00:00: Father, we have heard your word read this morning, and it testifies of your powerful work in the world, overcoming evil, bringing people to faith in Jesus Christ.
00:16: We want a taste of that.
00:18: We want to welcome the work of your spirit in and among us, and that it would go out from us.
00:26: We pray that you would use this body of believers to bring the gospel to the Green Bay area, clearly, to speak boldly the message of Jesus, even as Apollos did, to represent you to the people around us who don't know you, whether they're churched or unchurched.
00:48: I pray that you would create in us such a love for Jesus that we cannot help but share.
01:00: We pray specifically that you would give each of us specific people in our lives, that you would give us the opportunity to share the gospel with them, that you would give us a burden for their salvation, that you would cause us to love these individuals enough to share the gospel, to present the good news, and that you would bring them to repentant faith.
01:30: We recognize the elections coming up, and we want to offer ourselves and our nation up to you in this time.
01:39: We recognize that we don't know the hearts of each candidate.
01:45: We don't know truly who this or that person is in all situations.
01:51: And so we ask through these elections for your mercy on our region, our state, and our nation.
01:59: We ask that you would pry our hands off any sort of trust in politics and rather turn us once again to trusting in Jesus above all.
02:12: May we recognize the grace that you intend for the world through government.
02:22: Your word says that there is a place in the world for government at your hand, and yet don't let us depend on a politician or a party or an institution of government at a level that does not honor you.
02:42: Open our hearts and our minds to your word this morning.
02:49: Mold us, shape us, conform us into greater Christlikeness, we pray.
02:54: In Jesus' name, amen.
03:03: We have in this church people along the spectrum of Christian experience, from relatively new believers and followers of Jesus to people that have been following Jesus longer than I've been alive.
03:19: And I love that diversity present.
03:22: It makes me think back to when I first became a believer in late high school, and I started attending church, and I started attending youth group, and there was these people my age that knew all kinds of things that I had no idea anything about.
03:36: These were students, kids who had grown up in church, and they'd been taught all kinds of things from the Bible and about the Bible, and I was in there hearing almost all of it for the first time.
03:46: One of the good things about the church that I first became part of was that they taught from the Bible, both on Sundays and at youth group, and so I was being immersed in Scripture, and I was being told, you need to read the Bible, you need to understand what God actually says.
04:00: And so I quickly started coming across these stories where people were getting baptized.
04:06: And I was all new to me.
04:07: I didn't know what baptism was, and I started catching a glimpse of it from some of these stories, and I asked the youth pastor, shouldn't I be doing that?
04:15: It seems like something that the Christians do.
04:18: If I'm believing in Jesus, shouldn't that be me?
04:20: And he's like, yeah.
04:21: And so we talked about it, and then he baptized me during youth group, a week or two later.
04:26: We went out to a lake that was very nearby where the church was located, and right there during youth group, he talked to the youth about baptism, and we waited out from the beach, and I got baptized.
04:37: Baptism is not a minor thing in the Bible.
04:41: As we continue in Acts, the passage before us this morning deals with baptism, and there's actually a couple of different kinds of baptism, and we kind of need to sort these out so we can make sense of this.
04:55: We're actually in the book of Acts in a transition.
04:58: Verse 22 summarizes the end of Paul and his friend's second missionary journey.
05:04: They kind of finish.
05:05: They get back to Antioch, to home territory.
05:07: They're there for a little while.
05:09: And then verse 23, he's on the go again.
05:11: It's a very quick transition, and so if you're not paying attention, you might not even recognize it.
05:15: End of journey two, rest, beginning of journey three.
05:20: And there's all this baptism stuff, and so I want to pause.
05:23: I know that I titled the sermon Two Baptisms.
05:27: I really wish I had called it three, but I didn't realize until slides were done that I wanted to tackle all three.
05:33: There's actually three kinds of baptisms that we want to talk about.
05:36: The first is background context is there's no baptism in the Old Testament.
05:43: There's none.
05:44: And so you can read from Genesis to the end of Malachi, and you're not going to come across baptism even a single time.
05:50: And then when you get to the New Testament, all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, describe something of the ministry of a guy that we call John the Baptist, this guy that God raised up, a prophet who was doing baptisms out in the Jordan River in the wilderness area.
06:06: That's the first exposure we get to baptism.
06:08: And if you think about it, recognizing that these Jewish people had no Old Testament background, this was an entirely new thing going on.
06:16: And John's baptism was a preparing the way for Jesus.
