Stephen

Transcript

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

Amen. In order to church, we strive to be people of the word. So every year, what we do is we take a longer book and we work through it. So we've worked through books like Hebrews, Romans. This year, the book that we're working through is the book of Acts. And this is the second of four different series that we're gonna be doing on the book of Acts. So we kinda work through it methodically. But every, you know, every so often, we just shake it up, do kind of a different series on the same book. So we're gonna be in Acts. And this series, in our first series, first of these four, we talked about how Acts was our origin story, how our roots define us as believers.

So we can read in Acts one through six and we can see kind of what the church is supposed to be. Okay? And even in the beginnings, what we found, we found a couple of different things, but we found that the Holy Spirit is the one who is initiating everything. That the Holy Spirit is the one who's bringing people to life, who is authorizing opposition to the church and who is opening new ministry avenues for people. So you see the gospel kind of going out and spreading out quickly. And it's the Holy Spirit that's the one who's doing it. This series, we're gonna kinda pick up in what seems to be mid-story. And so to catch you up, we're gonna be starting in Acts, sorry, chapter six, verses eight through nine. That's where we're gonna start. But to catch you up, the church right now is flourishing. So they've experienced some opposition from the outside. They've experienced some kind of some turmoil

on the inside. And in response to all those things, I mean, they are flourishing. The church is kind of going out, the gospel's going out like gangbusters. People getting saved, people getting healed. I mean, it's blown and going. It's great. And then we kinda happen upon this story in Acts six and we're gonna move through a lot of Acts six and seven in the beginning of eight today. And just to kind of see what's going on. So let's just read Acts chapter six, verses eight through nine. And this is gonna be up on the screen for us. And it's also gonna be, if you have a printed Bible, if you don't have one with you, there's one near you, you can also look at the Bible on your phone. So however you wanna follow along, a couple of different ways. And so we are gonna get some slides here in just a minute. We're experiencing a few technical difficulties, but don't turn around.

Don't look at them. They're just trying their best. God bless them. It's under the different series notes. They'll find it. Okay, we'll just read. We'll just keep going. We won't have slides. It'll somehow, we'll make it. Okay, here we go. Acts chapter six, verses eight through nine. And Stephen, full of grace and power, was doing great wonders and signs among the people. And then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the freedmen, as it was called, and of the Cyrenians and of the Alexandrians and of those from Cilicia and Asia rose up and disputed with Stephen. So you have Stephen here who is just being a Christian. Okay, that's what Stephen's doing. Stephen here is doing what all the other Christians were doing in Acts, okay? So just Stephen being a dude, okay? And he's just following the Lord. And what's happening is he's continuing to be a Christian.

Right now, and here, he is colliding with culture. He's colliding with the people that are around him with the Cyrenians and Alexandrians, those from Cilicia and Asia. All these people are kind of coming around him and they're telling him he can't do what he is doing. They are arguing with him, they're disputing with him, they're saying, no, like what you're preaching's wrong or something, but there's a culture collision happening. And this is something that we're gonna see more of in Acts chapter six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, and 12. This whole series, we're gonna be going through those chapters and you're gonna continue to see Christianity kind of colliding with culture and these sparks flying. And it's not to say this is a bad thing, actually. It's to say that it's happening and we need to see it kind of in scripture and understand it a little bit. So what we need to really, though, grasp is that

these very collisions with culture are the things that the Spirit is going to use, the Holy Spirit is gonna use to open up new avenues of ministry. It's actually what the Spirit is gonna use to push the gospel past the edges of where it currently is. The gospel has to go past its edges, but what needs to happen for that to occur is these collisions need to happen. So we see it begin here in Acts six and if we're gonna keep reading, we're gonna see Stephen and his collision with the Jewish detractors here. In verses 10 and 11, Acts six, 10 and 11, says, but they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he was speaking.

