Philip in Samaria

Transcript

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

I did not miss that, okay. As we follow in Acts, we have been, last week in the book of Acts, it was kind of a big turning point, okay. So this whole year we are going through the book of Acts, and last week the big turning point was that Stephen, who was one of the deacons that we met at the beginning of Acts 6, Stephen was the first person to follow Jesus into death, okay, he was the first person that was killed

for following Jesus, okay. And what that did, what we saw was that sent the gospel past the edges of Jerusalem, okay. That sent the gospel past the edges of Jerusalem. And in that sense, what we have in the beginning of Acts, Acts 1-8 says that Jesus is talking to his disciples and he's saying that the gospel is gonna go out from Jerusalem and then another layer out in Judea and Samaria, kind of, and then to the ends of the earth, okay, so what Jesus is saying would happen in Acts 1-8, we see that happening. We didn't expect it to happen through persecution, but that's what's happening. So Stephen preaches the gospel, all these people in Jerusalem are listening to him, they don't like what he's saying, and they kill him. And when that happens, the church goes out, okay. The church goes out.

And so what we see is we see the gospel going out past the edges of Jerusalem, but we also see the gospel going out past the edges of cultural acceptance. We talked last week about how our culture will often not give the benefit of the doubt to Christians, that there are certain assumptions that we have in our culture that we kind of eat and sleep and breathe that is kind of, that is antagonistic to the gospel or suspicious of the gospel, and these things are just there. And so it's pushing the gospel past that today, we're gonna see the gospel continue past another edge, and we're gonna focus on another deacon, okay. No, we're not Stephen anymore, because he just died. Now we're onto another deacon who does not die, at least immediately, okay, so spoiler alert. This deacon's name is Philip, and we're gonna follow Philip for a couple of chapters here, a couple of verses here.

Today we're gonna be in Acts 8, and we're gonna start in verse 4, starting in 4 and 5 of Acts 8. And just so you know, we go through a big book a year, and so we're going through Acts this year, we do it through a couple of different sermon series, and so this is the second of four sermon series on the book of Acts, and we break it up, like we're not gonna touch Acts this summer, for example, but what we're looking at today, we're looking at the gospel going past the edges, so we're looking at kind of a sampling or a small part of the book of Acts, we're looking at Acts 6 through Acts 12, and that's kind of the situation that we're in today, so we're gonna be going through that. Okay, Acts 8, 4 through 5, it says, now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ. So Philip is preaching the gospel in Samaria.

Now that may not mean anything to me and you, but for Philip it meant a lot. For Philip, preaching in Samaria had some baggage with it. The first, we see that Jesus in his ministry had a mixed bag of mixed history with Samaria. So much so that in Matthew 10, Jesus is like, hey, don't go to the towns in Samaria. In Luke 9, John, the disciple, is so mad at how the Samaritans treated Jesus that he's like, hey, Jesus, is it okay if we call down fire on the Samaritans right now? Okay, mixed history, okay? Not all fun and games with the Samaritans. However, you also have John 4, where Jesus is talking to the famous woman at the well. Well, that woman is Samaritan, okay? So it's a Samaritan woman.

And second, the other thing is that Jews, culturally speaking, Jews thought that Samaritans were single-toothed, half-breed idolaters. And that's putting it nicely, okay? Jews and Samaritans did not get along. They had a bad history that went back at least a couple hundred, if not a couple of thousand years. They didn't like each other, they didn't trust each other. Jews thought Samaritans were terrible. In fact, and we miss this, right? We're so used to saying it's the parable of the good Samaritan, okay? We're so used to saying that, but that was very provocative whenever Jesus said that. Okay, because Samaritans weren't good to the Jews. They weren't good people, they weren't considered great at all, okay? And so whenever Jesus is saying that, it's provocative and it's ironic. Because what Jesus is trying to say is that these Samaritans that you hate, there's a good one who helped this person

on the side of the road when even your Jewish elitists would not help this person. So Jesus is telling that parable, not because he's trying to help us all love Samaritans. He's telling that parable because he's trying to challenge what we think of as far as good and evil, or preconceptions that we have. The Jewish preconception of a Samaritan was that they were terrible people, okay? So for Philip to go to Samaria is not a small thing.