06:23: In the Old Testament, in the book of Malachi, God had said that he was going to send an Elijah-type person who was going to prepare the way for the Messiah when the Messiah comes.
06:34: That is, this guy was going to help get the scene set for the arrival of the Savior.
06:41: And that's exactly who John turned out to be.
06:43: And so he was out doing this public ministry, preaching, teaching, and baptizing.
06:46: And his message was basically this.
06:49: Repent.
06:50: Turn away from your sin.
06:51: Quit doing that stuff.
06:53: Turn toward God.
06:54: And be baptized as an expression of that repentance so that when God reveals the Messiah, which is about to happen, you're ready.
07:03: You're in the place at a heart level and lifestyle level to really receive what God's about to do.
07:08: That was John's baptism.
07:10: Okay?
07:10: Now, Jesus was baptized by John, not because he needed to get ready for a Savior, but because he was identifying with the people that were going to get saved.
07:19: He was identifying with us and our experience.
07:23: That's the baptism of John.
07:25: Second baptism is the baptism we do today.
07:28: We might call it Christian baptism.
07:29: It's the kind of baptism described in Matthew 28, Great Commission, right?
07:34: Teaching, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I, Jesus, have commanded you.
07:45: That kind of baptism is about faith in Jesus.
07:48: It's a way of saying, I'm trusting in Jesus as the Messiah.
07:52: I recognize Jesus as the one from God who saves people, and I'm connected to him.
07:59: We might say it's like a marriage, right?
08:03: What I have belongs to Carrie.
08:05: What Carrie has belongs to me.
08:07: We are married.
08:08: What's hers is mine.
08:09: What's mine is hers, right?
08:12: Similarly, when we have faith in Jesus, what's his is ours, and what's ours is his.
08:17: He takes credit for our failures, our sins, before God, bore the punishment from God at the cross for our sins, but then he gifts us his righteousness.
08:29: He gifts us his status with God.
08:32: We get all that belongs to Christ because we are connected to him, and baptism pictures that.
08:39: His death counts for us, so we don't need to die forever in hell.
08:43: His new resurrection life is given to us so that we are new creations in Christ.
08:48: You can see that described in more detail in Romans chapter 6.
08:51: Now, the third kind of baptism, okay, so the first two are water.
08:56: We had John dunking people.
08:59: Then Jesus has people getting baptized in his name, also in water.
09:03: The third kind is baptism of the Spirit.
09:05: This has to do with when somebody becomes a genuine believer in Jesus, the Holy Spirit enters them and begins to live in that person.
09:15: That's baptism of the Spirit.
09:17: Spirit, we see it described, we saw it at the beginning of the book of Acts when Jesus told his disciples, you will soon be baptized with the Holy Spirit.
09:24: Wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit before you go out in ministry, right?
09:28: We see it in 1 Corinthians chapter 12, which is that spiritual gifts chapter, and in there it says, for in one Spirit, capital S, Holy Spirit, in one Spirit we are all baptized into one body, meaning the body of Christ.
09:43: Jews are Greek, slaves are free, and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
09:47: So this is saying, this is what happens for every single believer.
09:50: They get the Holy Spirit in a way they didn't have before they were believers.
09:54: So we've got three kinds of baptism.
09:56: John's baptism, I'm going to call it Christian baptism, and baptism of the Spirit.
10:00: And that third thing is all Christians at conversion, right?
10:04: Now, we're ready to dig in and see where Luke takes us in this passage.
10:09: First, Luke, the author of the book of Acts, introduces us to a Jewish man by the name of Apollos.
10:16: Now, this guy was a Jewish man from Alexandria, which was a big city in Egypt.
10:22: He was eloquent, well-spoken, and he was, we're told, competent in the Scriptures.
10:28: Now, Luke's writing from a Christian perspective.
10:30: So competent in the Scriptures cannot mean he had a good Jewish understanding of the Scriptures.
10:34: It must mean that he understood the Scriptures reasonably well from a Christian perspective.
10:40: That is, that they all pointed to the Messiah.
10:44: That they were all showing us something about Jesus and who he is.
10:49: And it says that he had been taught about Jesus.
10:53: Namely, he had been instructed in the way of the Lord.
10:56: So he had heard something of the gospel message, this Jesus is the Messiah kind of message.
11:02: And he was then now going out and sharing that with folks.
11:06: He's out in Achaia, right?
11:10: No, he's not there yet.
11:11: He's in Ephesus at this point.
11:12: He later goes on to Achaia.
11:13: He's in Ephesus and he's telling the Jewish people in the synagogue about this Jesus guy.
