Increase

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

In reading Acts 1, 4 through 11, that's kind of the end of what we have been talking about the last couple of weeks. The last two weeks, we've been zeroing in on the how we learn spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity is something that a lot of people like to talk about, but not a lot of people really understand either how it works or how to engage it. And this is at our church, this is what we call the learn phase of our spiritual journey. So the learn phase, just as we are growing, it can feel like a roller coaster. It can feel like Sundays we are great and Sundays we are terrible and it is really hard to know, am I growing? Am I progressing? Am I becoming a better Christian? Whatever that means, you know, how is this working? So to level us out, to really help us grasp where we're going, grasp if we're growing or not, we have adopted a or used a biblical metaphor of gardening.

The biblical metaphor of gardening. And we say it this way, that we learn in seasons. We learn spiritual maturity in seasons. Now these seasons are not winter and spring and summer and fall. We find our seasons in Scripture and we find our seasons starting with the cross and then going into the church. So from the cross to the church. And our spiritual seasons are loss, revival, increase, and organization. Loss, revival, increase, and organization. And this morning, any number of you could be in one of those four seasons. Maybe you are in a season of loss where you are just losing a lot. You are maybe in a big transition. Maybe you are in, uh, you know, your life is taking a big turn. Maybe you're going through just a really difficult time where honestly, if, if, if you would, would just kind of sit in front of the, you know, in front of the mirror and kind of have a talk,

you would think to yourself, this seems harder than it needs to be. This is frustrating more than seems fair. If you are in the middle of that, that is a season of loss. The encouragement in that is that even though it hurts, your season of loss is preparation. The season of loss that you're in is preparation. And the warning in that season is if you try to prevent that loss, if you try to avoid that loss, if you try to solve that loss, if you try to somehow try to do a work around, then that loss isn't preparation for anything. It's just loss. It's just going to come. And as much as you try to resist it, it's just gonna come and hurt you. And you're not gonna know what to do with it. We've gotta work with these seasons. So when we embrace that preparation, that next season is revival. We talked about revival last week. We defined revival specifically as a contagious urgency

toward God's kingdom. We talked about it how it was personal, how it was emotional, right? Revival is an emotional thing. Emotional highs aren't bad things. They just are doorways into something more permanent. So if all you're doing in your spiritual life is hanging onto an old emotional experience or trying to look for a new emotional experience, then yeah, you're just gonna keep doing this. You're gonna keep, you know, boom and bust, right? Like it's going to be extremely hard on you. And it will not help you understand what it is to grow in spiritual maturity. You will be in spiritual empathy for a really long time. There's not a way that you can begin to grasp what's going on unless you understand that those emotions, those moments are doorways. They are not finish lines. Okay. They're doorways into something else. And our encouragement in the midst of that is that revival is normal.

Revival is a normal part. It's not like this once in a lifetime, twice in a lifetime thing. That revival is normal. But again, if you try to hold on to it or if you try to manufacture it, it will slip through your fingers. If you try to hold on to it or if you try to manufacture it or somehow duplicate it, You know, like, oh, I, man, and I've had, you know, people that have come and visit our church, and they'll come in and, you know, they'll just kind of experience the, you know, the emotion of the moment, like, so the, you know, that first Sunday it's going to feel good, right? Everybody's, you know, everybody's friendly and all that. But then there's this, there comes this kind of this leveling out, and people, if they're looking for an emotion to duplicate the same emotion that that this other church, or maybe this church from a really long time ago,

conjured up in them, they're going to be disappointed. They're not going to grow. They're not going to figure it out. It's going to be frustrating because you're not looking for spiritual maturity. You're looking for a moment. You're looking for an emotion to be duplicated. That is wrong headed. It will hurt you, okay? It will not help you. So we've looked through loss. We've looked through revival. Today, we're going to look at increase. Increase flows out of that revival. I don't want to be too technical here, but historians who study revivals, they often want to lump in together the revival and the effects of that revival.

