The Cost of Following Jesus

Acts 6:8-15

Please remain standing and turn
in your copy of God’s Word to Acts chapter 6. We’ll be reading
verses 8 through 15. We continue in the story of the
work of Jesus through his apostles on earth. Jesus has risen from
the dead and raised to heaven. He is seated in glory where he
rules and reigns over all things. He awaits the father’s command
to return and to judge the earth and to make all things new. But
until then, his church on earth is to preach and proclaim Christ,
to baptize and to make disciples. And so we begin a new section
of the book of Acts where we read of Stephen, Philip, and
then Saul, And in their biographies, we know of their work for the
gospel. Before we read God’s word, let
us pray together. Lord, we are now entering into
your presence to hear you speak from heaven to us. We come to
receive your reign and a spiritual due, which will never return
in vain, but ripen to a harvest of either corn or weeds or of
grace or of judgment. Prepare our hearts. so that we
might learn, so that we might love your words, that your law
would be our counselor, that it would rule our lives, that
it would be our physician, that we would be a patient under it,
that it would be our schoolmaster and we’d be obedient to it. For
your glory sake, we ask these things in the name of Jesus.
Amen. You may be seated. Oh, we haven’t read yet. Hold
up. Just give the benediction and
go home. From Acts chapter six, verse eight, it says, and Stephen,
full of grace and power, was doing great wonders in signs among the people. Then
some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the freedmen,
as it was called, and of the Cyrenians and the Alexandrians
and those from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and disputed with Stephen.
But they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with
which he was speaking. Then they secretly instigated
men who said, we have heard him speak blasphemous words against
Moses and God. And they stirred up the people
and the elders and the scribes, and they came upon him and seized
him and brought him before the council. And they set up false
witnesses who said, this man never ceases to speak words against
this holy place 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. And gazing at him, all
who sat on the council saw that his face was like the face of
an angel. Amen, the word of the living
God. You may be seated. I think some of you have been around
church, many of you have been around church long enough to
know you never break tradition. You don’t sit in anyone’s seat.
Right. We don’t. Yeah, I heard apologies
there. We don’t change the color of the carpet. I mean, just say
we went to blue carpet. Now, this wouldn’t happen here,
but in other places. Well, you can’t change it to
blue because red is the color of the blood of Jesus. And oh,
you can’t sit in the women’s parlor because, well, you might
get it dirty. And what’s it for us to look
at? Or we. This is my favorite Southern
church phrase. We had never done it that way
before. And on and on, we could go with
examples. You don’t break tradition. And if one comes in and breaks
tradition, if one comes in and changes things up, oh, woe to
him. Uh, for it would be better for
him to have a millstone. Uh, no, we don’t want to say
that, but, but you, you know how it goes in the life of the
church. We don’t change. Um, well, Stephen’s
changing things. He’s gone into the synagogue
and he has preached Jesus as Messiah. He’s gone into the synagogue
and he has preached that the Holy Spirit will indwell people
in a special and powerful way. And in a sense, what he has said,
the implications of what he has said to these people in this
synagogue is you no longer need the law of Moses. Jesus has fulfilled
it. He has fulfilled all the ceremonial
laws because he is the sacrificial lamb once and for all slain before
the foundation of the world. And he has said to them that
the law of Moses, the, the, the, the theocratic law of Israel,
the, the governing laws of Israel are no longer because God is
going to scatter you among the nations. The new Israel will
be scattered across the face of the earth. He has said to
them, this temple is no more for God does not dwell in temples
made with human hands, but he dwells in the hearts. He dwells
in each and every new creation in Jesus Christ. And he has built
a new temple with Jesus Christ as his cornerstone. breaks every
tradition. Understand, understand very well
that what, what, what Peter has done in the early part of Acts
and now Stephen is doing is he is telling them your, your synagogues,
your, your temples, your man-made traditions, your, your lucrative
money-making opportunities are about to cease. and we need to
fix our eyes on Jesus. We need to listen to his word,
put it into practice in our lives, and we need to share his glory,
declare his glory among the nations of the world. He has basically
said, your rituals and your buildings and your ways are now obsolete
in Jesus Christ. Now this speech is, or this sermon
he gives is nowhere to be found. But if you read through what
many scholars have said of what Stephen must have said to make
them so angry, he personally realizes what it means to come
to faith in Jesus. He personally understands what
it means for Jesus to come into the world and fulfill all things.