11:18: And he's fervent.
11:19: He's passionate.
11:20: Well, what happens is he had been taught accurately the things about Jesus as far as he knew them.
11:27: And he was teaching those accurately, but he only knew the baptism of John.
11:34: So he didn't know about Christian baptism.
11:36: He only knew about John's baptism.
11:39: And this couple, Aquila and Priscilla, we met them last week in Acts.
11:44: This couple from Corinth in Greece, Paul met them there.
11:49: They were actually from Rome, kicked out.
11:50: They were in Corinth.
11:51: Paul meets them there.
11:52: They travel together.
11:53: They get as far as Ephesus.
11:54: Paul leaves them behind in Ephesus and he goes on his way.
11:57: So they're still there.
11:59: Now Apollos shows up in Ephesus.
12:00: They meet.
12:01: They connect.
12:01: And this couple starts to recognize Apollos has a lot of understanding of Christianity, but he's got some gaps.
12:08: There's some pieces that need to be filled in.
12:11: Verse 26.
12:13: He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately.
12:22: Now, I like some of the details there.
12:26: They took him aside.
12:28: They didn't say, nah, sit down, Apollos.
12:30: You don't know what you're talking about, right?
12:32: They don't publicly humiliate him.
12:34: They don't make a scene in the middle of the synagogue.
12:37: They wait until afterwards and they get him off to the side in a private context.
12:42: This is not a public teaching thing when they're correcting him and pouring into him.
12:47: It's private.
12:47: And they begin to explain to him, surely, Christian baptism, right?
12:52: Because he only knew about the first one, not the second one.
12:55: And so they're filling in the blanks for him, helping him understand what he was missing.
12:59: Now, presumably there were other things, and it wasn't just that one item, seems to be implied.
13:06: And Apollos is humble.
13:07: He's teachable.
13:08: He says, yeah, you know more about this?
13:09: Tell me more, right?
13:10: They've been with Paul.
13:11: They had some Christian encounter before Paul.
13:13: They were in a place to help him understand things better.
13:16: And they both, this husband and wife combo, together helped him.
13:20: I want to point that out briefly for this reason.
13:23: This was a man and a woman investing in the Christian knowledge of another man.
13:29: And it's legit.
13:30: It's right.
13:31: It's appropriate in this context.
13:33: This is not in contradiction with 1 Timothy 2, verse 12, which we've talked about in other contexts.
13:40: Men can learn from women.
13:41: The New Testament simultaneously teaches us that men can learn from women about the Christian faith, and that there is yet a kind of teaching that is not open equally in the same way to both genders.
13:53: I'm not going to focus on that right now.
13:55: It's not the point of this lesson.
13:56: But I think this passage is a prophylactic.
14:00: It's something that can help us ahead of time to not go down some weird path of our understanding of gender that looks more like some kind of patriarchal, cultural thing than what God's Word actually teaches.
14:13: And so it helps us stay balanced and not twist things.
14:16: So they invest in him.
14:21: And then, verses 27, 28, he went to Achaia, which is a region in Greece, namely to the city of Corinth, where Paul had previously been.
14:29: We know that it's Corinth, not just the region, because later on he's going to get referenced in 1 Corinthians repeatedly.
14:35: He ends up there.
14:36: The believers in Ephesus, where he was, wrote a letter commending him to the church in Corinth.
14:43: Like, hey, we know this guy.
14:44: He understands the Christian faith.
14:46: He's going to be a help to you.
14:48: Welcome him.
14:49: Right?
14:49: Kind of a credentials, a references here.
14:52: Now, it doesn't specify that Aquila and Priscilla were part of that reference, but almost certainly they were.
14:56: Right?
14:57: Because they'd already been in Corinth.
14:58: They already knew the folks there.
15:00: If you have somebody who's from both places and knows them, that's your connecting point.
15:04: So they have a chance to invest in him and then to help refer him.
15:08: And he becomes a significant part of the spiritual maturing that ends up taking place in Corinth.
15:15: Now, before we move on, we take this first Apollo section.
15:18: I think we have to ask some questions.
15:21: Are we teachable?
15:23: Are we humble and willing to receive instruction from people and to keep growing in our Christian faith?
15:32: This guy is at the level where he's publicly preaching in synagogue about Jesus and he still has more to learn.
15:40: I've been following Jesus for over 30 years now.
15:43: I've been a pastor for about 23, 24 years full time.
15:48: I've got a Bible degree and I guarantee you I am still learning.
15:51: I have not got it all figured out yet.
15:53: I am still growing, still learning.