Let's read the next two verses, Acts 8, 6-7. It says, and the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip when they heard him and saw the signs that he did. Four unclean spirits crying out with a loud voice came out of many who had them, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. Okay, so this is banner stuff. This is going extremely well.

Skip down to verse 12, it says, but when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. So it's going really well. In fact, it's going better than it did in Jerusalem, okay? The gospel of Jesus is here, it's rooting into a different culture, really for the first time. So we see the gospel of Jesus rooting down kind of in that first church, in that church in Acts 2, right, whenever the Holy Spirit falls, and all these churches are kind of just popping up, right? Just in people's homes, and they're meeting together in the temple courts, and everything's kind of jiving, it's good, but there's still opposition. What you see in the Samaritan culture is you see the same entry point, you see the same thing happening, right? So the same thing, somebody's going in, they're preaching, there's miracles,

there's signs and wonders. It's the exact same thing that we saw in Jerusalem, except nobody's getting beaten or thrown in jail, okay? So same entry point, different response. The acceptance level here of the gospel in Samaria is full and unhinged, okay? Like nobody's saying, hey, what these guys are saying is terrible, we should throw them in jail. Nobody, no opposition at all in Samaria, okay? And last week, and I feel the need to almost correct this, not correcting it necessarily, but last week we discussed how the gospel and culture were like oil and water, how there were some things that didn't line up, but that really isn't the whole story. And I wanna give you another layer four perspective. So I wanna acknowledge that every culture, each culture is vastly different from other cultures. It is very easy for us to see this. I will just give a few examples.

If you tell someone from a different culture to show up on time, you're just rolling the dice, okay? You don't know what on time is to them. They don't know what on time is to you, okay? Even in Burleson, Texas, there's a couple of different cultures at work about what's on time, okay? I don't have to go into that any further. I've been early for things. I'm just saying, as a white guy, I've been ridiculously early for things. I'm just, there it is. Showing up on time is different. Showing up, sorry, greeting rituals are very different from culture to culture, right? If you go to Eastern Europe, expect to get kissed on the cheek, sometimes on the mouth. That would freak everybody in this room out, okay? You go to, somebody try to kiss me on the mouth? Okay, what's happening here? Why aren't you trying to kiss me? Is this okay, right? But in Eastern European culture, that is completely normal.

That's a sign of affection. It's a sign of welcome. It's actually a really, really good thing, okay? But still, very different between cultures. Even simple gestures, if you go to Middle Eastern culture and you show somebody the bottom of your shoe, I just highly insulted all of you if we were in Middle Eastern culture, okay? I've shown you the bottom of my shoe, which is basically saying,

you're lower than the dirt that's on the bottom of my shoe, right? I don't wanna talk to you. We're gonna not do here. And so while it is true, and I bring all this to say this, while it is true that the gospel culture don't always mix, it is more accurate, maybe, to say that the gospel interacts differently with different cultures. The gospel interacts differently with different cultures. So for example, let's just take one. Let's take Middle Eastern Islamic culture, okay? I'm not, you don't need to know everything about Middle Eastern Islamic culture. You just can know a few things, it's fine. There are some elements in Middle Eastern Islamic culture that are resistant to the gospel, okay? So in Middle Eastern Islamic culture, they're going to flatly deny, vehemently deny, that Jesus is the Son of God, okay? That's a big barrier if you're preaching the gospel

in Middle Eastern Islamic culture, okay? They consider it really, really insulting for you to say that. There's bad things that go on. When you do say that, however, it also, Middle Eastern Islamic culture, also holds what we'll call remnants of the gospel, like pieces of the gospel that are true and exist in that culture. And the example from Middle Eastern Islamic culture is that family and marriage are highly esteemed, highly esteemed. People really aren't devoted to one another in their families. People will drain their life savings to help out a cousin. People will, I mean, fight, maybe not to the death, but I mean, they will fight to keep those families together, to keep those marriages together. And you can, look, I get it, it's not perfect. I'm not trying to say Middle Eastern Islamic culture has perfection in it, that's not, no culture does. However, every culture, every culture,

