This is Living Waters of Grace, the teaching ministry of Clark
Wofford, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel of Westmoreland,
County of Greensburg, PA. Now here's Pastor Clark as he
continues teaching through God's Word.
How exciting this is for Phillip and how exciting it is for you
and me when you have a chance to tell someone about what the Lord
has done for you. And how much more exciting it
is. Whenever they start responding
and their eyes start lighting up and they're getting questions
and they want to know and maybe they get to the point.
Well, how can I know this? Jesus, there's nothing more
exhilarating in life to have the opportunity to see God bring
someone into salvation because you were faithful to tell them
about Jesus. Amen.
Sometimes you won't be received well when you go out telling
people about Jesus. Eventually you'll find someone
receptive to the message and you'll be able to lead them to
Christ. The love and salvation of the
Lord can reach more people through you.
Pastor Clark will explain in today's message that that's what
a healthy relationship with Christ looks like, growing in
him every day and telling others about what he did for them.
It's good news that's meant to be shared with everyone around
you. Now here's Pastor Clark in the
book of Acts Chapter 8 with today's edition of Living Waters
of Grace. If you have your Bibles there,
turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 8.
What was it like to be in the Roman Empire at the time that
Christianity first began? I think at times for us in this
country, we we feel like the way we are working right now as a
nation is, is not real good obviously.
But we have to understand that this is not uncommon in world
systems. And I wanted to just review a
few things regarding the terrible sexual morality that
was going on in the time of the Roman Empire when the apostles
were first starting out with the Gospel Society at that time was
deliberately throwing off any kind of vision that Christians
would have for sexual ethics. Things that were once considered
unthinkable at that time were now being deemed natural and
good. And this time that we're living
in isn't the first time that Christians have had to live in
times of of sexual immorality. The New Testament church was
birthed in a time where the world was utterly opposed to
Christian morality. Just not today.
Not just the day we're living in, but the days that our
brothers and sisters first were brought into the Kingdom of God
in the book of the Acts. Most of the New Testament texts
that Paul had wrote, we're dealing with sexual immorality
within the world and within even the community of the church
predominantly at that time in Roman cities.
And so there's these three ugly features of Roman sexuality.
And I'm not going to get too graphic.
It's, it's pretty gross. But it was socially acceptable
at this time for a strong Roman man to have intercourse with men
and women alike. Does it sound anything different
than what we're experiencing today?
A real man would be having sex with his slaves, whether they
were male or female. He would visit prostitutes, and
he would have homosexual encounters even while being
married. The sexual relationship between
an adult man and an adolescent boy was unfortunately, all too
common. Pedophilia was understood to be
good and acceptable at the time. The culture was full of extreme
promiscuity and inequality. Yet the system is evil as it
looks to in our eyes, was accepted and even celebrated by
Rome. Isn't it fascinating how our own
country is celebrating this stuff now?
It was foundational to Roman culture, least not to protest
against it. To be loyal to the Empire, you
had to be loyal to the morality of the Roman Empire.
To the Romans. A biblical view would have been
very disruptive to the social fabric and demeaning of Roman
ideal of masculinity. Christianity at that time
condemned the Roman system in every part.
The Christian sexual ethic limited intercourse to married
man and wife that protected children and gave them dignity.
Christianity did not simply represent an alternative system
of morality, but one that condemned the existing system,
the system that was foundational to Roman identity and stability.
Christians were considered outsiders.
Christians were traitors. Christians were dangerous.
Their brand or morality threatened to destabilize all of
society. No wonder then they were scorned
and even persecuted. Right now, as I read this
article, I can't seem to grasp this fact that we're living in
times that are so similar to what this empire had lived and
experienced. Our early Christian brothers and
sisters had to understand the difficulty at the time that this
unconfession of biblical chastity in a safe culture was
what they wanted and what obviously we want today as well.
The morality that was being taught and practice stood out is
unnatural to the Roman world. My pastor in Philadelphia says
Whatever happened to this normal, good old fashioned sin,
Right. Sin is so warped now and weird.
I mean, it used to be like adultery, That's bad enough, but
pedophilia? And how much deeper and darker
can the culture and the society go into in regard to immorality?
Christian sexual ethics that limited intercourse to a
marriage between a man and a woman, a woman, was not merely
different from the Roman ethics, but yet they utterly brought
down their own institution of what they thought was normal in
the beginning. And it just became more and more
perverse as the days went on. This is why the Christians faced
so much hostility at the time. And this is a very same thing
that's happening today in the halls of our government.
We are having people who are legislating immorality.
It's a minority group that's wanting you and me to slowly
embrace same sex marriage or eventually this pedophilia idea.