15:56: We're on that journey.
15:57: Are we humble enough to recognize it and to continue to learn and to receive from others input that may fill in some holes in our understanding?
16:07: Might correct some out of balance thoughts that we might have about things in the faith?
16:12: And are we willing to speak up and to be an Aquila or Priscilla to someone else and say, Hey, can I talk to you about this?
16:20: I heard you say this.
16:23: Let's talk about that.
16:25: And to help us all grow.
16:27: Now, I'm not saying let's go out and nitpick each other all the time.
16:30: Please, no.
16:31: Nobody wants that.
16:32: Church does not need that.
16:33: But in a loving, helpful way, let's keep spurring each other on and helping us as a body to grow together.
16:44: The second Luke, after Apollos, introduced us to some John the Baptist disciples.
16:50: This is interesting.
16:52: Paul gets into this area on his third trip and he engages these folks.
16:57: And it seems to me that initially he takes them to maybe be Christians because he gets through this.
17:03: Wait a minute.
17:03: What's going on here?
17:05: And he's like, well, if you didn't receive the Holy Spirit, what were you baptized into?
17:09: It seems to me like it's saying he understood them to be baptized.
17:12: And so at first he thinks they're Christians.
17:13: But he's like, but if you don't have the Holy Spirit, what's going on here?
17:16: Right.
17:17: I think what's going on has to do with John the Baptist ministry.
17:22: They had only heard of John's baptism, which means that that Malachi prophecy, 400-ish years before Jesus, which had been fulfilled by John the Baptist in the region outside Jerusalem, in the Jordan River area, that message and his baptism had been taken all the way to Ephesus.
17:43: And it had gotten that far and these guys had embraced it.
17:46: Now, put this in context.
17:48: First, if you travel from Jerusalem to Ephesus by land in that day, something in the ballpark of 1,100 to 1,200-mile journey.
17:58: Now, you could make it shorter if you took a boat for part of the journey, and depending on where you got to the coast and where you took the boat, you cut 300, 400 miles off the trip.
18:08: That would be something like a land journey from Green Bay to Washington, D.C.
18:14: with no modern technology, no modern communication.
18:17: That's a long way for this message to travel.
18:20: But in God's grace, this message had gotten that far, and these folks had responded by the grace of God.
18:26: They're like, yes, we're waiting for the Messiah.
18:28: We've been baptized in John's message.
18:30: We're waiting.
18:31: We're excited that the Messiah is going to be here anytime.
18:34: And Paul's like, whoa.
18:36: Hey, guys, he came.
18:37: He's already come and gone.
18:39: But he's going to come back.
18:40: Let me tell you about it.
18:42: John was getting us ready for this guy named Jesus.
18:44: Fills him in.
18:45: They're like, yay, we're on Jesus' team.
18:47: Right?
18:47: They're right away ready because they've already received this preparatory message.
18:57: They don't say, well, you know, we already did this other baptism.
19:00: We're not doing another one.
19:02: They say, oh, following Jesus involves baptism?
19:05: Dunk me.
19:06: Now, I say dunk.
19:07: The word baptism, if you don't happen to know it, today people only know the word baptism from Christianity context, and people use it for dunking, for sprinkling, for all different things.
19:16: Literally, the word was a Greek word before Christianity, and it meant to dip or to immerse or to submerge.
19:25: They used this word for, like, a garment that would be immersed in a dye liquid in order to color the fabric.
19:31: They used it to talk about a sunken ship being submerged in the water.
19:39: It meant to put under a liquid.
19:42: That's literally what the word meant, which is one of the reasons that we practice baptism by immersion, where you dunk the person under the water.
19:51: Now, there's some other biblical reasons for it as well, but that's literally what the word means.
19:55: And so they say, yes, we're on board.
19:56: Do that.
19:57: Baptize us.
19:58: Paul does.
19:59: He lays hands on them.
20:00: The Holy Spirit comes.
20:01: And now they've gone from just, we want what God's doing.
20:04: We want to be part of this, to now we know about Jesus, and we're in.
20:09: And the Holy Spirit lives in them.
20:10: And the Holy Spirit's empowering them and enabling them to do things that they could not do before.
20:17: I have to ask you, have you been baptized as an expression of your faith in Jesus?
20:25: The New Testament does not present baptism as an optional thing.
20:30: It doesn't save you, but it's not optional.
20:34: Just like turning away from sin doesn't save you, but it's not optional.
20:39: Baptism doesn't save you, but it's not optional.
20:43: It is required.
20:43: It is commanded.