has resistors and remnants. It has resistors to the gospel and it has remnants to the gospel. And so let's take Samaritan culture, for example, okay? So we already saw that the Samaritans, we see a gospel remnant in the Samaritan culture. The gospel remnant in the Samaritan culture is that they attribute all of these signs and wonders, they attribute them to the Holy Spirit and they believe that it comes from God. They view it as a good thing, okay? Nobody really told them to do that, that's just part of their culture, so it kind of works, right, when Philip goes in and he's doing signs and wonders, they're not attributing that to an evil spirit, they're saying, no, that's good, okay? Because they have, somehow, they have a place for that. They understand that as a good thing and they attribute it correctly to the Holy Spirit. And it doesn't make them more or less holy,

it just means that in their culture, in Samaritan culture, that's an accepted thing. It's a part of the gospel that makes sense to them. It doesn't all make sense to them, and we'll see that in just a second, but this part does. Sam, the Samaritans also have some built-in gospel resistors and we see this in, at least one of these, in the life of Simon the Great. Simon the Great, you might not have heard of Simon the Great, but here he is, he's in Acts eight, we're gonna start in verse nine. Simon the Great, also called Simon Magus, you might have heard him referred to as Simon Magus, which just is Greek for the great Magus. So Simon the Great here, Acts chapter eight verse nine, it says, but there was a man named Simon who had previously practiced magic in the city and amazed the people of Samaria, saying that he himself was somebody great. So look, don't read this with your 21st century

American eyes, don't do that, that's a mistake. When we see a magician, let the eye rolls begin. Okay, whenever somebody says, well, I'm a magician, like okay, I mean, you're great at parties, I guess, but I'm not taking you seriously. I'm not following you, you have some great mystical power. You say magician and I'm like, are you in Vegas? I don't have a place for that, right? Like I'm not impressed, I'm not impressed, okay? Most of us aren't impressed by magic, we just kind of think of it as a sleight of hand. However, Simon here, and what we read here was a cultural icon in Samaria. People followed Simon the Great. Simon the Great didn't call himself the Great. The people called that power great. Simon was great because everybody in Samaria didn't culture a thought, Simon was great, okay? So don't be fooled, we see magician, the eye rolls start, don't do that.

Whenever we're reading this, he is amazing people and he's done it for a long time, okay? Acts 8, 10, and 11, it says, they all paid attention to him from the least to the greatest, saying this man is the power of God that is called great. And they paid attention to him because for a long time he had amazed them with his magic, okay? We don't really have a whole reference for this, like how much a long time is, but you get the sense that this guy had well-worn grooves. This guy was well-known in Samarian culture, people liked him, people thought he was great, and they didn't, maybe they feared him, but Simon the Great used magic to gain notoriety, okay?

But we don't get the sense that he was taking advantage of people or being oppressive or anything like that because everybody loved this guy, everybody followed him. Maybe they feared him a little bit, but everybody loved him. And so what we see here is that Simon is kind of helping define Samaritan culture, if we could talk about it that way. What Simon does, people pay attention to and they follow and they do it. And so Simon the Great is actually helping define Samaritan culture, and I tried to think of like, who could be somebody that would be like that? And I only came up with, I came up with a couple people, but I think this is the guy, hit it, let's see, who is it? Oh, do you know who this, yes, you know who that is. Anybody know who that is? Who is it?

Jimerson, that's Superintendent Jimerson, okay? Look at that smile, such a goofy smile, I love it. Look, many of us know and appreciate Dr. Brett Jimerson, he's the BISD Superintendent. And look, I'm not here to put this man on a pedestal, okay? I'm sure he's done things you don't like, et cetera, et cetera. Here's what you can't deny though, even if you don't like him. You cannot deny that this man is a man

who helps define Samaritan culture, that he deserves respect. Samaritan culture, that he deserves respect. Whatever you think about his decisions, that he's not perfect, but he is a good man who deserves respect. And because, think about this, because of his title, BISD Superintendent, and his reputation, because of title and reputation, many have paid attention to Jimerson for a long time.