So the revival, again, is this contagious urgency that Jesus ignites within you, But to lump that together with what flows out of it would be like lumping together romantic attraction and marriage. Okay. Romantic attraction is great and it's good and you really need it. Okay. That's a good thing to be romantically attracted to the person that you are marrying. Okay. Romantic attraction and marriage are related but one is definitely the catalyst. One is the ignition and the other is the result, the outflow of that. Okay. So I really want to, I really want to different differentiate between those two. And, uh, I really want to, for us to understand that they're different. So last week, uh, we saw the revival that was happening in the disciples life in Luke 24, they encountered the resurrection. They had these moments, the women, the, the, the two on the road to the

the road to Emmaus and then the 11 disciples, Jesus ignited their hearts and gave them an emotional moment. He catalyzed them. He helped them understand. He said, look at my scars. Watch me eat food. I'm really the resurrected Messiah. He was doing that to give them a moment, to give them something to hang on to, a doorway to hold on to something a little bit more permanent. So today we're going to turn to the increase and to learn about the increase, we're going to follow the flow. So the increase is the outflow of revival. We're going to follow that flow and see what happens. And to do that, we're actually going to be kind of fast forwarding through a lot of acts to really understand what's going on. When we do, we're going to see three things that are really prominent. The first thing that we're going to see is that increase happens to the extent that we cooperate with that revival.

Increase happens to the extent that we cooperate with that revival. There's a relationship between those two. The second thing we're going to see is that that cooperation is going to include the word and it's going to include community. That cooperation is not just kind of a mental understanding that cooperation is not just some, you know, belief system that you sign on to once and never, you know, never really think about it again. It's not set it and forget it. It's active cooperation with the word with community. Third, the third thing we really need to see is that we must discern between good and bad increase. We must discern between good and bad increase. Not all increase is good, and we're going to kind of see that. Revival is always good, but the effects are not always good. So we're going to follow the flow. We're going to start where we left off last week, which is in Acts 2:1.

And it says, when the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. So if you were not here last week, that's okay. The they in there is the disciples. And when the day of Pentecost arrived, this is kind of a big Jewish feast. So there's a lot of Jews from all over, really all over the known world that are kind of descending on Jerusalem for this big feast. Okay, so when the day of Pentecost arrived, which is big Jewish feast, they were all together in one place. So the disciples were meeting together. And that's what we talked about last week, how it was a really normal thing. Okay, so they're all meeting together. But then when they are all meeting together, this revival that began in their heart begins to flow out, begins to get kind of big. And so Acts 2 verses 2 through 4, it says, And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire

house where they were sitting, and divided tongues as of fire appeared to them, and rested on each one of them and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance." Okay, so we've gone from super ordinary to super wild. Okay, I don't know when the last time you saw divided tongues of fire hovering above somebody's head. That's been Never for me. Okay. So this is unprecedented. This is wild. This is attention grabbing. This is a big deal. Okay. We're not going to get into speaking in tongues today. I know some of you might be really disappointed when I say that, but we're not. We're not going to do it. If you want to, hey, if you want to talk about speaking in tongues, I am for that. That's a cup of coffee and we'll do that. Okay. We can schedule it. No big deal. But today we're not talking about it.

As all this is happening, okay, so as all of the disciples, the 12 disciples are there and probably more of them, it's not just the 12, they're all there. They're all, you know, speaking in tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. As all this is happening, Peter begins to preach the Word. He launches into sermon. And it goes from chapter two, verse 14, all the way through verse 36. So in scripture, that's a really long sermon, okay? The sermons that are recorded in the New Testament or even in the Old Testament are not that long, typically. But this one is pretty long. And what Peter does in that sermon, he shows the connection between scripture and the resurrected Messiah, which is exactly what Jesus did in Luke 24 to the women, to the two on the road, to Emmaus, and to the 11 disciples. So Peter's doing what Jesus is doing. And when that happens,

when Peter begins to preach and he begins to say, hey, here's this resurrected Messiah, it's all making sense. And everybody that's listening is going like, yeah, this all makes sense. It says they were cut to the heart. And they said, like, what do we do now? And so they started, they said, hey, repent and be baptized with the remission of sin. So in verses 40 and 41 of chapter 2, it says, and with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them. This is Peter saying, save yourself from this crooked generation, 41. So those who received his word were baptized and there were added that day about 3,000 souls. Okay, we in a day, we're going from around 75 people, which is roughly the number of people in this room-ish, to 3,000. That is 40 times the amount of people. And if we're following the flow, we need to understand, the first thing we need to