Then they secretly instigated men who said, we have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God. This should sound very similar. The same thing happened to Jesus at the end of the gospels. He's on trial and people are being instigated to lie about him, about what he did. Because of this, they arrest Stephen, they bring him before the council. The council is talking to him, we pick it up in verse 13 and 14, it says, and they set up false witnesses who said, this man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us. Let me just pause here and say, when the gospel interacts with culture, anytime, anytime at all, anytime that you are speaking truth into any culture, okay, I don't mean just American culture,

I mean any culture, whenever you do that, sparks are gonna fly. Collisions are inevitable. They're gonna happen. If you think that you can kind of just waltz in somewhere, start preaching the gospel, and you're not gonna get any resistance, you're not gonna get any back talk, you're not gonna get anybody making up stories about you, lying about you, trying to derail whatever you're doing, you are sorely mistaken. We see this here in Acts 6, but we see it, we have seen it over and over and over again. It's easy to do that. It's like oil and water, the gospel and culture like oil and water, and we see this really all over the New Testament. One of the places that you see in the New Testament, 2 Corinthians 2, 15 and 16, it says, for we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved, and among those who are perishing. So among people that are being saved,

and among people that are perishing, we are the aroma of Christ, right? We are the aroma of Jesus, but that aroma smells different if you are being saved versus if you are not, right? The aroma smells different. It says, to one, it is a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. In other words, when you are being a Christian, when you are sharing the gospel, when you're sharing your story, when you are loving somebody, serving somebody in the name of Jesus Christ, when that happens, some people are gonna see that, smell the aroma of Christ and go, oh, that is, that is so good. Oh, that's just life-giving. I don't know if you've ever had that experience. I have, you know, I've seen people serve other people and been moved to tears over it. I've seen just this great truth explained in just a really kind of a way that I get, and I'm like, oh, yes, I see, yes, I get it.

It's life, right? It feels really good. The opposite is happening to somebody who is resistant to the gospel. If somebody is resistant to the gospel, they see the exact same thing that you saw and are thinking, oh, that's, hmm, that's toxic. No, that's not, no, that's not good enough. There's something wrong with that. And what happens is somebody who's perishing, somebody who's resistant to the gospel, they're going to throw on, maybe it's like they're gonna be cynical about it. They're gonna, it's not gonna be life to them, do you understand? It's gonna be death. It's going to smell. They're gonna smell Jesus Christ and just go, oh, what is that? Smell. This is the major witness in the New Testament. When you share the gospel, it stinks like death to some people, and the reaction will be emphatic, sometimes dramatic.

And when you really consider anybody's ministry, consider anybody's ministry in the Bible. Collisions are everywhere. It's Jesus and the Pharisees. It's Moses and Pharaoh. It's John the Baptist and Herod. It's the Old Testament prophets and the Old Testament kings. It's everywhere. It's all over the place. That when the gospel goes forth, when truth goes forth, when people are loving and serving in Jesus' name, even Stephen here, he is healing people. People are actually being healed. And there's no denying it. It's right there. Everybody can kind of see it. It stinks like death to the people that are detractors. In fact, they make up lies, and it's an interesting lie that they make up. It says, in verse 14, it says, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us. Look, you wanna make a Jew mad?

You tell him that you're gonna desecrate the temple and that you're gonna trash Mosaic law. Okay, that's all they need, right? You're hitting at the core, at the core culture of what it is to be a Jew in the first century right there. Okay, and so these lies aren't just kind of, they're not just throw away statements. These are major accusations. This guy is planning on tearing the temple down. Stephen was not doing this, actually, but it doesn't matter. Stephen was healing people, but it didn't matter.

Stephen was full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, we see in the beginning of Acts 6, but it didn't matter. In your friendships with people who don't know the Lord, as you share the gospel, as you give counsel, as you minister to people, I really wanna help you and we'll keep talking about it, but I wanna help you. I wanna say that you can count on a few things and one of those is being misrepresented.