No disagreement there, okay? And if you're unfamiliar with the wonderful Dr. Brett Jimerson, you can just find him on social media, he's all over the place. But without trying to put Jimerson on a pedestal, I'm really just trying to make a connection for you. That's Simon the Great, okay? That's Simon the Great. That's somebody that everybody in Samaritan, whether they like him or not, are paying attention to him at least. And they're listening to what he's saying, and they're thinking about the things that he's asking them to think about. Through his title, his reputation, his longevity, he has earned favor in the community of Samaritan. Simon the Great's actions, this is really what I want you to see, I want you to connect. Simon the Great's actions are indicative of Samaritan culture. What he says and what he does is largely what is acceptable in that culture,

in Samaritan culture. And it helps us see why his next moves are important. Look at 813. Acts 8:13 says, even Simon himself believed. And after being baptized, he continued with Philip. It's interesting, he continued with Philip. And seeing signs of great miracles performed, he was amazed, okay? And so we see this as he is seeing these things, as he is kind of being amazed by these things, he's following after Philip. He's following after Philip. He's continuing on with him. Another translation says that he was Philip's shadow. He wouldn't leave Philip alone. He's following Philip around because he was amazed, he was literally just fawning over the guy, okay? Things get really interesting in this story though, whenever Peter and John come to Samaria, all right? And the Holy Spirit, let me just say this, this is confusing for some. The Holy Spirit waits to fall on the people of Samaria.

So Philip goes, preaches the gospel, people in Samaria believe, but the Holy Spirit does not fall on them. The Holy Spirit waits to fall on these believers until Peter and John come and lay hands on him, okay? This does not mean that Peter and John conferred the Holy Spirit onto these people, or that they somehow have the Holy Spirit in their hip pocket and they can give it to somebody else. That's not what's going on here. The Holy Spirit is making a point to both the disciples and to the Samaritans, you guys are equals. So when Philip and John come and lay hands, the Holy Spirit wants, sorry, Peter and John, when Peter and John come and lay hands on the Samaritans, and then they begin speaking in tongues and they begin kind of like, oh, okay, the Holy Spirit's here. What the Holy Spirit is doing is confirming in Peter and John these Samaritans that you wanted to call fire down on, that was John.

These Samaritans that you call fire down on, they're equals, they're just as much Christian as you. They have just as much spirit as you. They're not lesser, they're equal, okay. So Peter and John come down and they are laying on hands and the Samaritans are receiving the Holy Spirit. Look at Simon the Great's reaction, verses 18 and 19. It says, now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands, he offered them money, saying, give me this power also so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit. Simon the Great, let me just make an apology here for Simon the Great, okay. Simon the Great is doing what any Samaritan would do. Simon the Great is not doing something, he's not just going off on his own, he's not, what he is doing is indicating Samaritan culture. There's no gasp among the Samaritan crowd

whenever he asks for this. In fact, many people in the Samaritan crowd were like, yeah, give him money. We wanna follow him around too. That's amazing. It'd be great if Simon the Great could do what you guys are doing. Nobody's freaking out. Nobody thinks this is a bad idea, okay. Simon the Great, he does what most Samaritans would do and in fact, we actually think this act is so terrible and it is, we think it's so terrible that it's where we get the word simony from. You've ever heard the word simony? It's kind of an old word but it means trying to buy church favors, okay. That word simony comes from Simon the Great, same guy. Simon, and I wanna give you two caveats to this to really help you understand what's going on. Simon the Great believed the gospel of Jesus Christ and was baptized before this happened. Okay, so bear this in mind. Bear this in mind. He believes, he hears the gospel, he believes the gospel

and he's baptized in obedience to the gospel. Simon the Great is not just some unrepentant heathen who just is trying to go buy religious things. He's doing what he thinks makes sense, okay. And he's heard the gospel and he believed and he was baptized. And he may have thought, we don't know, but he may have thought the Holy Spirit was just like spiritual magic. We don't know what kind of category he had for it, but he was trying to have a category for it. He was trying to make sense in his culture.

And even though this seems crazy to us, I would tell you that Simon does not know that this is wrong. Simon the Great has no clue that what he's doing is bad, zero. He's doing what makes sense in Samaritan culture. He's doing what he thought he should be doing and it is an example in Samaritan culture of a gospel resistor. It's an example of something that makes it difficult in Samaritan culture to believe the gospel, to really understand it in all of life. It's a resistor to that. And we have to finish the story to kind of see this play out. So look in Acts chapter eight, verses 20 and 21. This is a response to Peter offering money.