20:45: And in the New Testament, it's consistently something that happens right away when somebody comes to faith in Jesus.
20:52: And so if you are a believer in Jesus, somebody who's trusting Jesus to save you from hell and for heaven, and you haven't been baptized as an expression of your faith in him, get your butt in gear.
21:07: It's time.
21:09: Come talk to me.
21:10: We'll get it done.
21:12: Secondly, they've already been baptized.
21:15: They had some other kind of baptism going on, but they find out that Jesus wants his people to be baptized as an expression of their connection with him, their reliance on him, personal faith in him.
21:27: They say, let's do it.
21:28: By that, I would argue, if you were baptized as a baby by your parents, however well-intentioned that may have been, and I'm sure it was well-intended, I would encourage you as a believer in Jesus to be baptized as an expression of your faith in Jesus.
21:46: Because when you baptize a baby, that has nothing to do with that baby's faith.
21:49: They don't have faith yet.
21:51: I myself was baptized as a baby by my parents with my mom's Lutheran background, my dad's Catholic background.
21:59: They had me baptized as a baby.
22:01: But we didn't do anything with that as a family.
22:03: My other siblings didn't end up getting baptized.
22:05: But when I became a believer, I'm like, well, I've never expressed faith in Jesus through baptism.
22:09: I'm going to do this.
22:10: And so, like that, I'm saying, John's baptism isn't what's required of us, though it was appropriate for that time.
22:18: We want to do what Jesus calls us to do.
22:20: I would say likewise, if you haven't been baptized as an expression of your faith in Jesus, do it.
22:25: If you have questions about that, you want to talk about it, come talk to me.
22:29: But, baptism is a big deal.
22:32: Baptism is a picture.
22:34: It's an outward way of saying, I surrender to Jesus.
22:39: I'm connected to Jesus.
22:40: His good is now mine.
22:42: My bad was solved by him.
22:44: I'm accepted by God because I'm with Jesus.
22:51: Now, notice verses 8 through 12.
22:54: It's this fast forward summary.
22:56: We're told that there's a three month period, at the end of which, the Jewish people there, that haven't come to faith, say, enough, another's Paul stuff, get out of here.
23:05: And so, he has to shift what he's doing, and he moves away from reaching to the Jews, primarily at the synagogue, and instead takes the ones that have come to faith, and they're doing some other stuff, and he's reaching out to, to people throughout the area, Jews and Gentiles both.
23:17: And then there's another two years after that, mentioned in verse 10.
23:23: No, verse 8.
23:25: Verse 10.
23:26: You can find it.
23:28: So, probably back to back, three months, followed by another two years.
23:32: So, over two years that he's working, and living, and ministering in Ephesus, and there's some interesting things going on.
23:40: I think what first catches my attention here, is this, hokey pokey Christianity.
23:50: We got this story, about these seven brothers.
23:55: Okay?
23:56: And then we got a following story, about the burning of books.
24:00: And I think these, are helping us to think through, hokey pokey Christianity.
24:04: Now, obviously, the hokey pokey, has not been around for 2,000 years.
24:07: It's just a modern way of describing it.
24:09: But we got these seven brothers, who are, exorcists.
24:14: They're Jewish exorcists.
24:16: And, they're not willing to go all in on this Jesus thing.
24:20: Right?
24:20: They're just kind of, trying to dabble with a portion of it.
24:23: For those that don't know the hokey pokey, you put your right hand in, right?
24:29: And then you shake it all out.
24:30: And then you take your right hand out.
24:31: You're in and out.
24:32: You're in, but then you're not staying there.
24:34: And then some other part of you, is in and out.
24:36: And eventually, all of you's in, but then you get right back out of it.
24:40: And then you're kind of in, and then you're kind of out.
24:41: That kind of Christian faith, where you're, you're not really committed.
24:45: You're only, you're only kind of dangling part of your life in, checking it out, but not for long.
24:50: And even when you're kind of like, oh, maybe I'll do a whole life.
24:52: You're like, no, not, not really.
24:53: I'm not going to stay there.
24:54: I'm not going to really be committed to Jesus.
24:57: That's a half-hearted kind of faith in Jesus that really is no faith at all.
25:05: That's not what we're called to.
25:08: We're called to be all the way in, all the time.
25:14: This story that we have of the seven brothers in verses 13 to 16 is one of my favorites.
25:19: I know it was read earlier, but I got to reread this.
25:22: Just catch the details here.
25:23: Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.
25:42: Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Seva were doing this, but the evil spirit answered them, Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?