Count on being misrepresented. It is normal for whenever you declare yourself to be a Christian or whenever you kind of present yourself as such, it is normal for you to be lumped in with what other people's conceptions of Christians are. And look, I don't wanna vilify people that don't know the Lord. That's not what I'm trying to do, actually. I'm trying to say, though, if you walk in and you don't understand that, you're gonna approach that situation totally different because let me just, here's the reality check for this morning, at best, at best Christian, you are Ned Flanders from The Simpsons, at best. At best, you're a bumbling idiot, at best. At worst, you are misrepresented as a hypocritical racist who hates gay people, who's oppressive to women, who's anti-intellectual, you are a sheep, you believe in unicorns, and you are a few decades behind culture, at worst.

Unless you think I made any of those things up, those are all quotes from Pew Research on what people think about Christians. I didn't make any of it up. I just took quotes. Instead of being surprised by this, 1 Peter 4, 12 tells us this, don't be surprised by these trials that come upon you, right? Like, don't like think, oh, what's happening? I'm being misrepresented. Something's terribly wrong. No, man, that's normal. That's normal. In a conversation with somebody who is not a believer, who has kind of a lot of these misconceptions of Christianity, or who thinks half of what I listed there, you're gonna have to go in understanding that you have some ground to make up. Does that make sense? Like, you're not coming in as a Christian and then going, oh, this person is a Christian. Drew says he's a Christian. That means he's totally trustworthy. That usually will not happen.

Plan on handling conflicts, collisions in culture. Plan on doing that with the gospel. What I wanna do is I wanna give you three gospel handles. Okay? And I wish I had the slides up. It's okay, it's all right. They're trying their hardest. They're like sweating bullets over there. It's okay, guys. Love you. I want you to feel it. I want you to understand it. I don't wanna vilify our culture. Our culture, people that don't know the Lord are doing the best they can with what they have. Okay, so let me just be apologetic here for just a minute, right? Yes, we are all sinners. Yes, scripture talks about how we are resisting the Lord God in heaven, but I guarantee you, you talk to average lost person X and they're gonna say, I'm feeling all these symptoms of running from the Lord. I feel pain, I feel disconnection, I feel frustration. I feel depression. I feel all of these things, but it's not like

they're making all these connections. But if only I believed in the God-man, like no, they're not thinking that. They're thinking that they're in pain. Does that make sense? And so when people are in pain, sometimes, they're going to react painfully. They're going to be easily upset, especially when you start talking about spiritual things. If you don't believe me, I just want you to imagine somebody who grew up in a church and who suffered some kind of abuse there, right? And you can fill in the blanks, I don't need to. Suffered some kind of abuse. It's 10 years later, they're just trying to be an adult. You bring up a spiritual conversation with them, oh, buddy, just wait. That's gonna be an emotional moment for them. For you, it might just be you sharing your story. For them, that is a seismic activity. There's major disturbance in the force when that happens,

okay, so to speak, so to speak. So what I want to do is I want to give you three gospel handles for when those collisions happen. If you are sharing the gospel, if you are sharing your story, those collisions are inevitable. But I want to give you three handles, three gospel handles for dealing with that, and then I want to look at how Stephen dealt with it, okay? When you are being represented or villainized,

what I need you to do, and this is a big one, I need you to reflect. Just take a moment, they're all gonna be R's, spoiler alert, it's a sermon. Reflect, reflect on how you may need to repent. Reflect on how you may need to repent. Look, it's a real question you should ask yourself. Have I been acting like a martyr? Have I been looking for pity? Have I maybe even sort of resembled some caricature of Christianity? Like have I been hypocritical lately? Have I been self-righteous? Those are really good questions to ask of yourself. Not that we have to walk in and be perfect, but it's good because it helps you be humble in the right way, because if you think you can walk in there and you're gonna be the aroma of Christ, that's just gonna make somebody like, oh, life is here, then, you know, maybe not. And so often when you act surprised, okay, so if you're in a moment right now,