This is a response to Simon the Great offering money to Peter. Verse 20, Peter said to him, may your silver perish with you because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money. You have neither pardon nor lot in this matter for your heart is not right before God. Peter is completely shocked. He has clutched the pearls. He does not know what category to put this in. He has no idea. He's offended at the thought of it. He keeps going. Look at 22 and 23. Repent therefore, Peter says to Simon. Repent therefore this wickedness of yours and pray to the Lord that if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you are in the gall and bitterness and in the bond of iniquity. Okay, that's a fairly scathing rebuke. Okay, Peter is not holding a lot back. But I want you, just for now, I want you to notice Simon's response. He doesn't feel so great right now, he says.

Acts 24, Simon answered, pray for me to the Lord that nothing of what you have said may come upon me. This is really interesting. Okay, this tells you a few things. First, it tells you that Simon probably was just as surprised as Peter. I don't know if you've ever been in that situation where you say something to somebody and they're surprised and then you're surprised that they're surprised. That's always fun, right? Getting into like a marriage fight with that. Oh, gee, wow. That's a, those are doozies right there. You're like, no, I thought they, no, you thought and I thought, oh, it gets pretty complicated. This is happening here. Peter's shocked. Simon's shocked, but Peter's shocked.

Simon feels terrible. Oh, look, I, he doesn't say it, but it's almost like, look, I didn't mean it like, I didn't know. I didn't understand. Pray that nothing of what you said may come upon me. No, I don't want any part of that. No, I didn't mean that. I didn't understand. Here's the other thing. He doesn't say, teach me how to pray to the Lord that these things won't come upon me. He asks Peter to do it.

Why? It's interesting, right? That he asks Peter to do it. He's showing his culture. He's showing his culture with his question to buy it and he's showing his culture with this request. Peter, pray for me. That doesn't happen to me. He's showing his culture. The gospel resistor in Samaritan culture is that they believed that spiritual things belonged to the privileged. They belong to those with money, those who are famous, those who are leaders. They believe that spiritual things belonged only to them and if you want access to that, then you gotta pay for it. You gotta be famous enough for it. They believed that. That sounds crazy to us. I'm just, just own it, right? Okay, we're 21st century America. Buying spiritual things doesn't make sense to us at all. It doesn't, but it did to them. It did to Simon and it did to all, I would argue it did to all Samaritan culture.

That made perfect sense. That religion, spiritual things, not just religion, spiritual things belonged to the privileged and if you want access, you must be significant. Simon and all the Samaritans that followed him, they needed guidance. His request and his motivation were completely out of step with the gospel. There is no argument there, okay? If somebody comes up to you tomorrow and just says, hey, I wanna buy your Christianity from you, you can safely assume that they don't know what in the world they're talking about, okay? It's a safe assumption. They don't understand what's going on, okay? And that's okay. You can approach them with grace and love in that moment but if they're trying to buy Christianity, they don't get it. There's a disconnect, something's wrong, okay? So Simon's request and his motivation were out of step with the gospel and he didn't know it yet.

They didn't know it. And it paints a vivid picture for us of gospel and culture. Here's what we can learn from it because we're not just observing how dumb the Samaritans are, okay? It means something for us today. And since we've already looked at Islamic Middle Eastern culture, then we looked at Samaritan culture, let's look at the gospel and southern culture. Let's turn the lens on ourselves, shall we? Okay, this is the unfun part of the sermon just in case you're keeping score at home. It's way fun to throw darts at Samaritans. It's not way fun to be on the dartboard. We gotta find ways that our home culture, right, the stuff that we see, the stuff that we swim in, is out of step with the gospel in ways that we may not even understand yet. There's a really tired joke, and I'm sure I've said it before, but there's these two young fish

that are, two young fish that are swimming along, and there's this great old, old, old fish that swim in the opposite direction and he catches them with his eye and he goes, water's warm today, and the two fish kinda look at them, don't really know what to say, and they keep swimming, they kinda scurry along a little bit, and one of them finally says to the other one, what's water? A lot of times we don't know what we're swimming in. We don't see it, we don't feel it, we don't understand it because we were raised in it. Southern culture is the air we breathe, man, and if you're not from here, you learn that pretty quickly. If you're like from the Northeast, if you're from the North, if you're from the West, the Midwest, and you come down here, it is just different. People behave differently, people respond differently, it's just different. Even in America, southern culture is very different