It's it's like the frog in the firing pan that the heat keeps
being turned up. The media keeps talking about
the pros and cons or whatever. And after a while you get tired
of hearing it. And your response might be,
well, it doesn't really affect me.
I'm not going that way. What does affect you?
It affects me. It affects everyone.
It affects your kids. What's being taught nowadays in
public school systems is just beyond our dreams.
I mean, when I was a kid in school, we had the Pledge of
Allegiance and we said the Lord's Prayer and we had the 10
commandments. None of that's there now.
This is how far we've fallen as a society and a culture.
Now, the good news is, is that in the 1st century, the
Christians were men and women of great courage.
They confess their values and their morality in a spirit of
bravery. They confess and practice
Christian morality. And today we need to be brave as
well and have the willingness to obey God rather than men, even
in the face of persecution. So when you think about Philip
and all these guys in the early book of the Acts, sometimes
we're reading this sort of like in a vacuum.
We have to really think about what were they living in at the
time? What was the culture like?
It was worse than what we're dealing with right now.
So take heart, take courage. The majority of the people in
our country are pro-life. The majority of the people in
our country are pro marriage between a man and a woman.
The majority of the people in our country are against
pedophilia. So don't let the media think
that it's the other way around, OK?
They're making millions of dollars to twist our minds and
to water down our convictions. That's why it's critical to vote
a lot of some when Christians, I don't vote.
It's not worth it. It's definitely worth voting.
You need to vote. Every vote counts.
And if you don't vote, you're basically living apathetically
and complacently in a world that you still have the ability to
have a voice. The good news is, is that we are
to be salt and light in the world.
And we have the ability, by the power of the Holy Spirit and the
Word of God, to stand our ground and not to compromise and not to
neutralize and not to be apathetic or complacent, but to
be bold and be loving and be gentle.
Because people that embrace these convictions of immorality
are lost. They don't know Jesus, OK?
Many of us were embracing those values at one time before the
Lord saved us, right? It's important to understand
that. So when we study the book of the
Acts here today, Philip is called the evangelist.
He's the only man in the New Testament called literally the
evangelist. We're called in the Bible, all
of us as Christians to do the work of an evangelist.
And that means simply being open to sharing your faith with
someone that doesn't know anything about Jesus, OK.
And so we pick it up here in verse 26.
And this is the the whole issue here.
Previously, Philip was down there preaching the gospel in
Samaria. Big revival happened.
A lot of people got saved. Now the Lord is working in his
life to work with one person. So one person to God isn't more
important than 1000, right? God is not looking at numbers or
population. He's looking at one heart, one
person at a time. And so Philip is sensitive here.
An Angel of the Lord in verse 26 of Acts 8 spoke to Philip saying
arise and go toward the South along the road which goes down
from Jerusalem to Gaza. It's interesting in a Bible you
can read these things and read them quickly and not sort of
reflect on the fact that this is a big deal that an Angel spoke
to him. Now was he more important than
you or me? I've never had an Angel speak to
me yet I, I, I welcome that if that's what the Lord's will is
for me. But then how do I discern if
it's a an Angel of darkness or an Angel of light?
They, they both can sort of float in the same atmosphere
and, and work in the same way. But the interesting thing about
the word of God is, and we're taught throughout the Scriptures
that God's main focus and main way of speaking to your heart
and mind is through the word of God, the written word of God by
the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I don't need an Angel to know what the Lord wants me to do.
And you don't either. I got Genesis through Revelation
and there's more information than I actually need to have
that I need to follow and, and and accept and and live live in,
you know, but this Ethiopian eunuch is, is a man in a
chariot, this worshipping in the Jewish sense driving down the
road and we're going to read what what happens here.
So Phillip is getting this sense of of God wanting to do
something arise and go toward the South along the road which
goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.
There's two roads that go down that way.
This one was more of the difficult Rd.
This is the desert. And so he arose and he went, and
behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under
Candace, the queen of The Ethiopians, who had charge of
all her treasury and had come to Jerusalem to worship, was
returning. Now, when you read this, I don't
know about you, but like, I like to look things up when I read
something. I'm like, what's the eunuch?
Does anybody ever look at that definition?
Sex change operations were happening back in the 1st
century. The church That it's a
castration of a male, they have no ability to have sexual
relations. That people who were in empires
and cruel and controlling wanted to make sure that those who
served them weren't having sexual union with their
concubines or trying to overthrow a government by
developing another group of people.
And for some reason this was accepted back in those days.
I I don't hear much about it now.
I'm glad that this is isn't a requirement for people, but
strange, isn't it? And so this person is a eunuch
and he's basically not able to ever have a family or have
children, but he's committed to this woman, Candace, the queen
of The Ethiopians. Now, Ethiopia at that time was a
large area that covered just not Ethiopia, but down into Sudan
and those various regions. He was a man of great authority,
it says. And he handled the treasury of
this whole land of Ethiopia. It's a very, very prominent
person. He had come as a seeker to
Jerusalem to find out about Jehovah God.
