwell in houses made by hands.
29:15: Stephen, saying, guys, God's not limited to some physical building that we can make.
29:23: Don't, don't put your focus on what man has made, as though the temple building is the end all be all.
29:30: No, in fact, the Jewish people of that day didn't know it, but in a few decades the temple would be destroyed permanently, 70 AD.
29:39: It comes to pass.
29:41: Say, don't trust in that.
29:42: You want to meet God where he's at, you need to come to Jesus.
29:46: Let's go back to Stephen summary, his punchline section, verses 51 to 53.
29:55: Try to imagine being the folks hearing this and knowing that he's saying this specifically against you.
30:04: You stiff necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit as your fathers did, so to you, which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?
30:19: And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.
30:30: Calls them stubborn, uncircumcised in heart and ears.
30:36: That, that's them's fighting words to the Jewish people.
30:40: Physical circumcision was the sign of the covenant, and that was a huge deal.
30:45: You either had that sign, you were part of God's people, or you were the smucks, you were the terrible, rotten, no good people, in Jewish thinking.
30:54: And he says, not only are you uncircumcised, but you're uncircumcised on the inside, where it really counts.
31:00: You're not set apart for God, you're not in right relationship with God.
31:03: In fact, all the villains from the book that took place long ago, you're just like them.
31:08: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and just like they persecuted and killed the ones who came before, you betrayed and murdered the one that it was all pointing to.
31:22: You don't even keep the rules that you're all fixated on.
31:26: Now, as you might imagine hearing this, they are not happy.
31:31: Verse 54, now when they heard these things they were enraged and they ground their teeth at them.
31:37: Grinding their teeth is a cultural way of expressing anger and rage.
31:43: Try to picture the maddest you've ever been at something or someone, and you're in the ballpark of what this is describing.
31:54: Enraged, absolutely enraged.
32:01: Is Stephen afraid in this moment?
32:06: Humanly speaking, he should be, but that's not how he's portrayed.
32:11: He doesn't seem fearful at all.
32:14: Why?
32:14: Because God met him in this moment in a profound way, verses 55 and 56.
32:22: But he, Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, 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 opened and the son of man standing at the right hand of God.
32:41: So God lets him see this, this glimpse, this vision into heaven, to behold the glory of God, to see Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
32:49: And Stephen is like, y'all, guess what I see, and tells him.
32:52: And that's what tips them from enraged to murderous.
32:59: That's where he really goes over the top.
33:01: There's two things you have to catch about this vision that God gave Stephen.
33:07: Number one, by claiming that Jesus is at God's right hand, he's implicitly claiming that Jesus shares in God's authority and honor and status, and therefore, even God's nature, is God.
33:23: He's making a divine claim about Jesus, which they understood him to be making.
33:29: That's what makes them tip to murderers.
33:32: They're saying, that's it, he's now earned himself the death penalty, we're going to stone him.
33:36: And it's the same thing that led to Jesus his own execution.
33:44: You remember that when Jesus was on trial, they had all these rigged witnesses claiming things about him, but they couldn't get enough to say the right thing.
33:51: And then he finally gets asked explicitly, are you the son of God?
33:55: And Jesus' response, Matthew 26 64 and following, Jesus said to him, you have said so, but I tell you, from now on you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven.
34:08: Then the high priest tore his robe and said, he has uttered blasphemy, what further witnesses do we need?
34:15: So what they finally sink him on is basically getting him to admit that he's God.
34:22: And when Jesus says, hey, I'm going to be at the right hand of God, seated on the throne, he said, that's it, you're claiming to be God, that's blasphemy, death penalty.
34:31: Stephen is now claiming the same thing, not about himself but about Jesus.
34:35: Stephen is saying about Jesus what Jesus said about Jesus, and they prepare to put him to death.
34:42: Now the second thing to note, which I missed when I first read through this, do you notice a difference in how Jesus described it and how Stephen described it?
34:54: Jesus said the son of man will be seated.
34:56: As far as I can tell, every single reference in the New Testament to Jesus being at the right hand of God describes him as seated, every single time, except these two verses by Stephen here, where he is standing.
35:14: Throughout history, Christians have understood this to mean that essentially in this moment when Stephen is about to be put to death, he's given a glimpse of heaven, and Jesus is rising up to meet him, to welcome him home.
35:28: Jesus' normal position at the right hand of God is seated on the throne, but in this moment, as Stephen is faithfully living for Jesus right up to his death, Jesus says, welcome.
35:42: That is a profound reality.
35:47: Death becomes a doorway to the Lord.
35:53: It becomes a way for Stephen to go be with Jesus.
35:57: When I first began serving as a pastor at this church about 10 years ago, there was a lady in this congregation who would drive to church on her little mobile scooter.
36:11: Her name was Rosemary.
36:12: I got to know her, we got to be good friends.
36:15: She had the driest sense of humor, it took me a while to figure out when she was being weird and when she was doing a joke, because it was so dry.
36:25: And so I loved this lady dearly, she and I, we really connected.
36:30: But she had a degenerative disorder where her muscles were failing, and in the last year or so she went home to be with the Lord.
36:43: And she described how it came to be.
36:49: Her body was failing, and she was taken from the care facility to the hospital, and she was told, basically, here's where things are at, we have only got a couple of options.
36:59: We can do this, and you will be in a facility, and we will have you with a tube down your throat, and you will be living that way on assisted breathing devices and so on until your death, or you can forego that and just die.
37:15: And she said, wait a minute, I can skip that?
37:20: And I get to, those who were there at the time can tell you, she was excited.
37:28: She's like, it's here, I'm gonna go get to be with Jesus.