see is that this increase that we're talking about, it's beginning within Judaism, beginning with Jews. In other words, when Peter is preaching, he's not preaching to people who have no idea what a Messiah is. He's not preaching to people that have no understanding that there's a God who created the world. The people that Peter is preaching to have a lot of understanding already. And what he's showing them is that everything they understand is connected to this resurrected Messiah, Jesus is the resurrected Messiah that they've been waiting for. These are people that are already expecting it and Peter is able to point to them and the increase that is happening right there, it continues to explode even a couple of verses later in 46 and 47 of chapter 2 says, in day by day attending the temple together and breaking bread their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts praising God and having

favor with all the people and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Again, all of this increase, right, this mass of people that's just kind of being added to this huge lump is all happening within Judaism. And what you see is you begin to see this community begin to form. So Peter preached a sermon, there's all these people coming, the community begins to form, things are happening, things are shared, people are sharing with one another. I mean, it's really starting in the middle of all of that increase. More happens in Acts chapter three, Peter preaches another sermon, kids not done. All of Acts three is a sermon, which is a lot of verses again. So it's a longer sermon. And then the aftermath of that is in Acts four, four, it says, but many of those who heard the word believed and the number of men came to about 5,000.

So that increase is now at about 5,000 men, which is roughly eight to 10,000 people. I don't know why we switched to counting men, but we did. But when you do that, you kind of have to go almost double what that number is to account for everybody. So the number of men came to about 5,000. So the increase went from 75 to 3,000. Now it's at 5,000 or excuse me, eight to 10,000.

So how do we make sense of this? Right. This is crazy. This is wild. This is fantastic. If we read this and think, you know, man, if we want revival, if we want to see increase like that in our shirt, maybe, maybe we just need to recreate acts two and three, right? So I don't have tongues of fire, but maybe somebody does Right. I can call up somebody who can who can transport the tongues of fire here it'll be fine, I'm sure it costs a little bit, but we'll get it done and And then we're gonna go in the middle of Burleson. Let's all go in the middle of Burleson And and let's get some people and and put the tongues of fire on top of them and start and start uttering things in The Holy Spirit, it'll be great. We're gonna see 3,000 people saved that day. I I don't know, I don't know if that's, again, it's really helpful to remember that increase is a season

that it flows out of revival, which also comes out of loss and suffering. So again, where we're hitting in Acts 2 is a build up from Luke 24 in Acts 1. Okay, this is a buildup that we are now seeing the increase flows out of that and really that there's no shortcuts on that Right, we can't again. We're not gonna transport tongue-to-fire in we're not gonna try to recreate the moment of acts to and listen if you think that's silly I've heard pastors say it I've heard pastors say all we need to do is get back to acts to and then we'll be a growing church or whatever all of Our problems are gonna be solved or something like that and I get the sentiment I understand why somebody would say that, but the reality is the Bible doesn't give us Acts 2 for us to recreate it. The Bible gives us Acts 2 for us to learn and make some observations, but it's not to somehow, I don't know, stage that again with our fingers crossed hoping, you know, we're

going to get 3,000 people in a day. There are the observations that we can make, and so what I I want to just point out three things. First is that increase usually begins with insiders. Insiders. So the reason I say that is because what you see in Acts chapter two, three, and the beginning of four is people that are, again, already anticipating a Messiah. They're already waiting. They're already Jew. They already understand the Old Testament. They already are. They're informed, right? And so when people go through revival, when somebody who's an insider, when somebody who is already a Christian, when they go through revival, there are, and increase follows, there's new relationships, there's new ideas, there's new habits, there's new desires, there's a lot of new, and they really feel like they come out of nowhere. And they're not always, obviously, at this scale,