25:53: And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them, and overpowered them so that they fled out of the house naked and wounded.
26:03: That's got to be one of the funniest and most horrifying stories I have ever encountered in my life.
26:09: My love for this story, I got a disclaimer here, is very influenced by a preaching segment by a pastor named Matt Chandler.
26:17: He preached on this and it has impacted my understanding of this passage.
26:22: Think about it this way, there's these Jewish men, seven brothers, who have a priestly heritage in their Jewish background, and they decide to be itinerant exorcists.
26:33: That is, they're traveling around place to place to cast out demons from people.
26:37: That's how they're making their living.
26:40: And they think, hey, there's money to be made if we tack on to this Jesus thing that's going on.
26:45: And so they try to kick demons out of people by saying, I adjure you, I put you under oath, I do this formal requirement thing of you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.
27:00: They're like, I'm getting Paul's Jesus authority on you right here, spirit.
27:08: That's what they try to do.
27:11: But the evil spirit answered them, Jesus I know.
27:16: Yeah, we know Jesus.
27:19: We know about him.
27:20: That's what the spirit is saying.
27:22: And Paul I recognize.
27:24: Yeah, we've heard about Paul, I've heard about Paul, and that guy's causing all kinds of problems for us demons.
27:29: I know Jesus, I know Paul.
27:32: But who are you boys?
27:35: Right?
27:36: In an encounter with a demon, that's not what you want to hear.
27:38: Right?
27:41: I have no idea who you are, fellas, is what the demon is saying to them.
27:45: You're trying to invoke Jesus power.
27:47: Yeah, I'm afraid of Jesus.
27:49: And that Paul guy, man, he's tapped into Jesus power.
27:51: I'm afraid of Jesus, or Paul too, but you guys don't scare me.
27:56: Right?
27:57: And then, the man in whom the demon is living, the evil spirit is living in him, attacks the seven brothers.
28:05: Overpowering seven.
28:06: Picture this, it's seven on one.
28:08: My money would have been on seven.
28:13: But this one demon-possessed guy overpowers all seven of them, leaped on them.
28:19: He just aggressively attacks them, mastered all of them, overpowered them, so much they flee out of the house, wounded and naked.
28:29: Like, they're bleeding.
28:30: They're running out of the house, beat up, bloodied, probably bruised, probably literally bleeding different places, right?
28:35: I appreciated the way that Chandler describes this in terms of contemporary entertainment fighting, right?
28:45: Like, I don't watch UFC, I don't watch boxing matches, but I do enjoy a good boxing movie, right?
28:51: If you're old enough, you might think Rocky movies.
28:53: If you're too young for that, they did remakes where they continue, you know, the Creed movies, right?
28:58: And there's some other ones out there.
29:02: And sometimes when you have a competition fight, there's debate about who won, right?
29:08: And the judges have to make a decision and they announce their decision.
29:11: Oh, we declared this one to be the winner.
29:13: But, you know, some of the people that saw the fight are like, well, you know, they decided that, but I think these, this fighter, this guy won instead.
29:21: Matt Chandler gives us a helpful test for a fight to figure out who won.
29:27: He says, if you go into the fight with pants and by the end of the fight, you ain't got your drawers, you lost that fight, right?
29:41: That's literally what happens here.
29:43: Seven guys with clothes at the beginning of the fight, they lose, all seven of them run out of the house naked.
29:52: They lost big time.
29:54: Why?
29:54: Not because of the demons' power, but because they were not really tapped into Jesus.
30:02: They were trying to use Jesus as a tool without surrender and relationship with Jesus.
30:09: They just wanted a little bit of, of tacking into Jesus to get what they wanted.
30:14: They didn't want Jesus.
30:15: That's a dangerous, dangerous place to be.
30:21: And it happens today in a lot of ways.
30:23: If your version of Christianity is, I'm going to do some Christian stuff so I can get these things that I want, and that'll be the end of it, you're doing the same things as these seven brothers.
30:36: If you go to church or tithe or observe the Lord's Supper or get baptized or whatever, with the hopes that you get a little bit more American dream fulfillment, you'll be a little healthier, God won't let you get sick, etc.
30:51: You're trying to manipulate Jesus.
30:55: And God sees through that every time.
30:58: We heard mentioned in Sunday school today about Jesus' warning that there will be people who say to him, Lord, Lord, didn't we do this and that and the other thing in your name?
31:07: He said, depart from me.
31:08: I never knew you.
31:11: Do you really have relationship with Jesus?
31:13: Because it can't be about the externals.
