Reverend Jonathan Waits
Looking Out (Acts 8:1-4)
Date: December 29, 2024
So, I’m going to run out on a limb and be honest with you about something this morning. I went back and forth on this because of how it would be received, but decided that transparency is the best option. Before your minds race too far ahead of me with a list of all the things I could follow that opener with, I’ll just tell you: The idea for this message came to me in a dream. If you had a copy of the message and already read ahead, you were spared a bit of suspense there. I’m honestly not sure what it means that the idea came to me in a dream. I’m not sure how much weight to put on that. I am certain that it doesn’t mean anything significant about me. I normally have sermon subjects and passages planned out months ahead of time. But I had recently shifted some things around, and had been praying through what the message for this morning was going to be. For some reason, God seems to have chosen this way to communicate it. Prayerfully I’m getting it right. Again, I don’t know why. I don’t honestly remember any of the rest of the dream. I just remember the one idea that gave birth to what we’re going to be talking about today. I am pretty sure it is from God’s Spirit, though, because I hadn’t been thinking in this direction at all before, and the message is consistent with the Scriptures as we are going to see. All of that is to say this: I think what we are going to talk about this morning together is something God wanted to set before us as we wrap up this year and get ready for the new one arriving on Wednesday.
Let’s get into it this way: We are in the season when our minds begin naturally turning in the direction of the future. As the new year arrives in the middle of this next week, we almost can’t help but wonder where we will be at this time next year even as we reflect on what we have experienced over this last one. Culturally speaking, a big part of this wondering about the future takes the form of making New Year’s resolutions. New Year’s resolutions are simply goals we make for things we want to see happen in the future. More specifically, they are goals we make for things we want to see happen in us in the future. Resolutions are typically about us. They are about us accomplishing things in our own lives to make us more into the people we want to be—or, at least, the people the culture around us has convinced us we want to be. We live in a culture that encourages us constantly to focus on ourselves.
This is a generally personal trend, but it can also manifest itself organizationally. I don’t know that we are going to make any group resolutions as a church this year, but there are quite a number of things we’d sure like to see more of. There’s a lot of good stuff happening. There’s a lot of stuff going on that’s worth celebrating—we’ll do that really intentionally here in a few weeks on Celebrate Sunday; you won’t want to miss that. But there’s also a danger here. The danger is that we’ll start to focus our attention on the things worth celebrating rather than the God who enabled them in the first place.
The early church had a lot of things going on that were worth celebrating too. In fact, if you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way to the record of the church’s founding and early growth by Dr. Luke that we call Acts. If you land in about Acts 2, you’ll be able to track with me for the next few moments.
The church exploded into existence five weeks after the resurrection on the Jewish festival of Pentecost. That morning the Holy Spirit entered the group of 120 disciples of Jesus who were gathered there and waiting for that very event. Filled with the Spirit, the apostle Peter went out to address the crowd that had gathered because of the explosion of different languages being spoken by the disciples and which could be heard out on the street. He proclaimed the resurrection to them and the miracle of salvation available in Jesus, and on that day 2,000 people became believers. The church went from one a little smaller than us to mega church size in the span of a few hours. And things just kept growing from there.
In the earliest days of the church, the believers still thought of themselves as Jews. They were simply Jews who had embraced Jesus as the Messiah and Lord. Because of this, their life rhythms were still marked by Jewish practices like going to the temple regularly for times of prayer. In Acts 3, we find Peter and John going to the temple for that purpose. As they entered, they encountered a lame beggar. Rather than giving him money they didn’t have themselves, they healed him in Jesus’ name. This was the spark that ignited a whole new conflagration of faith. Peter and John once again proclaimed the resurrection, this time in the temple. Their boldness prompted a confrontation with the Sanhedrin and a night in jail. Their action was too late, though. This even more public proclamation of the Gospel than it had yet received resulted in another 3,000 people becoming followers of Jesus. The church now numbered 5,000. The movement of Jesus was gaining speed quickly.
Acts 5 through the beginning of Acts 6 tell of the continued boldness of the disciples under the leadership of the apostles. They dealt with foundational issues of character and expectation, they faced down more threats from the religious ruling elite, and they even began to institutionalize to the point of organizing daily food lines for the poor who had joined their number. This led to organizational growing pains which they responded to by raising up more leaders to help carry the load, giving rise to the first deacons.
Everything seemed to be going the church’s way. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. There were still challenges. They had to work for it. But it was working. They were growing at a pace that would see them become the dominant force in Jerusalem in fairly short order. This was exactly what Jesus wanted them to do. There was no way indeed that the gates of Hell were going to be able to prevail against them at this rate.