And he understands what God is doing. It’s a worldwide redemptive
shift in the way ministry has been done. And so these people,
all they hear, They don’t hear Jesus. They don’t hear grace.
They don’t hear salvation. All they hear is our building.
All they hear is our income. All they hear is our customs,
our rituals under Moses. This guy says they are no more. And so what do they do? Well,
he’s ministering in the footsteps of Jesus. They do to him as Jesus,
as was done to Jesus just some weeks or months before. I want us to think today about
the cost of following Jesus. We’re going to see in this passage
that Jesus is seized or Stephen is seized because he is successfully
speaking of the Messiah. He is effectively preaching and
doing signs and wonders among the people. And I want us to
see Stephen’s grace, his power, his wisdom, his spirit, his demeanor
for ministry in the midst of persecution. and want us to see
what it looks like to be a truly converted man doing the work
of almighty God. Let’s first think about Stephen,
the man. Remember just earlier in our
study of the first couple of verses of chapter six, Stephen
was one of the seven chosen to be a deacon. He was a man full
of the spirit, a man full of wisdom. He was a man who could
help with the distribution of goods or food among the widows. Stephen was a Jew, not by birth,
but by conversion. He’s what we would call a Hellenist,
a Greek who converted to Judaism, and now we know he’s converted
to Christianity. But he would have been a very
well-educated man. He would have known many things
and been able to speak of many things. And you couple that with
the power of the Holy Spirit over a converted man. with his
gifts and his graces. As you see, he is an unstoppable
man in service to the King of Kings. Let’s think about his
ministry. His ministry was initially to
be a deacon. Now, if you read this passage,
you begin to wonder, is he not an apostle? He’s preaching. He’s doing signs and wonders
among the people. We can only assume from the rest
of Acts that he’s probably healed people. He’s probably cast out
demons. He has probably done many mighty
and amazing works in God’s service, but apparently he’s a really
good preacher. Now, a couple of weeks ago, we looked at the
office of deacon and we noted that sometimes when we think
of a deacon, you know, they wear the green jackets, you know,
like they’ve won the masters. Um, they come up, they, they
learn how to walk up the aisle to collect the offering. They
stand at the door. They turn the lights on and off, that kind
of thing. Well, remember we said no, a deacon is way, way more
than we have dwindled it down in our American church culture.
A deacon is a servant of Jesus Christ. He makes the word possible. But the deacon is an office of
sympathy and service, and sympathy and service are never divorced
from the word of the living God. And so could it be? The answer
is yes. But could it be that a deacon
in his ministry to the poor preaches the good news? Could it be that
the ministry of the deacon, and the answer again is yes, in his
ministry to those who are suffering or under great hardship because
this is a fallen world and bad things happen to us, that he
preaches the gospel. And so you can imagine, Stephen,
this man, this minister for God’s sake, this deacon in the early
church, as he goes about doing the work of sympathy and service,
preaches powerfully the word to people. And he, because of
his background, because of his education, because of his training,
but because of his conversion, his being filled with the spirit,
he’s full of grace and power, our passage tells us. He was
full of the spirit and wisdom a few verses ago when he was
selected to be a deacon. He is able to do many great wonders
and great signs because God is at work through this set apart,
ordained man to do the work of the ministry. And I mentioned
a few moments ago, what did he, what in the world did he say
to make these people so angry? Well, he spoke of the supremacy
of Christ. He spoke of the coming of the
Messiah, the work of Christ at Calvary. He spoke of Jesus fulfilling
the law. He is the end of the law, the
end of the ceremonial law, the end of the theocratic civil law
of Israel. He has fulfilled the moral law,
which you and I could never fulfill and live it out obediently. He
has fulfilled those things in order that we would live obediently
through faith in him. And he has made an end to the
sacrifices. He has made an end to the incense
and the burning and the rituals because once and for all, Jesus
has made satisfaction for our sins. And he is the high priest
who has risen above and he has sat down. Priests never sat down. They perpetually and continually
through their divisions of men, kept an offering. burning on
the altar before Almighty God to keep away God’s wrath that