but revival does bring increase in somebody's life. And when insiders, when people that already follow Jesus, when they see that increase, there is a sense of responsibility that goes along with it. That they see that, you know, they say, oh, I see Jesus doing all these things in me and around me and it's amazing. How do I cooperate with that? And you really see it all over scripture, not just here, but you see it all over that. God takes insiders and shakes them up first. He takes insiders and ignites their hearts for revival first, and it's not because we're more special, but it's... You see Jesus doing it with the disciples. Think about it. All the disciples, all the people that followed him, Jews, all of them, they were all Jews. The Apostle Paul was a Jew, he's an insider. Revival comes to the insiders first, Luke 24 and Acts 1. A lot of times in Scripture, you see that revival comes with that judgment

comes with it, the gospel comes to insiders first, to the Jew first, and then the Greek. You see that play out a lot of times in the New Testament. 1 Peter 4:17, Romans 1:16 and 17. And I think some of that wisdom is that if increase began with outsiders, that they wouldn't know what to do with it. It would be confusing and frustrating. They'd say, okay, what's happening here? and they wouldn't really understand kind of what that whole flow was. That it starts with insiders. What else do we see in Acts two and three? We see that insiders are doing word ministry. So last week, again, we saw Jesus bring it back to the word and it's the same with the disciples that are declaring the word. And when you see with the scriptures that we read, that says that they heard and believed the Word, right? That there was this understanding that this is all happening in accordance with Scripture.

And we get tripped up whenever we talk about word ministry. We get tripped up because we think preaching and we think I'm not a preacher and you're not gonna make me one and I reject that soapbox and megaphone, right? Don't give that to me. I'm not a preacher, I can't preach. Let me give you an alternate definition of word ministry. And it's from a book called The Trellis and the Vine, Colin Payne and Marshall. And these guys talk about it in this term, right? They talk about it this way. It says a Christian bringing truth from God's word to someone else, praying that God would make that word bare fruit through the inward working of the Spirit. They say that word ministry, sharing the word, preaching and teaching, right? What the Bible called preaching and teaching in a conversational sense is just a Christian bringing the truth from God's word to someone else.

And they're praying it would bear fruit. They're praying that the Spirit's working with it, but really it's just as simple as that. And so my question to you, if you are a believer today, can you bring God's, or can you bring truth from God's word to another person? Can you pray that God would bless that word? Can you pray that that word would bear fruit? Can you ask the Spirit to use that word? You can do those things, then you can do word ministry. You don't need to be Peter with a tongue of fire in the middle of a crowd. You don't need to be on a stage on a Sunday morning. Yes, this is preaching, agreed. But whenever scripture's talking about preaching and teaching that all the church was doing, we're talking about this. We're talking about a Christian bringing truth from God's word to someone else in prayer, right? In the hope of it bearing fruit through the working of the Spirit.

Yes. If you can do those things, then you can do word ministry. In fact, if you cannot do those things, I would love to meet with you for five weeks and teach you how to do it. It's not that hard. And I guarantee you, it would revolutionize the way that you understand what it is to minister to somebody else in the word. When you think about ministering to someone else in the word, and you think you're disqualified, if you think you need a seminary education to do it, if you think that's somehow too hard for you, you are incorrect. That is wrong headed. It is bad for you to think that. It's a lie. That word ministry is something that is easily, I say easily, It's something that is accessible to everyone, something that we should all do. And so amid all of this new, all these insiders doing word ministry, there's something else that's happening that the insiders are forming into spirit community.

And we kind of take this part for granted, right? Whenever we're reading through Acts 2 and 3, and we talk about, you know, all these people that are coming, we just think about people coming, right? Into, I don't know, this big blob or something. I have no idea, you know, but coming into something, belonging to something. But what you see is that almost immediately there's a community that flows out of that. Not a blob of people, but an actual community where people are knowing what's going on in each other's lives. They're sharing with each other. They're sacrificing for one another. the seasons of loss, then revival. Change happens. But the outflow of that is that community begins to form, and it's a community that looks like the Holy Spirit. It's a community that is powered by the Holy Spirit. Cooperating with that community means jumping into it. For us right now, for you

right now, it's going to mean making an appearance at someone else's house. It's going to mean showing up. It might mean mentoring each other's kids. It might mean asking for help when you are underwater. It might mean just asking somebody to come over and watch the game. But the idea is that that community, that the spirit is going to form, is good and we need to cooperate with it. In fact, the biggest mistake that I see people make, almost, this is probably number one, is that people believe, Christians believe that they can make their own community or that they don't need it. They believe that they can find Christian community or form their own Christian community on their own terms in their own way. And what that looks like is, I'm not friends with people who disagree with me. I'm not friends with people who think differently than me or vote differently

than me or have a different view on these certain social issues. What I've seen even more increasingly, like as time has gone on, Social media has had a way of kind of siloing us into these echo chambers, where no one disagrees with us. Or when we say something controversial, the only comments that pop up are like, yeah, tell them. Let me just tell you, that's not reality.