if you're in a moment and you've shared the gospel at work, you've shared the gospel with your friend, you've done something, you've declared that you're a Christian, you've spoken with somebody about the Bible, and the reaction wasn't rainbows, right? And you're acting surprised by that. If you're taken aback by that, it often doesn't leave room for reflection. Does that make sense? Because you're too busy worried about how you felt about it. You're too busy about that and you're not busy thinking, was my approach, could it use some work? Could it have been improved? Those are good questions to ask. And if you walk around thinking, well, I'm just gonna slap everybody in the face with the gospel, and if they don't like it, they don't like it, okay, I mean, sure, I get it. But like, when you look at the New Testament, there was some care taken in how the gospel was presented, right?

And there was some care taken in, even in reading a lot of the New Testament, there's care taken in living an upright life so that people who want to slander, you cannot, right? That's in the New Testament. I don't have the verse off the top of my head, but I swear it's there. Have you been acting like a murderer? Have you been looking for pity? Do you need to repent? And you should reflect on that, right? The gospel says that Jesus is making us into his likeness.

He's making us into his likeness. Do you know how that happens? That happens as you are continuing to obey him and things that bubble up to the surface, brokenness bubbles up to the surface in your own life, it's gonna come up and when that happens, you need to confess it and repent of it. And sometimes that means, whenever you've realized that brokenness in your own life, sometimes that means you need to go back to people with whom you have previously shared the gospel or people that you work with or people, and you need to apologize. Hey, I was a big jerk. Hey, I confused religion and politics and we had a really hard conversation. I've learned some things since then and I just wanna apologize. I just wanna say I've done some reflection on that. It's a good step. Here's the second gospel handle if you're gonna deal with cultural collisions. You need to be able to relay, it's an R,

you need to be able to relay the simple gospel. There are many times that you can relay the simple gospel, many, many, many times. You can do it with people that you know very well, people that you don't know very well, you can do it in a grocery line, you can do it at Thanksgiving dinner, you can do it lots of different places. I'm not saying it's always gonna be peaches, but I am saying there's lots of opportunities for you to relay the simple gospel to people. We are coming out, in a couple of months, we're gonna come out with something called a spot Bible study. And I'm not gonna get too far into it, but it's just to say that they are short, memorizable ways to get to the gospel simply from a lot of different points of conversation.

We're gonna be using those in our life groups. The point is, for those, is that many times you are in a conversation, and you're coming from a lot of different ways, and there's a lot of different spiritual conversations that you can have, and you need to be able to get to the gospel from that point. Does that make sense? And so, in order to do that, sometimes something

like a memorized presentation doesn't exactly fit whatever's going on conversationally there. And so we're trying to split the middle. We want you to be trained to know how to relay the simple gospel. Does that make sense? So some of you, if I said, hey, give me the gospel in like 45 seconds, I mean, I can give you 45 minutes, and you still wouldn't be able to do it. It's just not something that's gonna roll off your tongue, and maybe it's something you haven't given a lot of thought to. And that's okay, that's actually really good to admit, to repent and confess. It's good, it's good to do that. But it's also good as a church for us to help you, as a church body, help each other, have ways that we can kind of get to the gospel simply from points of contact within the culture. So reflect on your actions, relay the simple gospel,

and when you do all of this, you do it as you, number three, rely, it's an R, rely on Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. When you are misrepresented, that is actually a moment that we can use for the Lord. Let me say that again. When you are being misrepresented, when people are lying about you, when they are assuming poor things of you, whenever you have to feel like that, whenever you have a spiritual conversation with somebody, that you have to kind of like say all these apologies first or something, you just realize you're kind of working through a lot of stuff that is there in the other person.