was due to us for our sin. And so his ministry in the synagogue,
his ministry in the temple precincts was to proclaim Jesus. Now in AD 70, which is probably
about 25 years from this point in history, in about AD or notes,
it’s a little ways more than that. It’s about 40 years away,
but in AD 70, the temple is going to be destroyed. Jesus predicted
it, but the temple will be completely destroyed and there will never
again be temple sacrifice, temple rituals. Yes, Jewish adherents
still have their synagogues, they still have their places
of worship, of reading of the Torah, the law, and all the rest,
but there has never been, since the destruction of the temple,
a rebuilding of the temple. And so for the next 40 or so
years, there will be a struggle among Jewish people to reconcile
Jesus, Messiah, cross, Calvary, Passover lamb, permanence of
Jesus’ priesthood, effectiveness of his work, all those things,
there will be a struggle, but Stephen is walking in there,
preaching and proclaiming in a mighty and powerful way, Jesus
has made an end to all of this. Now, part of his ministry, we’re
gonna see this in the coming weeks with his defense of his
faith, And then his stoning, part of Stephen’s ministry is
going to be to scatter the new Christians across the face of
the earth. Remember what Jesus said to his
disciples. He said, your ministry will be
in Jerusalem. And then it’s going to go to
Judea and Samaria. And then it’s going to go to
the ends of the earth. What does persecution do with Christians? It scatters them. And it scatters
them in God’s wisdom and providence. It scatters them in his redemptive
plan and purpose to send them to places where they can go and
serve. Now, think about the traditions
of the synagogue. Think about the permanence of
the people in Jerusalem. Oh, this is the holy city. This
is the most special place of Almighty God. I think of living
in a certain town in a certain house with certain neighbors.
I had a certain call to a certain ministry and It became obvious
to me it was time to move on. And I did like the dog. When you take him to the vet,
I put my feet out. No, I don’t want to go. But God sometimes
needs to shake what is shakable in order to usher in what is
unshakable. And that’s what he does in his
kingdom work is he, he brings in pain and hardship and suffering
and sorrow, and he moves his church out into the world. Otherwise
we’d stay put. And we keep our little candle
burning saying, come, come get the light. And he says, no, go
bear the light. So part of Stephen’s ministry
was to send the church through his own persecution out into
the world. Well, what of the message of
Stephen? We’ve already said it a couple
of times, but I want it to be abundantly clear to us today. Stephen was preaching Jesus.
Stephen was preaching Messiah. Stephen was preaching fulfillment
of the law through the life, through the obedience and through
the sacrificial death of Jesus at Calvary on the cross. He was
preaching that the law had been fulfilled, that the ceremonial
law was no longer needed. He was preaching that we have
a high priest in heaven. He was preaching the book of
Hebrews. He was preaching a message of hope through faith in Jesus
Christ, not a message of salvation through adherence to the law,
not a message of salvation through burnt offerings and sacrifices
and rituals, but simply a message of faith in Jesus. And he had
come into their synagogue and sat in their women’s parlor.
That’s what he did. He stole someone’s pew for the
day. He broke tradition. He preached. the truth. And we’ve got to think
about the message of Jesus as we continue as a church today
to proclaim it. Not all will receive it with
joy. Not all will receive it with
faith. Not all will treasure it. In fact, you can see sometimes
as a preacher, all the little things that go on in church.
You know, you can see which ones of you are covertly trying to
open a candy wrapper, but we all, we all hear it. Um, we,
we see who’s not happy to be here. And sometimes you’ll see
people resisting the gospel. It can come like this and it
can, it can be looking down, it can be a shaking of the head
and it can be someone with the most hateful look waiting for
you at the back door to saying, I don’t believe a word you said
preacher. And it’s not against you. It’s not against the preacher.
It’s not against the church. It’s against God himself. When
he clearly speaks through his faithful servants, it is God
speaking. And so his message was ruffling
feathers as it, well, as it will do. What does the apostle Paul
say? Our preaching is an aroma. It’s
a pleasing aroma to those who are being saved, but it is a
stench in the nostrils of those who are not the sons and daughters
of almighty God. And so his message is a strong
message of Christ. I want to think about a final
thing in Stephen’s life here. I had to come up with an M word.