But then the Empire struck back. Well, not exactly. Rome didn’t care about the church just yet. But the powers that be in Jerusalem made one last concerted effort to put the church out of business, and this one seemed a lot more successful than anything they had yet experienced. Luke documents this in Acts 6-7. Stephen, one of that first group of deacons turned out to be a dynamite preacher. He was attracting such big crowds and turning so many hearts to the Lord that he became the focus of the Sanhedrin’s efforts to shut up the church. When they couldn’t out-argue him, they turned to more underhanded means of stopping him. They falsely accused him of blasphemy.
This turned into a wild trial in which he offered an eloquent defense not of himself, but of the Gospel. He proclaimed the resurrection and showed from the Scriptures how Jesus was indisputably the Messiah. In the end, though, he went what seems to have been a bridge too far and condemned the religious leaders for their hardhearted refusal to embrace the truth. He does this with language that’s hard to imagine finding anywhere other than the Bible nowadays. If you’ve been flipping through the story with me, we are in Acts 7:51.
“You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are always resisting the Holy Spirit. As your ancestors did, you do also. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They even killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become. You received the law under the direction of angels and yet have not kept it.”
The already angry mob of Jewish leaders handled this rather indelicate denunciation of their character and integrity about as well as you might have expected them to handle it: badly. “When they heard these things, they were enraged and gnashed their teeth at him.” Stephen responded by proclaiming a vision of Jesus standing at the right hand of God which just enraged them all the more. “They yelled at the top of their voices, covered their ears, and together rushed against him. They dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. And the witnesses laid their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.”
This is great writing. It’s like a scene from a movie in which a mysterious, but sinister-looking character who gets just a second’s worth of focus at a pivotal moment in the story turns out to be the main villain. Continuing into chapter 8, we find that this Saul was totally on board with Stephen’s ad hoc and illegal martyrdom. “Saul agreed with putting him to death.”
This turned out not to be just a one-off tragedy, though. Instead, this was the blow that finally made the dam that was holding back the full force of the fury of the Jewish religious elite crumble into dust. “On that day a severe persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the land of Judea and Samaria. Devout men buried Stephen and mourned deeply over him. Saul, however, was ravaging the church. He would enter house after house, drag off men and women, and put them in prison.”
This was one of those cliffhanger moments in the story. If this were a series, the episode would have ended here with a “to be continued…” label. Everything for the church has gone from good to bad to worse in the span of a few weeks, if that. For most movements, this would spell their end. They reached too high. They got too stuck on their own success. Or perhaps from the other direction, they didn’t focus on themselves and strengthening the success they had experienced enough and instead kept trying to push outward. If only they had stayed on mission and not kept picking needless fights with the local religious authorities, then they could have seen their streak of success continue unabated. They could have used some good resolutions to keep them on track.
Those are certainly all variations on how this kind of thing happening today would be received by both unbelievers and believers alike. But can I frame out a different perspective for us this morning? Far from being a sign that anything was going wrong for the church, this was perhaps the most important catalyst for growth the church had experienced to date. This was a kind of judgment against the church for getting off mission, but not in the way we are tempted to think. They hadn’t drifted from their mission by reaching out too much and engaging too intentionally with the community and culture around them. They had drifted from their mission by doing that too little. They had started getting comfortable and shifting their focus to themselves and all the success they were enjoying. As a result, God gave them a little push.
This brings us at last to that idea that hit me in a dream a few days ago and which woke me up from a dead sleep when it did. We could focus on ourselves, but why? I know that may not sound like much, but let’s unpack it for just a second.
As a church, there is a constant and abiding temptation for us to focus our greatest attention on ourselves. I don’t mean that in some kind of a vain and sinful way either. I mean very simply that there is a great and abiding temptation for us to focus on what we have going on here to the exclusion of the things that are going on around us in the community and the world out beyond that. And when we do this, there is nearly always a totally legitimate sounding justification for it. And that justification sounds legitimate whether it is a positive one or a more negative one.
Negatively, it may be that we need to give our greatest attention to ourselves because there is some genuine problem that needs to be solved. We can’t possibly focus on sending or going outward right now. We need to get that addressed, whatever it is, and then we can worry about things happening beyond the borders of our campus. More positively, there are so many good things going on around here right now that if we don’t build and manage in well, all of them will collapse and fade away, and then what will become of our efforts to grow God’s kingdom? Let’s make sure we are all set here, and then we will give attention to what’s going on out there.