31:14: It can't be just trying to use Jesus as a tool to get what you want.
31:19: That's hokey pokey Christianity.
31:21: That's just dabbling, just a little piece of it to get what I want.
31:27: And it won't work.
31:28: And in fact, the end result of hokey pokey Christianity is worse than these brothers experienced.
31:36: Hokey pokey Christianity ultimately leaves you bound for hell.
31:40: You can't be just, well, I'll do a little bit of Jesus so that my cold goes away.
31:45: That's not a saving faith.
31:49: All in on Jesus is the only road that any of us should be on if we trust in Jesus.
32:01: Verses 17 to 20 give us the alternative.
32:06: This became known, this seven brothers incident, became known to all the residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks, and fear fell upon them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled.
32:19: That's amazing.
32:20: They hear this and like, you can't play games with this Jesus stuff.
32:23: Right?
32:24: There's a fear about it.
32:25: Now, fear then is not just like you finding yourself in a yard with a pit bull that's growling.
32:31: This is the kind of fear that the Bible talks about that there's a degree of reverence and awe.
32:37: This wow kind of heart attitude.
32:41: But there's also fear like, I don't want to offend God.
32:45: I don't want to alienate Him.
32:46: I don't want to make Him upset with me.
32:49: That's kind of part of it as well.
32:50: And that's their attitude towards Jesus increasingly as this kind of stuff is playing out.
32:57: And they realize, you don't play around with Jesus.
33:00: You don't do this half-hearted, halfway in, halfway out thing with Jesus.
33:03: American culture in the last 75 years has failed to understand this.
33:08: And there's been a lot of cultural Christianity in our nation that is anything but the real deal.
33:13: If you look at the average, typical example of Christianity around you, it is probably not the real deal.
33:22: It is probably not a genuine, wholehearted, repentant, faith in Jesus kind of faith.
33:29: You've got to be all in with Jesus.
33:36: And the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled.
33:39: Because of this, you don't play around with Jesus, you've got to be all in mentality.
33:43: Jesus was really being honored.
33:45: He was really being treasured.
33:47: And that's what we're supposed to be doing here.
33:49: We say here at Faith Chapel that our purpose is that we exist to worship God, to recognize His worth, to recognize how valuable He is.
33:58: We exist to honor Him, to treasure Him, to value Him.
34:03: Now we talk about worship often in terms of songs, and that's fair.
34:06: That's fine.
34:07: It's right to honor Him in songs.
34:09: But we ought to be doing it with everything we do.
34:11: Who we spend our time with, how we invest in others, what we give up for the good of the people around us, and so on.
34:19: Well, that's what plays out with some of these folks who hear the Christian message and respond.
34:23: So much value of Jesus is going on that these folks have a book burning.
34:29: Not the kind where they want to hide information.
34:31: Oh, we don't want anybody reading about that.
34:32: It's rather that they're saying, we've got all these spiritual book resources for other spiritual things other than Jesus.
34:40: And now that we know that Jesus is the way, we don't want anything to do with this.
34:45: And so we're going to get rid of this.
34:46: Now, how do you get rid of it?
34:48: When I was in college, I was convicted through the input of a friend and the work of the Holy Spirit in my life that I had a CD that I was listening to, a music CD, that was not appropriate.
34:59: It was not something that I could listen to and honor Jesus while listening to.
35:04: And I thought, yeah, Jesus doesn't want me listening to this.
35:08: This is not appropriate.
35:09: It doesn't have tone or attitude or lyrics that are in any way appropriate to Jesus.
35:14: I should get rid of this.
35:16: My first thought was, well, I guess I'll try to sell it, get a few bucks back out of it.
35:19: And I thought, wait a minute.
35:21: If I shouldn't have this in my life, why should I put this into somebody else's life?
35:26: I shouldn't do that.
35:27: I'm not honoring God by trying to get my money back out of this.
35:31: And so I'm like, I need to get rid of this.
35:33: And I was like, oh, man.
35:35: Money was a little different for me back then.
35:37: I didn't have much as a poor college student.
35:39: But what I did was I took the CD and I just broke it.
35:42: I said, I'm going to be done with this all in.
35:43: I broke the CD and threw it away.
35:45: That's essentially what they're doing here.
35:47: We got all these false religion, spiritual resources.
35:50: We can't give them away.
35:51: We can't sell them.
35:52: We need to get rid of these because we're all in on the Jesus train.
35:55: And so they have a burning, right?
35:57: Many of those who were now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices.
36:01: I used to do this, that, and the other.