And as he's there, he's still thinking about things and he's
sitting in his chariot and he's reading Isaiah the prophet.
Now to have a, a scroll back in those days, the, the Bible
wasn't complete like it is here now that we have what a blessing
what we have. You had to buy it in scrolls and
specific books. And it was it was quite
expensive. And so he's up there with this
big scroll reading the writings of the prophet Isaiah and the
Spirit. The Holy Spirit in verse 29 said
to Philip, go near and overtake this chariot.
So he had to run. It says in verse 30.
So Philip ran to him and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah
and said, Do you understand what you are reading now in your
life? In my life, the Holy Spirit is
speaking to us all the time about all kinds of different
things that the Lord wants us to do.
I would trust you hear His voices.
I desire to hear His voice too. What is the will of God for your
life and mine? What is it that the Holy Spirit
is wanting you and me to do on a daily basis?
God sets up divine appointments all over the face of the earth
for one-on-one connections with people to talk to them about
their struggles or their problems.
I got a phone call this morning, the wrong wrong time to answer
the phone. I was in the radio room and just
felt compelled to answer the phone and the person on the
phone was saying that they needed some help.
And usually they start with church, starting with A and they
work the way all the way down to the end of the alphabet to try
to get money with this person had a girlfriend that needed
help and she didn't have any place to stay.
And this guy couldn't help her because his father wouldn't help
him or something. All these excuses.
I said, well, why don't you come to church today and we can meet
you and we can talk and maybe, you know, think about what might
be the next step for you and her and he.
And he said, well, where's the church at?
And I told him, he said, well, I don't know if I can get there.
I said, well, we're here every Sunday at 10:30, right?
They like you to send them a check or put them in a hotel and
you never meet them and you don't have any ability to have
any kind of opportunity. But I said you really need to
get connected with a community of believers.
You can have a family and you can get help and you can find
out about the Lord and the ways of God and that kind of stuff.
But he wasn't interested in that, you know.
And so, but I think about everything being being a divine
appointment. You show up somewhere, someone
tells you something and you have a chance and to tell them about
your relationship with the Lord, that's a divine appointment.
The appointment is really divine.
Whenever the person starts asking questions and they're
interested in what it is you have to tell them, like in this
instance here with this Ethiopian eunuch and Philip.
And so the, the response to this question, he says, well, how can
I unless someone guides me? And he asked Philip to come up
and sit with him. So no question in Philip's mind
was, wow, God's up to something here.
This guy's already prepared to hear about Jesus, and I just get
a chance to tell him about him and explain things to him.
How exciting this is for Philip and how exciting it is for you
and me. When you have a chance to tell
someone about what the Lord has done for you and how much more
exciting it is whenever they start responding and their eyes
start lighting up and they're getting questions and they want
to know and maybe they get to the point, Well, how can I know
this Jesus? There's nothing more
exhilarating in life to have the opportunity to see God bring
someone into salvation because you were faithful to tell them
about Jesus. Amen.
My wife is talking about this over and over.
We were praying the other night. We had a profound discussion
about life and aging and kids and grandkids and family and
older moms and just everybody that's in our life and how we
want to be used by the Lord together as a couple and not be
thinking about ourselves or our opinions or our feelings.
But how can we more be more giving to others and less
focused on this ourselves? And she told me, and I mentioned
this briefly, but I want to bring it up again.
She happened to be in a neighborhood where her mom lives
in a older development. And she had a chance to visit a
neighbor about some unrelated matter.
And she went in and the woman was crying and her daughter was
there. And Cindy said, what's wrong?
She's why going to break up my home.
My husband's died. I got to leave this place.
I can't handle it myself. They're going to put me in a
personal care home now and just seems like my life is this
ending and I got all this stuff. I don't know what to do with it.
And and she was just overwhelmed and distraught, this woman and
Cindy began to tell her about the Lord and she finally got to
the point of asking the lady if she could pray for her.
And she says, oh, I would, I would love that.
And so Cindy got to pray for her and got to impact this woman for
Christ. And she said, Clark, that's all
I want to have a chance to do in life, to have those kind of
opportunities, those kind of divine appointments, because she
said there's nothing that makes you feel any better than that
kind of opportunity and experience, right?
And you guys know you've been there, you've done it.
And and so this is the opportunity that we're learning
about today in the book of the act.
This is Philip's encounter and God personalized it.
So you and I can sort of think as we study this together, how
can I be like Philip and be open to the Holy Spirit and be ready
to tell someone that they need Jesus?