That's a moment that we can use for the Lord. Matthew 5:11 says that we are blessed whenever that happens, whenever we are persecuted for His name's sake, and this is why, this is why the blessing is there, is because as a follower of Jesus, you can take that on the chin. Let me say that again for all of you to hear, and if you're taking a nap, like just wake up right now, when you are persecuted, when you are misrepresented, when you are lied about,

that's a moment that you can use for the Lord because, exactly because, as a Christian, more than any other person on the earth, you can take it on the chin. Why? Why can you take it on the chin? It's because when somebody's misrepresenting you, you can be gracious because Jesus has been gracious with you. How many times have you misrepresented the Lord? Let's not count that. That's a scary number for me, okay, that's not good. But am I condemned to death on that? No, Jesus was gracious with me. When somebody's lying about you, when somebody spreads rumors about you at work, whenever the deck is getting stacked against you, you can take all of that on the chin. Why? Because Jesus Christ is in charge of your reputation. Jesus Christ is in charge of whatever other people are thinking. It's his gospel, it's his kingdom that's gonna go out. Your job, your way in on that is that you are there

and you are representing the kingdom. You are sharing the simple gospel. You are sharing testimony. You're like, man, I was praying yesterday to your coworker who does not pray, who is antagonistic with the gospel. You're saying, man, I was praying yesterday and I was just convicted over whatever. You're just sharing that, man. You're sharing that with your coworker and if they start lying about you, you can take it on the chin because your value, your identity is not based on what other people think about you. That is hard to remember but it is always true. Hallelujah. I'm glad I'm not defined by what other people think about me. That'd be a terrible existence. When we hold on to these gospel handles, we find that in these moments, the Holy Spirit is going to take the gospel and push it past its edges. It's gonna go out to more people. It's gonna go out to many people that need to hear it.

I don't know how many times I've heard this testimony of somebody saying, you know, I wasn't a Christian and I worked with this lady who was a Christian and I saw her share her faith several times and there was several times whenever she'd share her faith and somebody would just be absolutely rude to her and she was just kind back to them and that spoke to me so much. I mean, how many, I've heard that so many times, just some variation of that. I've heard that so many times. Man, if we would go out believing the gospel, what it says about who we are, that would give us all the confidence that we need. We don't need to worry about what other people think about us. We don't need to worry about being Ned Flanders. We need to be conscious of it. We need to know it's out there, okay? But we don't need to be scared by it. These collisions are coming and the only way to avoid them

is to resist the Holy Spirit. Don't do that. Hold on to the gospel in these collisions. Reflect, relay, rely. Here's how Stephen's collision went. Let's look in Acts seven, verses one and two. Before you say that, I wanna say, even though I just said, I just said, reflect, relay, rely, we do not read of Stephen reflecting if the accusations against him in this court are correct. Okay, we don't see that. It's still foundational for us to reflect. And we actually see that in some of what Stephen does here. Let's look at verses one and two. It says, and the high priest says, so everybody's just lied about him. The high priest says, are these things so? Give Stephen a chance here. He gives Stephen a chance to defend himself. Verse two, and Stephen said, brothers and fathers, hear me, the glory of God appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia before he lived in Heron,

and on and on, it's going to go for Stephen here. It is enough to say that Stephen does not act surprised. When asked if these things are so, Stephen doesn't even address those charges. Stephen's not lobbying for his rights. He's not saying, hey, this is a sham trial. He's not saying anything like that. What does he do? He goes straight into the gospel. Why? Because he knows it's a sham trial.

He's not worried about fixing that. He's worried about something way more important, which is sharing the gospel with these people who are right in front of him. And what Stephen does next is he delivers the longest printed sermon in the Bible. If you had to take bets on who preached the longest sermon in the Bible, like my money's on Moses all day long. That dude could talk, okay? Or maybe it's Jesus that somebody would record one of his sermons. No, it's a guy named Stephen who we will find in a few seconds does not last very long in the story. Okay, he's about to die. But he delivers the longest printed sermon in the Bible, and we are going to skip it now because we're not going to read all of Acts seven because that's a long. It's 51 verses of sermon, and we're in the middle of a sermon right now. I feel like it'd be, you know, sermon inside a sermon. I'm not that meta right now, okay?