37:31: And in very short order, she was, she was thrilled about it, because she knew by faith, she had a vision, by faith, not by sight, of what Stephen had, that she was about to go be with Jesus.
37:47: And so she said, option number two, please, and be with Jesus.
37:55: Death is not the worst thing that can happen to us.
37:59: Death, a horrible thing, an enemy of mankind, becomes in the gospel a tool for God and for our ultimate good, because death has been conquered just as Jesus conquered the grave.
38:17: And so it takes us not so much away from this life as it takes us into the fuller experience of eternal life with God.
38:25: Finally, notice verses 59 and 60.
38:30: As they were stoning Stephen, pause and think about that.
38:37: They are throwing stones at Stephen.
38:41: Don't picture pebbles, don't picture things that you're going to skip on water, picture softball sized rocks, picture brick sized rocks, right, because they're stoning them to death, they need big rocks that will get the job done.
38:54: As they were stoning Stephen, as these rocks were being hurled at him and he's being hit by rocks, he called out, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.
39:06: And falling to his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against them.
39:14: Stephen's a big old plagiarist.
39:19: He didn't come up with either of those things, he's imitating Jesus.
39:23: Doesn't sound familiar?
39:25: He's following Jesus.
39:26: He's following Jesus in obedience to God even unto death.
39:30: He's following Jesus by entrusting his spirit unto God at the time of his death, Luke 23 46, and Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, father, into your hands I commit my spirit, and having said this he breathed his last.
39:43: Way, he's following Jesus in that way.
39:45: And he's following, Luke 23 34, and Jesus said, father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
39:56: I'm gonna put this real simple.
39:59: God wants you to follow Jesus, like, really.
40:08: God doesn't want you to be a Christian and go to church as though that were the end goal.
40:15: God wants you to follow Jesus.
40:18: If you're not already following Jesus, he wants you to repent of your sin, to turn away from your sin, regret your sin, and instead trust in Jesus.
40:26: And if you're already a Christian, having done that, he wants you to actually live your life in such a way that you're following Jesus every day, to the end of our days.
40:36: And God does not leave us to our own ability or resources to accomplish this, he gives us his own spirit to live in us, so that we will have the faith and power to obey when it's not easy, when it may be costly.
40:55: Stephen didn't die because he messed up, he died because he didn't mess up, because he stayed faithful to God, because he kept his focus on Jesus and followed where God led.
41:08: Over and over in this passage we see this reference to the spirit.
41:11: Stephen was a spirit.
41:13: I want to be like Stephen.
41:25: Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking to die early, though I leave that in the Lord's hands.
41:32: I mean, I want to finish well.
41:34: I want to faithfully trust and follow Jesus until I get to see him face to face.
41:41: The Old Testament, God chooses Solomon, son of King David, to be the third king of Israel, and God comes to him and says, ask me what you want, what do you want from me?
41:54: And he basically says, give me wisdom so I can be a good king.
41:58: I thought about that, and I'm not king, I don't need the wisdom of Solomon to be king over God's people, though wisdom is certainly needed.
42:09: Now, what would I want?
42:12: And I have thought many times, what I really want is, I just want to be faithful to God.
42:18: I look at Solomon's story and how he ends badly, and I think, I want to finish well.
42:24: I don't want to make a mess and shipwreck of my faith.
42:27: I want to stick with Jesus to the end and be faithful in my own life, and be faithful as a pastor, and be faithful as a husband, as a father, as a witness.
42:35: I don't want people to look at me and see me...
42:37: Process of joining the Evangelical Free Church of America denomination, the E-Free denomination, I had quite a few conversations with our district superintendent, John Payne, and it turns out that, while a generation ahead of me, that's his heartbeat as well.
43:01: Both of us are continually praying for the other.
43:03: God, help him to finish well, help him to finish well.
43:07: And it dawned on me, God's going to keep me from making full shipwreck.
43:15: Philippians 1 6, I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus.
43:25: That doesn't mean I won't have some mess ups, I'm certain I will, but he's going to keep me from turning away from Jesus, ultimately and finally.
43:33: And as I long to finish well, I need to pray for it, I need to ask God for it, and I need to live surrendered to Jesus.
43:47: Our mission here at Faith Chapel is for every believer to become, make mature, and multiply fully surrendered disciples of Jesus Christ.
43:57: So let me end on this note.
44:00: Are you a fully surrendered disciple of Jesus Christ?
44:05: Now, if you're honest, the answer is no, none of us are fully surrendered.
44:08: But as far as you know God's calling your life, as far as you understand what he's calling you out of and what he's calling you into, have you said yes thus far?
44:20: Or is there some part of your life that you're trying to keep off limits from God?
44:25: Maybe finances, maybe a certain relationship, maybe leisure time, maybe a hidden sin that you don't want to be done.
44:36: Is there some part of your life that you're saying no to God about?
44:40: God is asking you to surrender more and more fully to him.
44:50: Your life will be better for it.
44:54: I can't say it'll be easier, but it will be better.
44:57: Let's pray.
45:01: Father, help us to be serious about following Jesus, not, not out of mere duty, not out of mere obligation, not, not out of the sort of fear that doesn't understand the gospel, but may we be so confident in Christ, so joyful about the good news of who Jesus is for us, that he's fulfilled the law perfectly, he's paid the price of our sin completely, he forever lives to intercede for us and to plead for your grace for us.
45:35: May we be so confident in Christ that sin loses its appeal, that we don't want to live our own way anymore, and we want to follow you and trust you no matter where you lead, and trust that even if you walk us into and through hard things, as you did with Stephen, ultimately you're leading us home to the Lord.
46:00: We pray these things in Jesus' name.
46:02: Amen.