than other culture. Robert Elder, who is an assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University, he wrote a book on this, The Sacred Mirror, and he talks about, at length, he talks about how in southern culture, we often bind our identity to how our family and our close friends see us. Let me say that again, because this is somewhat uniquely southern. In southern culture, we bind our identity, who we are. We bind that up in what our family and close friends think about us. The value judgments they have, we wear, and we own. That's kind of a southern thing to do. John Crotts, who is a Georgia pastor and a writer for Medium, he has an article, Southern Charm versus Jesus, which is a great article title, and he says this, and we got a quote of it, it says, some southern Christians in the name of our culture either minimize or outright cover-up sin among our family and or close friends.

Southern charm versus Jesus, what he's saying is that, in southern culture, we consider it impolite conversation to talk about our sin or to talk about whatever we're struggling with in our circle, in our close circle of family or close friends. It's impolite conversation. You don't ask about it, you don't bring it up. Let me just tell you, that is a uniquely southern thing to do. It might not be totally unique to southern culture, but it is definitely a marker of it. When southern culture, say it a different way, minimizing or covering up sin is both common and culturally accepted in southern culture.

It's how the sausage is made. We all do it, and it's a built-in gospel resistor because the gospel is actually super clear about confessing sin. And as a southerner, you're reading about confessing your sins before one another, and our call to worship today was confessing our sin, being free, confessing sin. And as a southerner, sometimes you get caught up in your own culture and you don't wanna do that. You wanna hide that. You wanna hide looking dumb. You wanna hide not knowing what to do next. You wanna hide that because you're more concerned with how the people that you care about, how they see you than actually receiving help from them. And culturally, man, you saw your parents do that. You saw your grandparents do that. You see your siblings and your friends do that, and you do that. I do that. That's a built-in gospel resistor in southern culture. What about gospel remnants?

Gospel remnants, I bet you think there's plenty. So many gospel remnants in southern culture. Let me just hit on two. There are two very, kind of very strategic parts of southern culture. First, there's a gospel remnant of, there's a vibrant history of Holy Spirit experiences. Vibrant history. You have many people, past and present, that will either testify personally or are written about or whatever, they have experienced the Holy Spirit at work in their lives, personally, like not third-hand accounts, but they've seen, they've prayed and they've watched things. And when you hear that and you've heard that, I'm sure you've heard that, if you've been in southern culture for at least five years, you've heard somebody say, hey, I heard, I saw the Lord work in this way. I saw the Holy Spirit move in this way. It might not have been worded like that, but you've done that in authentic, tangible ways

you've seen it. And that's a beautiful remnant, gospel remnant in southern culture. Another one is that there is a common acceptance of salvation in Jesus. In the south, most everybody can quote John 3-16. Okay, don't do it now. You don't get bonus points for now. Don't do it, I know you want to. I just know you can, okay? Let that be enough today. We understand Jesus died for my sin so I could be free of guilt. We get that. When we go knock on doors all around here, when we're talking with people, when I'm talking with people, like out in the coffee shop or whatever, I can almost guarantee you they've had some kind of religious experience and they already know what I'm gonna say when I say Jesus died on the cross for your sins. Okay, those are two givens in southern culture, particularly in Burleson,

but in southern culture even in general, okay? They don't always know what it means, okay? They don't, but they can recite it to you. They can remember far back enough Sunday school when they were a kid to be able to say what they need to say now. They know the answer is Jesus, okay? They know that that much is true. What these two things do though, and it's really interesting, and many people have actually noticed this and written on it. These two things combined

have actually moved several commentators, social commentators, writers, historians, to echo the words of Flannery O'Connor. She has a work called Mysteries and Manners. Flannery O'Connor is a great writer and if you can pick up some of her work, it's always good. It's a little weird, but it's always good. She tends to be a social commentator. She's gone, but her writing remains. She says this, it's really interesting. She says the south, talking about southern culture, the south is hardly Christ-centered, but it is most certainly Christ-haunted. Let me say that again. In the south, the south is hardly Christ-centered. It is most certainly Christ-haunted.