So we're gonna skip it for now. It's really good to read later if you wanna read Acts seven. It's a good sermon, but here's how it ends. Let's just skip to the end, okay? Here's how it ends. Acts seven, 51 through 52, the beginning of 52. This is Stephen talking to Jewish leaders. You stiff-necked, uncircumcised in heart, stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of these prophets did your fathers not persecute? So Stephen rolls out a rebuke of the religious elite that would tear the cover off a baseball.

It's blistering. He says, your heritage, your Jewish heritage is rebellion and murder. And he's not done. Look at the second half of 52 into 53. Says, and they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it. So you say, not only is your heritage rebellion and murder, now you have rebelled against and murdered the Son of God. Ironically, tragically, you, the people that received the law, broke it. Stephen is not making friends in this moment. He's not gonna run for office. He wouldn't win. He's given absolute stone cold, hard truth to people that have not just resisted the Holy Spirit, they have built an empire of resisting God for millennia.

And in all this, Stephen was relying on the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit's given him words to say. Holy Spirit's given him courage to say it. And I imagine, it took, now it's fun, look, it's fun to just watch Stephen dunk on these Jewish leaders, okay, that's fun, it's cool, great. But Stephen knows exactly what he's doing, and he knows exactly how this is going to end, and it took him a lot of courage to say these things, knowing what would happen. Trusting God that the end would be okay. Look at verses 57 through the beginning of 58, it says, but they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together at him. They cast him out of the city and they stoned him to death. And I know what some of you were thinking, like, yeah, let's go be like Stephen, except for that last part. Can we skip the stoning, please? That's not a sign how I really wanna go.

But I don't know if you've heard the news, but if you follow Jesus, you're already dead. You're already like Stephen if you follow Jesus. Galatians 2:21 says, I am crucified with Christ. Romans 6:3 and 4 says, you're buried with Christ in your baptism. Jesus says, take up your cross, your instrument of torture. Take up your electric chair and follow me. That's what it means. That's what the cross was. The cross is an instrument of torture to kill criminals. Jesus says, take up your cross and follow me.

Let me say it a different way. The Holy Spirit uses Stephen's arrest, sermon, and death the same way he uses our lives. The Holy Spirit uses Stephen's arrest, sermon, and death the same way the Holy Spirit uses our lives. Let's keep reading, we'll get back to that in a minute. Acts 8:1, second part of 8.1, it says, 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. But let's catch the main point here. Did you hear that? The gospel is going out to Judea and Samaria just like Jesus said it would in Acts 1:8. Just like the Holy Spirit planned, the gospel is going past the edges of Jerusalem.

And you might be thinking, well what about Stephen? Did he get the short end of the stick? Let me just be more clear. Stephen is living eternally with the Father. Stephen was probably received into heaven with a parade. Stephen would take that trade every time. Every time, he took the trade, he knew what was coming. He took it, he would take it again. He has no regrets. Stephen traded his life to extend the gospel

of gospel salvation to many people, many more people than were living in Jerusalem. It was gonna go out to Samaria and Judea and to the ends of the earth. Stephen traded his life to extend the gospel. Holy Spirit used that, his arrest, sermon, and death, same way that Jesus came to give his life as a ransom for many, Mark 10:45. Jesus is coming and he's saying, this is how I want you to live. I'm going to lay my life down for other people to be saved. Stephen, we see this right before all this kicks off. What's happening? He's laying his life down for the gospel to go out to many people. And the Holy Spirit uses our lives the exact same way to extend the gospel out to other people.