Even in our church here, man, there is great diversity of opinion. There is great diversity of political view. There's great diversity of how you should handle your family, how a good way to love other people, a way to think about military, a way to think about government. I mean, it's all very different in here, even in here, among Christians who love each other. Most times within Christian community, you have great variation. And if everything's homogenous, if everybody kind of like, you know, walks this line, they all dress the same, both the same, talk the same, you know, just view everything the same, that's typically an indication that something's wrong. When the Spirit is at work and the Spirit's drawing people together, a lot of times the people that, I mean, look at the disciples. Look at the disciples. I'll just pick two. Matthew the tax collector, okay, Simon the zealot.

Matthew the tax collector, before he followed Jesus, worked for the government. He was a government employee. Simon the zealot, the zealots were a religious sect that would show up at political rallies and knife people in the lungs and run, okay? Very different. And they were in a group of 12, okay? I'm not saying we need to knife people, okay? Don't knife government employees. That's not what I said today, all right? Don't do that. But in other words, there is great variation. Great variation, even in the 12. And when the Spirit brings community together, it's a bunch of different people. There's a joy in that. There's a goodness in that, not just in the variety, but in the fact that the Spirit brings those people together, that I love people. Truly, I would lay my life down for my friends, for people who believe totally different than me. And that's a good thing. That's evidence of the Spirit. It's not me bragging.

It's that Jesus has done that for me. So let's recap real fast this increase. This increase is flowing from the inside out. Cooperation with this increase looks like word ministry. It looks like spirit community, let's keep following the flow. And I'm going to go a little fast here, but I just want to, I just want to kind of hit it rapid fire so that you can see it, because the increase is about to hit a lot of obstacles. It hits four very quickly. The first one is external. It's an external obstacle in acts four versus five to 22. There was governmental interference, right? So the government is coming down on this movement. This is right after Peter's second sermon. Peter and John are arrested. They go before the council and they're threatened, but nothing happens. They're released. They go back and they have a praise service with the new church. And what happens?

Verse 31, Acts 4, verse 31, it says, when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken. And they're all filled with the Holy Spirit and continue to speak the word of God with boldness. You see here again, word and community. Word ministry, spirit community happening right after that. Again, you see this happening. So obstacle number one, that obstacle was external. The next obstacle we see is internal, is an internal obstacle, and it deals with deceit within the church. This is Acts 5, verses 1 through 11. This is a truly fascinating story that I hate to skip over this morning, that I'm going to. It is about a couple, Ananias and Sapphira, they come in and they sell a field and they bring the money in of the sold field to give to the church. They actually don't lie about selling the field. They lie about how much money the field sold for, which is, to me, a very odd thing to lie about. And when they do,

Ananias comes first, the husband comes first, that is why. He says, hey, I've sold the field for this much money and I'm giving it to the church. And Peter says, did you really sell it for that much? And he's like, yeah, I sold it for this much. It's like, no, you didn't, you're lying. Ananias falls dead. Next, Sapphira comes in, does the exact same thing, falls dead. It's a bit jarring. It's very, honestly, it's strange, really. It's kind of a wild story. And after that happens, it says like, they're all, they all look and they're all like, whoa, this is a big deal. But even then, even in the midst of that, increase keeps coming. Look at verse 14, it says, and more than ever, believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women. So you can see that we're losing the ability to count. At this point, it's just a lot of people. What else is happening? Or let's look at these, these two

things that enter on that external. What you see with increase is that it's going to bump into the establishment. So when loss comes, then revival comes and Jesus is igniting something, he's catalyzing something. The outflow of that is going to disturb the status quo by its very nature. Jesus doesn't hate the status quo. We don't all need to start rallying against the status quo. But the idea is though that when Jesus brings change, you're going to have people even in your own life that don't want you to change. They like how you were before and they're going to resist.