And so Philip runs over and he is going to begin to speak to
him. In verse 31, this man says, I
can't understand any of this unless someone guides me.
And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him.
The place in the Scriptures which he read was this.
He was led as a sheep to the slaughter.
This is from Isaiah chapter 53, verses 7 and 8.
Doesn't matter where you go in the Bible, you can always take
wherever it is in the Bible and lead people to the truth of who
Jesus is. And as a slam before its shears
is silent, so he opened not his mouth and his humiliation, his
justice was taken away and who would declare his generation for
his life is taken from the earth.
Now you and I being believers right away, we know, hey, that's
Jesus, that's prophetical, that's been fulfilled in the
death, the burial, resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But the eunuch is hearing and reading this for the first time.
So the eunuch answers Philip and says, I ask of you, of whom does
this prophet say this? Of himself or of some other man?
And that's sort of the view of the Jewish people when they read
Isaiah 53. If you ask a Jewish person, who
do you think that's about? They'll say, well, that's a
prophet or that's about the Messiah.
Or they might just be honest and say we have no idea when we read
that what that's talking about. South Philip opens his mouth
and, beginning at this Scripture, preaches Jesus to
him. So not only did he cover this
section of Scripture in Isaiah of this being fulfilled when
Jesus came to earth, but he would go into the teachings of
the Gospels and the experience that they've had already in the
book of the Acts with the preaching of the gospel and how
thousands of people are becoming believers because they're
hearing about Jesus saves for the first time.
Jesus saves from sin, Jesus forgives sin, Jesus cleanses us
from sin. And so when Philip is preaching
to Jesus, to him, and they're going down the road, it says now
as they went down the road, they came to some water, interesting
water. And the eunuch said, see, here
is water. What hinders me from being
baptized back in those days, they had public baptism.
It wasn't done in the backyard of someone's home or in the YMCA
or in some church facility. They love going out into the
community in the streams and lakes and rivers and get a big
crowd of people around and have people publicly baptized.
Because when that happened, the culture all the sudden said,
something's going on here with these Christians.
Every time I turn around, they're, they're, they're being
dunked underwater and they're, they're following Jesus.
What's going on here? And it convicts them.
And maybe they're thinking I'm missing out on something or I
should be baptized or I should follow Jesus.
I mean, all kind of thoughts happen when people see other
people baptized, as this man recognized right away the
significance of water, and water represents purification and
cleansing. He would have been taught that
in the school of Judaism. But that water can't cleanse us
from our sin. It's a purification, right?
Temporal. But it can't wash away sin, only
the blood of Jesus Christ. What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus, right?
We sang about that this morning, The blood of Jesus.
That's without the shedding of blood.
There is no remission of sin. If we walk in the light as
Christians, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one
with another. We have this communion, we have
this oneness, we have this unity, and the blood of Jesus
Christ, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin.
Amen. If we confess our sin, he is
faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from
all unrighteousness. It takes the blood of Jesus to
do that, the only sacrifice that could take away our sin.
And so Philip says to him, if you believe with all your heart,
you may. Now when you think about when
you first became a believer and the Lord brought you to the
knowledge of your need of salvation, and you began to
think about, you know, this, this power of the of the cross
and what it can do for you. You realize that first of all,
when you believe, you were maybe in front of someone that
understood you were believing, or maybe you were by yourself
when you believed like I was, but you knew that now you
believed. You once didn't believe and now
you believe a young man that used to come to this church.
I'll never forget the story. Wonderful young man and friends
of some good family here. And he had come from a Catholic
background and he never really heard, he said, the Gospel.
He just felt that he was hearing about religion every Sunday.
And so I got to know him after a while.
And I said, well, by the way, you know, how did you come here?
And he told me and and then I said, were you a Christian?
And he said, yeah. I said, well, how did that
happen? He said one Sunday.
I'm just sitting here and all of a sudden I believed.
Isn't that awesome? Thanks for joining us on this
journey through Acts. On today's edition of Living
Waters of Grace, Pastor Clark shares that one of the most
remarkable things about the book of Acts is how it shows the
disciples transformation. The followers of Jesus we meet
here are very different from the often confused and fearful
disciples in the Gospels. After Jesus's death and
resurrection, and especially through the power of the Holy
Spirit, the apostles experienced a profound change in their
hearts and boldness. Their faith became unwavering,
and they moved forward with courage to spread the gospel
despite opposition and hardship. Acts reminds us that the same
Spirit who empowered them is at work in US today, shaping our
hearts and giving us strength to live boldly for Christ.
Living Waters of Grace is a ministry of Calvary Chapel
Westmoreland. If you're in the Greensburg, PA
area, we invite you to join us this Sunday at 10:30 AM at 400 E
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