What about you? Are you handling misrepresentation well? Are you real quick to act the martyr, to look for pity? Do you see those moments of being misrepresented? Do you see those moments as opportunities to take it on the chin? And let me just say, I sympathize if your answer is just, no, never, I've never done that. Look, I understand. It's hard. It's hard because what we see, what everything that is around us tells us that

we are the center of our own lives, that the clothes we wear are important, really important, hundreds of dollars important. That the kind of car we drive is really important. That the kind of echelon of society that we make it to, the people that we can network with, our level of ambition, the kind of legacy that we leave in terms of money or employment. We live in a world that tells us all those things are important, but what we see here is actually more true than any of what I just said. What we see here is Stephen, just the Holy Spirit using Stephen to cut through all of that and say, listen, listen, if you die a martyr tomorrow, you have lived a great life. In fact, you've lived a better life than most. That's hard because we like being alive. I get it. I like being alive too. It's hard to think like, man, being a martyr, that's pretty sobering.

But I was having a conversation with my wife one time, and I'm gonna end with this, and so I'm gonna invite David to come back up. I was having this conversation with Christie, and I don't remember who, I don't remember who said it first, babe, sorry. Somebody said it first. Talking about taking a bullet for somebody, right? Talking about dying for somebody.

And my wife, it was way more clever than I can remember, but she said, look, it's easy to take a bullet for somebody, but it's harder to live every day for somebody. It's harder to die every day a little bit, right? It's hard to continually sacrifice for another person. In fact, being a martyr, neither one of us were signing up for it in the moment, but in some ways, it's easier. Simpler, maybe, is a better way to put it. I'm gonna use it. The life that the Lord Jesus calls us to do, to walk in, is a life of sacrifice, to be Stephen every day.

Just harp us wrap our minds around, because not only do we lock our clothes and our stuff, we like our life the way we want it. We like being in control. We like being on the throne, in our own hearts. It's a very appealing thing to us, because we're sinners. Our encouragement is to be like Stephen, to make the trade, to sacrifice ourselves for the gospel to go out, for the gospel to go out to be pushed past its edges. These collisions with culture, look, your water, culture's oil. It's not gonna match until we're all in heaven, okay? It's not gonna match until we're here. It's always gonna be full of collisions. How are you gonna handle those? You gonna be surprised when you're misrepresented, lied about, shunned, not invited to the work lunch? You gonna be surprised by that, or you gonna take it on the chin? Today, I want you to go home,

and I want you to write it somewhere. I'm not asking you to become a journal, like a person who journals all the time, but I want you to write out where you see the Holy Spirit working around you. I want you to think about the people that are in your life that don't know the Lord, or are walking in some serious hurt, maybe some serious disillusionment, maybe some serious pain. And I want you, as you write those things, as you write all those opportunities out, I want you to pray. All week, I want you to pray over that. I want you to think about each one of those scenarios. And I want you to just pray a simple prayer, just like Holy Spirit, what do you want me to do? And look, I'm not asking you to try to engineer a ton. But just walk with your eyes open, listen to the Spirit, see what's there. There's probably a lot more opportunities than you think. So that's my encouragement.

I want you to do that this week. I want you to go home today, I don't want you to do that. Maybe some of you, you're not walking with the Lord at all. What I just described was maybe brand new to you, or really foreign. We have a time of response that we're gonna stand and sing in just a minute. We're gonna be back there by those chairs and that couch where those lamps are, just gonna be back there, just hanging out. If you want prayer, if you want encouragement, if you want to make a decision for the Lord, if you wanna know a little bit more about our church, if there's something that we can help you with, I'm gonna be back there. Even after the service is over, I'm still gonna be hanging out back there if you wanna come and say something, ask for prayer or something, anything. My encouragement is that the Holy Spirit's probably been talking about something and that you need to act on that.

And that's probably gonna take some courage. So that's my encouragement to you is to just rely on the Holy Spirit. Put one foot on the other, make it happen. Let's pray. Jesus, thank you for today. Thank you for the opportunity to listen to you, to read your word, to be encouraged by it. Thank you for the life of Stephen, that short life that we read about and how it's really just a quicker version of the life that you've called us to.

Pray that we would walk in it.