And our cooperation with that is the same as the disciples where they said in Acts 4:20, it says, we cannot help but speak of what we have seen and heard. That there's a point at which we we have to resist that kind of temptation or that kind of resistance, that kind of pushback. We have to push back on the pushback. In addition to the outside pressure, which will happen, you're also, you're also going to see that increase can attract dishonest intentions. So an anions and sophira who lied.

And here's where discernment becomes key because again, not all increase is good, okay? Not all increase is good. There's a missionary that I know in Madagascar, his name is Mametina, and he began as a translator. And so he was a translator working with this other missionary and they would go into the bush, they'd go into these villages. And the missionary would preach the gospel and everything was really, really kind of amazing and they'd never heard it before and wow, it's really happening. And so after that, the missionary would say, Okay, who wants to follow Jesus? And they've shared the gospel, they've kind of talked about who Jesus was, what he's done. And Mametina said, about 90% of the hands would go up. And this is not just one village, this is several villages. But 90% of the hands would go up. And then the missionary would say, okay, you, you know, 90%,

talking to 90%. Here's what Jesus wants you to do. He wants you to only be married to one woman because they were a polygamous society. He wants you to only be married to one woman. He wants you to not get sloppy drunk in ancestor worship rituals. They would go down the list and they would say, this is what it means to follow Jesus. This is the sacrifice that's going to take to follow Jesus. Now who wants to follow Jesus? And Mametit said without fail, it'd be like 10%. 90, but about 10% of that 90. A lot fewer hands. That missionary was discerning between people who wanted to follow a resident Savior and people who maybe were just kind of doing what other people were doing. There was a way that the Holy Spirit kind of sifts through people who just want to jump onto the bandwagon of increase without going through the revival themselves. And you see that a lot.

You see some church is doing great and a ton of people start coming and sometimes people just go to check out what the big deal is. They're not being changed. They're not coming because they wanna follow the Lord. They're just spectators, man. They're just checking it out. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not the same thing as somebody who has been changed, who is part of that increase. And that's honestly, that's why at our church, we have a membership class. We have the gospel course. It's to help people understand what it is

for Jesus to bring you through loss and revival and increased organization, for people to understand what it is that Jesus is doing in their life and what we're doing together as a church. This is, in other words, I'm glad we're here. I'm glad you guys are here. I'm glad we're sitting. I'm glad we're looking at the word together. That is a good, good thing. But this is not all we do. We don't just come and sit. We're on a mission. We're making disciples. This is what Jesus has called us to do. And if we aren't doing that, we're not a very good church. In fact, if we're not making disciples, we might not be a church at all. because that's what the Lord has called us to do, to be a church. We are on a mission. So the obstacles are external and internal. When you follow the flow, you see that it repeats. There's another set of external and internal obstacles. In Acts 5, 17 through 40, you have governmental interference.

Again, this time the apostles are arrested and angel frees them. And a council warns them not to speak the name of Jesus. Acts 5, 42, it says that every day in the temple and from house to house they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus. This is discernment, but it takes on a different form and I want you to see it. I just want you to imagine for a minute that your church, our church is receiving threats to stop preaching and teaching. I want you to imagine that I was just put in prison and just got out of prison. It takes some amount of discernment for you as a church member to look at that and go, yeah, let's keep going.

Yeah, Drew was just in prison. The city of Burleson is threatening us. This is, sorry, this is imaginary. We're not really receiving threats from the city of Burleson. We're quite protected actually in Burleson, Texas. But let's just say it takes some discernment to go, yeah, yeah, Let's keep going. Like didn't somebody raise their hand and go, Hey, is this sedition? Are we acting against our government right now? To which somebody like would turn to them and reply, yeah, this is sedition. We're acting against our government right now. Yes. The government authorities want to threaten and kill us. Yes. That is what's happening. It takes discernment to say, okay, let's keep going. You have to understand what the Lord is doing is good and ignore people that say, hey, maybe we should stop, this is sedition. You have to sometimes ignore that. It says they did not stop teaching and preaching.