The southerner who isn't convinced of it is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image of God, which is a great line because Flannery O'Connor can write. But I think she captures it, right? I think we see it here. Many people I talk to, Burleson, many people that you know, many people that you work with, and it might be you, I might have just described you. You aren't living this life that you're proud of. You aren't saying, hey, I'm a Christian and it's really authentic and it plays out in all these ways and you have some confidence that God is working in you. You have some confidence that what you're doing is right, that you're raising your kids right, that you're doing your job right, that you're leading yourself right. You don't have that sense. You don't have any understanding, really, of how to have this Christ-centered life, but you most certainly are Christ-haunted.

Your coworkers are most certainly Christ-haunted. They know that something is out there and they're scared out of their minds. You would be, too. In Southern culture, we have a vague awareness that there is a very powerful person who may or may not like us. That'll keep you up at night. We have the specter of Jesus watching us, but we don't have the life-changing power that the Spirit produces. What a terrible place to be.

Here's the good news. That's a lot of bad news, by the way, about Southern culture, it's a lot of bad news. It is real, it is good to know it, but it is not comforting to know it or to admit it. It is hard to admit. Here's the good news in it. The good news is we are not left to our own culture. We're not left to any culture, actually. We're not beholden to what has been taught as right or good.

We're not beholden, as the Scripture would put it, we're not beholden to the sins of the Father. Right, the sins of the previous generations kind of visiting us again. We're not beholden to that. In Christ, we could be free from that. The way the Holy Spirit does that, here's the good news, is that when a people receive the gospel, so as the Samaritans are receiving the gospel, it is, even though it is resistant in some areas, and even though it is beginning to maybe put some of those gospel remnants together, right, what is happening is that the Holy Spirit is creating and inviting people into a new gospel culture.

And in Burleson, it's gonna look a little southern, and in China, it's gonna look a little Chinese, right? It's gonna take on some of the flavor of where it is, but it's gonna be unique, it's gonna be different, and the Holy Spirit uses that, uses those families that it creates to see the kingdom come, to see the Spirit work in people's lives. We call these gospel families church, right? Church in a service on Sunday, although I'm glad you're here. It's not the same, we are a church gathering right now. We're a church people, a family of covenant believers. We believe something that has been given to us. We believe that Jesus has changed us and we've come together, Jesus has brought us together as a gospel family, and in this gospel family, we're not perfect, but we wanna see the Spirit move in people's lives, and not just our own, but other people around us.

This is what it is to be in a gospel culture. This is what it is to say, like, I'm gonna be part of a church, is that you are part of a family that doesn't just live for itself, it doesn't just live for its own blessing, it lives for, seeing God's kingdom come, seeing other people receive blessing, and yes, we're walking in blessing, doing that, and that's great, but it really, the bigger blessing comes from seeing the Holy Spirit move in other people's lives. This is the new culture that the Holy Spirit is putting together, and the good news here at South Burleson is not that we are good, or that we are free from cultural errors, or that we don't have blind spots, it's not the good news. The good news is that the Holy Spirit is creating something new in us,

and we don't get to control that, we don't get to take credit for it, we just get to walk in it, and that's the invitation, right? Look, we have a time of response, we're gonna have a time of response now where, listen, the gospel continues on, the gospel wants to push all of us past our edges, and sometimes those, you know, for some of you, the edges are really, really kind of close in, and so, what I wanna encourage you to do is respond. I want you to just have a moment with yourself where you're asking like, have I walked in gospel freedom? Have I come to a place where I've said yes, Lord, I wanna do, I wanna walk in a manner worthy of the gospel, I wanna follow you in repentance. I'm living according to Southern culture, I'm living according to whatever rules, whatever I'm beholden to, maybe you are Christ-haunted, and you aren't Christ-centered. The difference is not working hard,

the difference is believing, and if you help doing that, if you need to kind of sort in what that's supposed to be, sort that out, man, I would love to talk to you about that. I'm gonna be back there where those two lamps are, the couches and the chairs, and I'm just gonna be back there, you can come. While we sing, you can come a little bit after the service, whatever you need to do, I just want you to respond to what the Spirit is doing in you.