And so I just came up with the word mess. Stephen is the man,
Stephen’s ministry, Stephen’s message, now Stephen’s mess. Now mess does not even begin
to describe the situation that he’s in. I think because we live
in a cancel culture world though, we understand very well what
Stephen’s situation is. They don’t like what he’s saying.
And if you don’t like what somebody’s saying, you come up with a name
to call them. Are you attribute to them an
action or a behavior that is bigoted or insensitive culturally
and does not conform to today’s virtue signaling norms? And you get canceled. You’re
a bigot. You’re a racist. You’re a phobe
of whatever prefix you want to attach to it. And so what mess
has Stephen found himself in for preaching the word of God
to people who need to hear it? Well, they’ve hauled him in,
they’ve seized him. Our passage says they disputed
with him for a while, debated with him, and because he was
so full of the spirit, they could not withstand. He continued to prevail. And
so they seized him. They put up people to tell a
lie about him in their little court of law, beginning to sound
like Mabeth, beginning to sound like Jesus and his trial. And
so they say, we’ve heard him speak blasphemous words about
Moses and God. They set up false witnesses to
say, this man never ceases to speak words against this holy
place and the law. And we even heard him saying
that Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs
which Moses has given to us. He’s in a mess. But is that really
the way to look at Stephen’s predicament? No, it’s not. The
apostle Paul says in the book of Colossians, I am filling up
what is lacking in the sufferings of Jesus. People on earth hate
Jesus, but he’s ascended to heaven. He’s risen to the throne of glory
and he’s seated at the right hand of almighty God. And he
is not here to have people heap insults upon him. And those insults
will come, but they come on you. They come on his church. They
come along on his followers of Jesus Christ. And so if you are
going to live the Christian life, if you were going to proclaim
a Christian gospel, if you’re going to serve our risen Lord
and savior, you will follow in the footsteps of the master.
You will be persecuted. You will be hated. You will be
hauled in before those who want to hear what you have to say.
They will persecute you. They will jail you. And yes,
they might even kill you. And so Stephen is a man with
a ministry and a message, and he’s now in this great mess,
but he’s following in the footsteps of our Lord. Do you think today
might be the day that you die? What a morbid thought, huh? Is
today the day of your death? Most of you are young enough
and healthy enough that you probably got a few more years. Some of
us more than others, but we feel pretty good. We took our gummy
vitamins. We popped our pills. We’ve done
our regiment. We had our physical, we had our
EKGs. We’re ticking along pretty good,
but could today be the day of your death? Well, none of us
knows. We’re to number our days. We’re to remember that our days
are in the hands of almighty God. But could today be the day
of your death? If so, it would be because of
health, not because of persecution. But today is the day of Stephen’s
death. We’re going to have two more Sundays on his defense and
then on his stoning. So it’s going to be a couple
more weeks of us thinking and considering these things from Acts chapter
six and chapter seven. But by the end of this day for
Stephen, he will face death. And how does he face death? It
says, In verse 15, they were all gazing at him. He’s sitting
in the council. They’re all staring at him full
of hatred. And his face was like the face of an angel. What a
courageous man, a confident man, a serene man. What a man who
knows who is his God. And he knows his marching orders,
I must preach the gospel. even if it means crossing the
threshold into the women’s parlor, even if it means sitting in another
person’s pew, you get what I’m saying. So sometimes being a
Christian means we break norms. We don’t do what everybody’s
just always done before. But if it were your day of death,
would this be what people would see in your demeanor? Because
you were contending for the faith. because you were preaching for
almighty God. May it be so. Let us pray. Our
Lord, we thank you that in your wisdom, you see fit to use us
to make the name of Jesus famous to the ends of the earth. We
thank you that in your weekly service, we hear what is good,
right and true. What is, um, what is biblical,
what is, going on in the spiritual places, what is going on in this
world. And we get to be part of that. We get to serve you.
Lord, someday it may cost us. And we pray that we would be
courageous and confident and that we would, we would yes,
have the face of an angel because we are so full of grace, so full
of the spirit, so full of your power, so full of your wisdom,
that we are effective in proclaiming Jesus. and then dying and being
forgotten, but letting Jesus be lifted up forever and ever.
This is our desire, so help us in it, we pray in Jesus’ name,
amen. We want to sing of God’s goodness,
the fact that he will make us more than conquerors, so turn
to 515 and please stand to sing.