Pushing through resistance can take some discernment. If you're saying, okay, the Lord has brought me through loss, and now I'm in a period of revival, and you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna stand on my desk at work, and I'm gonna quote Acts 2, I'm going to do that whole Peter sermon at work, and then I get fired. Amazing. I get fired. Okay. Do I look at that situation and say, Oh, look, I'm a martyr, right? Like I'm the resistance, you know, they're resisting the gospel. No, man, you stood on your desk at work like a crazy person, and that's why you got fired. Had nothing to do with the gospel. Actually, it was just you being dumb. Okay. You need to discern between you being dumb and actual resistance. Okay? There's times whenever you are acting in ignorance or you kind of think that you're doing like something bold for the Lord, but it really is not, you're not reading the room, you're

not really understanding how to connect with people, and you've got to figure that out. It takes discernment to do that. Resistance can be good sometimes if you're doing something dumb, and resistance can be used for evil like we see here in Acts 5. The last obstacle is an internal obstacle and it's actually racism within the church. Bet you didn't know there was racism in the Bible, but there is. Acts 6:1, it says, now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. A bit of background, widows couldn't work, had no way to get income. They relied on assistance. So a lot of them begged. But in this, what was happening with the churches, they were organizing to take care of the widows because that's true religion, right? To

take care of the widows and orphans. So the church was doing that. These widows were being taken care of, but there was a complaint. The Hebrew widows, the Jewish widows, were being favored over the Hellenists or the Greek widows. So you had Jews being favored over Greeks with a daily distribution of food. So you had Greek widows not getting as much or not getting any, but they made sure that those Hebrew widows were totally well fed. The church responds to this by electing people to handle it. And this is where we see the first move toward the role of deacons. And so they make that decision, right? They handle that problem, they organize for it. Here's the aftermath, Acts 6-7, it says, and the word of God continued to increase and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.

In the face of obstacles, external pressure, internal pressure, all these obstacles, the increase continues. this burgeoning movement of people, it doesn't have a whole lot of hierarchy. It doesn't have a whole lot of organization to it yet. They are just taking the known world by storm. And when you read Acts 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6, it is amazing to see how the increase goes from a small group of people to Literally multitudes of people more than they can count. You see again, we're away from numbers here. There's no, there's not 10,000, there's not 5,000 men. They quit counting, in other words. It's too big to count. Cooperation in the spirit goes hand and hand with increase.

As we cooperate with the revival, that increase will come. In other words, you didn't see the church respond to the external pressure by caving and say, you know what, this is sedition. Maybe we should stop. Maybe we shouldn't do this. Maybe we're upsetting too many people. You see that and you see, okay, they didn't cave. But they also didn't cave to the internal pressure of, hey, it's okay to lie about how much money you're bringing in. Or, hey, it's okay for some widows to be favored over other widows. I mean, You know those Greeks and Jews? What can you do? No, they faced it head on. And they said, no, we're not, this is not going to be a part of our church. This is not gonna be something that we do. This is not gonna be something that we condone. So they had to stand up and they had to face the pressures from the outside and pressures from the inside

and cooperate with the spirit as they did it. Even in Acts 6, part of the cooperation of the spirit is electing people to handle a problem that was happening. And when you do that, when you cooperate, what's this look like for you, right? What's this look like for you? What's this mean to cooperate in the spirit? I would just bring it back to word ministry and spirit community. That really, when you boil it down, when following Jesus, it looks like being a part of a spirit community, okay? And again, don't make the mistake of thinking that you can find or form your own spirit community as something the spirit does and the spirit leads you to and the spirit sustains. This isn't something, look, we're not here together because we have enough parlor tricks to keep everybody entertained, okay? I'm fresh out. I'm not even good at parlor tricks, okay?

The word of God sustains us. The spirit calls us. The spirit nourishes us. We minister to one another in the Word, and we are energized by the Holy Spirit. That, that is what it means to follow Jesus. That is what it means whenever you are gonna be, you're saying I'm a Christian, that it means that you are ministering the Word, and it means that you are part of a spirit community. If you don't want any part of those two, that should be a warning sign for you. That should help you understand. Maybe I don't follow Jesus like I think I do. That should be a warning sign to you. But again, I don't wanna make the ceiling too high here. Jesus simply says, if you wanna come follow me, then come follow me. But when you follow Jesus, that's going to turn into community. When you follow Jesus, that's going to turn into you caring about people enough to share truth with them.