The problem with this thinking—both negatively and positively—is that as soon as we stop looking outward, as soon as we stop going, as soon as we stop sending, we are leaving the tracks God laid for the church to run on. Once we do that, we aren’t operating on His power any longer. We are operating on our own power. We are limiting ourselves to what we can accomplish. This is true even if the good things we are shifting our focus to are ones that were initiated by God’s own power. And listen: we may be able to accomplish a lot on our own, but we can’t grow God’s kingdom on our own. That takes God’s power. No other power will suffice. If we leave behind God’s mission in order to focus on our own, then like an electric train that has jumped its tracks, we’ll only go as far as our momentum can carry us. Without His power, we will eventually fail and fall. The fatal irony here is that in our efforts to maintain momentum—the reason we are shifting our focus to ourselves and what we have going on rather than God’s mission to take the Gospel out—we will be doing the one thing that will guarantee we will lose it.
At First Baptist Oakboro, we have a lot of fun things happening right now. We are working toward a major building and renovation project that will prayerfully be breaking ground in the next few months. We have new members connecting at least once a month. First time guests are an almost weekly affair. We are baptizing people regularly, including just last week. We almost have more kids and youth than we know what to do with. There are all kinds of reasons that we need to focus our attention on ourselves. Anybody looking in from the outside would think so. If we don’t manage in well, all of these plates we have spinning are going to collapse. And yet and again, if we fall to that temptation, we will be cutting ourselves off from the very power that has brought us to this point and that we need to sustain us through it.
If we want to be the kind of church that God made us to be, the kind of church we are enjoying being— something many of you have observed to me in recent weeks—then now is the time it is more important than ever for us to keep our focus on the task God has given us as a church. And what is that? It’s the very same task Jesus gave the disciples before He returned to the Father’s right hand as Stephen witnessed Him. We are to make disciples of all nations, starting with our Jerusalem—that’s Oakboro and the surrounding communities for us—and expanding outward from there until we reach the uttermost parts of the earth. We can focus on ourselves given all the things going on around us, but why? What can we really do to fix or even simply sustain ourselves anyway? God’s going to take care of us, so we don’t have to worry about ourselves. We just need to be faithful to His call to make disciples here and from here moving outward to the ends of the earth, and He’ll take care of the rest. To put that another way, if we want to be the church God made us to be, we have to be growing by going.
Now, hear me well: This doesn’t mean we can ignore what’s going on here right now. We can’t. We dare not. We have disciples to make that are piling up on our doorstep. You have created a community here that is powerfully attractive. I really shouldn’t have to work very hard to convince you of that either. You just need a working set of eyes to see the results for yourself. And where God has brought disciples to make to our doorstep, we need to make sure we are doing everything we can to make them. If I can get even more explicit with an example, if you aren’t actively serving elsewhere in our ministry right now, we need you serving with our youth and kids. This applies whether you have kids of your own in the program or not. God is doing a great work there, and it is going to take all hands on deck to manage it and to continue creating the kind of safe, Gospel-focused environments that are keeping them coming and coming back in steadily increasing numbers.
But we can’t stop there. If we want to be the church God made us to be, we have to be growing by going. We have to be looking out for more and more ways we can serve our community. The first place to go is to the parents of the kids and youth we have coming without them. Now, some of those families are actively involved in other churches, but they keep bringing their kids here, especially to the Gathering Place on Wednesday nights, because you have made that such a powerful midweek event. But many of them have parents who need the Gospel just as badly as their kids do. And lo and behold, we have their kids on a regular basis which means we have Gospel access to them. For some of you, your call is not to minister directly to the kids we have here, but to reach out to their parents with Gospel love and an intentional invitation to what God is doing here.
That’s all just the lowest hanging fruit. Whether it’s in the schools around us or partnering with any of the several great local missions organizations or reaching out even beyond there, though, we have to graduate beyond the lowest hanging fruit to go and proclaim the resurrection in the places our God is at work and inviting us to join Him. The more we do this, the more we stay on track with God’s mission for His church, the more we will experience God’s power flowing freely in our midst. And when we are operating on that power— which is far more powerful than anything we will ever be able to produce on our own—managing in while looking out won’t be an either-or decision, but a both-and adventure. As we keep going, we’ll keep growing. Those are not mutually exclusive outcomes, but two sides of the same coin. If we want to be the church God made us to be, we have to be growing by going.
So, let me ask: What missions passions has God planted in your heart and mind? Where is He calling you specifically to be going in order to advance His Gospel as a part of His church? It could be across the world, but it could also be right across the room. Where and how are you positioning yourself to be a part of making disciples who make disciples? There’s a place for you in our kids and youth ministries if that’s where God’s calling you. If not there in some capacity, then let’s find where God is calling you to work. If we want to be the church God made us to be, we have to be growing by going. Let’s commit to going on God’s power so that our growth can continue to move forward and expand to God’s glory, our joy, and the advance of His kingdom.