36:03: And a number of those who had practiced magic arts, so these are people who were actively involved in false religious stuff, brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all.
36:12: It's this public confession, this public demonstration of being all in for Jesus.
36:16: They counted the value of them and found it to be 50,000 pieces of silver.
36:20: This passage is telling us something about the value, the monetary value of these books.
36:27: Now, if each piece of silver was valued at a dollar, that'd be like 50 grand worth of books.
36:32: That'd be impressive, right?
36:33: 50 grand worth of books burned at this gathering?
36:37: That's probably not the value.
36:39: Scholars think this is probably a Greek drachma, silver coin.
36:44: It's probably what they were referencing.
36:46: And a drachma was basically a day's wage.
36:51: So if you say, well, what do you make today?
36:53: Say you earn $15 an hour, right?
36:55: Which you can do that at McDonald's.
36:56: $15 an hour times an eight-hour day is $120 a day.
37:01: So 50,000 of these coins would be equal to about $6 million in contemporary currency.
37:09: This is a $6 million book burning because these folks are all in on Jesus.
37:15: They want nothing to do with that old stuff anymore.
37:20: Are you that all in on Jesus?
37:23: Are you ready to get rid of anything, even of monetary value, anything that used to be important to you, are you willing to get rid of it if it's not appropriate to your life as a follower of Jesus?
37:38: That's what we're called to.
37:39: We see the same thing in Hebrews chapter 12.
37:41: We're supposed to get rid of anything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.
37:48: You got to get rid of sin in your life.
37:49: Yeah, but anything that hinders you, anything that trips you up following Jesus, get that out of your life.
37:54: Get that out of there, right?
37:56: If you're going to run in the bellum, what do you wear on your back?
38:00: Ideally, nothing, right?
38:04: Maybe a limited water bottle pouch thing.
38:08: That'd be about it.
38:09: You don't show up for the bellum with a backpack full of all your school books.
38:13: That'd be crazy.
38:14: Why would you run that way, right?
38:15: You don't want all that extra weight weighing you down.
38:18: You're not going to run better that way.
38:19: You're going to run worse.
38:21: So also, if we're going to follow Jesus, we've got to be all in.
38:23: What might you have in your life that you're hanging on to that you need to say, get this out of here.
38:30: I don't care how valuable it used to be to me.
38:33: It's got to go.
38:36: Let me suggest that whatever those things in your life might be, whatever the Holy Spirit convicts you of, go break that CD today.
38:45: Go get rid of it today.
38:46: Don't dilly-dally about it.
38:48: Make that change.
38:50: Be done with it.
38:51: You're not going to regret it.
38:53: That kind of faith, all-in faith, is impactful.
38:59: Notice how the passage ends, verse 20.
39:02: So, that is in light of this public demonstration of all-in Christianity, so the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily.
39:13: Hokey-pokey Christianity doesn't draw people to real faith in Jesus.
39:19: All-in Christianity, God uses that.
39:22: That's attractive.
39:23: To the repentant person that God is working in their life.
39:29: If you look back at the Christian influences in your life, who really made a difference for you?
39:35: Was it an all-in Jesus follower?
39:39: Or was it somebody who just kind of played around with Christianity?
39:43: It was that first group, wasn't it?
39:44: Somebody who said, it's all Jesus.
39:46: It's all or nothing with Jesus.
39:48: That's, that's who I am.
39:49: Those are the people that make a difference.
39:54: Which is why here at Faith Chapel, we call for every believer, insert your name here, Christian, for every believer to become, make mature and multiply, fully surrendered disciples of Jesus Christ.
40:09: my desire, the elders' desire, this congregation's desire is for every believer in this room to be more fully surrendered to Jesus.
40:21: If that's your desire, may the Lord show you the next step in the path of obedience and grant you the faith to stretch out this afternoon and begin walking more fully that path.
40:35: Let's pray.
40:38: God, help us to take seriously Jesus and who he is for his people.
40:44: Help us to avoid dilly-dallying with going through the motions of Christianity with half-hearted efforts to be kind of Christian.
40:59: Change our valuing so that there's nothing in our life that even begins to compare to our treasuring of Christ above all.
41:10: Set us free from idolatry.
41:12: Set us free from loving things, trusting things more than Jesus.
41:18: And show us the next step that we can take dependent on you in that direction.
41:26: And as that happens, Lord, may the message of Christianity bear great fruit in the place where you have us.
41:36: Influencing those around us, drawing them in to Jesus.
41:42: It's in the name we pray.
41:44: Amen.