It will happen. It will happen. As the Spirit continues to grow and mature you, you're going to want to be with other Christians. You're going to want to share what's going on in your life. You're going to want to pray for people. You're going to want to read your Bible. You're going to want to do these things. Not every day, not perfectly. I've had a rough patch too. I get it. But this is what it is to follow Jesus. What do we see in the last phase of increase the outflow?

It's in Acts 6 and 7 and 8. And really it's a new guy that we've not met before. He was introduced in Acts 6. He was one of the guys that was elected to handle the distribution of food to the widows. His name is Stephen. So Stephen starts preaching. Stephen's sermon is longer than Peter's. It's super long. It's a really long sermon. And after that, everybody gets really mad at him and they stone him to death. He dies. Right. So listen, sometimes even when you preach a good sermon, you still get stoned. Okay. Um, so they killed Stephen. He was the first martyr acts chapter eight, verse one, and then we're going to skip to verse four, it says, um, and Saul approved of his execution, his excuse me, Stephen's execution, and there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria except the apostles.

And then in verse 4 it tells us, now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Look, your spiritual life is not about every day looking the same or about you having control of everything. Your spiritual life as you grow in spiritual maturity, you go through seasons of loss where you really hate it, you really want it to stop and it won't stop. But when you hold on, when you understand that the Lord is doing something in that, you go through a season of revival. And then from that revival there's this outflow that comes out. And when that outflow happens, new challenges arise, new opportunities, you're bumping into new establishments, It changes things. It is disruptive by nature. Following Jesus is not about maintaining a status quo. Following Jesus is about following the Spirit wherever He leads you, and oftentimes that is going to disturb the status quo that you're

dealing with. And so honestly for a lot of people in Burleson, man, a lot of people, not just Burleson, but I mean DFW, Metroplex, you grew up going to church and you kind of have this picture of the Christian life, that it should be in this really well-defined box, that it should be, you should be nice, you should hold the door open for people, you should tip your cap, you shouldn't flip off people when they cut you off, and when you do, you should feel really bad about it, that you're just like this, that you always smile, that your marriage is always good, that your kids are perfect, that there's all this kind of attending stuff that kind of comes with it. And we form that in our head and we think that's what being a Christian is. If I want to be a Christian, if I want to follow Jesus, then I've got to make my life look like that. That is wrong, false, no, no.

Following Jesus is much more radical and disruptive than all of that. Following Jesus has to do with spending your life ministering to other people, spending your life devoted to the Christian community that you are in. It is radically different. And so my encouragement to you is maybe you have understood your life in terms of following Jesus in a particular way. But I want you to imagine where it could take you if you started following Jesus today. What would that look like? What would it look like for you to be able to minister to other people with the word? What would it look like for you to jump into spirit community with other Christians? How would that change everything in you? What I want you to consider as we go into our time of response and Dan and say, you're gonna come up and lead us through a few songs. I want you to think through all that we've talked about.

And I want you to understand following Jesus, it brings increase that's disruptive. It doesn't look like some normal, quaint Christian life that it is disruptive. It is different. It is you being on mission. As we do that, we're going to open up our time of invitation. So as we sing, I'm going to be up at the front right here if you would like to make any kind of decision. If you would like to join our church, if you want to be baptized, which is the first step in following Jesus. If you want somebody to just pray for you, if you wanna make a decision to follow the Lord today, then I'm gonna be up here and you can come and talk to me. And we're just gonna keep singing, okay? So everybody, stay in with you.

I hope this builds on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest grain, But holy trust in Jesus' name. My hope is built on nothing less Than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest grave, O lead trust in Jesus' name. I stir snow with strong, In the Saviors that restore, The darkness seems to hide his face, The rest on his unchanging grace, Every high stormy gale holds a bend there I still, I still hate strong In the Savior's love, I still hate strong In the Savior's love, I still, I still hate strong He shall come with trumpet sound, dressed in his righteousness alone. Faultless we stand before the throne. My son is strong in the Savior's love through the storm.