This is Living Waters of Grace, the teaching ministry of Clark
Waffer, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel of Westmoreland, County
of Greensburg, PA. Now here's Pastor Clark as he
continues teaching through God's Word.
Whenever Jesus does that work, when we're born again, we are
given His nature. Even though we still have this
old nature trying to take over every once in a while, we have a
new nature, we have a new life, and not any that the Holy Spirit
comes into our life to live in us at the time we're born again.
And when He's in us, He gives us the ability to live a completely
different life. Amen.
We're not perfect, but we're certainly not the way we used to
be, right? Certain things bother us now
that never used to bother us. When you give your life to
Jesus, He makes you into a new creation.
Your old self has passed away and you've been reborn as a
child of God. Pastor Clark encourages you
today to submit to the process of transformation that the Holy
Spirit is working inside you. It may only seem like baby steps
right now, but once you've been faithfully serving the Lord for
a few years, you'll look back and not be able to recognize
your old self because of how much your life has been changed
by Jesus now. Here's Pastor Clark in Acts
Chapter 19 with today's edition of Living Waters of Grace.
We are in the book of Acts this morning and we're going to look
at Acts chapter 18, the last few verses starting in verse 24, and
then we're going to go into the 1st 10 verses of Acts chapter
19. Acts is a very exciting book
because it's all about the birth of the early church, the New
Testament church, and the work of the Holy Spirit and how He
got things moving in the lives of the Gentiles and the Jewish
people at that particular time. So I find that every time I I
study this book, sometimes I wish I was back in those days,
living in those days. But what's wonderful is that the
the Bible teaches us that Jesus is the same yesterday, today and
forever. So the days we're living in are
just as good as the days in Acts.
Maybe we don't see as many signs and wonders and miracles, but
they still occur. And they happen when the Lord
decides he wants to use them for his glory.
And we can't make things happen, but God sure can make things
happen, can he any time of the day.
So let's pray as we seek his face.
Father, we're thankful today that we have the word of God.
And that's why we're here, Lord, to learn more about you, how to
follow you, how to know you, how to experience you in our daily
lives. Thinking this morning isn't you
said to Peter, if you love me, feed my sheep.
And Lord, that's what we do here.
We only want to feed your sheep. That's that's what you've called
us to do, no other agenda, no other idea, but just to simply
teach your words simply to your people.
We pray, Holy Spirit, today that You would take what is written
here and make it alive for each of us, that we might not only
learn and experience You in a new way, but that Lord, when we
leave here today, there would be something different in each of
our lives because we've encountered You in a special way
this morning. That's our prayer.
We pray your blessing, Lord, on all those who are struggling and
those who are afflicted and those who are challenged in
life. We think of the world we live in
today and the so many people who are hopeless, Father, so many
people are controlled by addictions and the bondage of
sin and not knowing how to get free, Lord.
And You're the only one that can set us free when we come to You,
whom the sun sets free, the Bible says is free indeed.
So we pray your power today, Lord Jesus, in the midst of your
church all over the earth would be setting captives free and
helping us as believers, Lord, not to get stuck and caught up
in bondages of addictions or sins again, but to stay close to
you and to keep our hearts open to you.
And so, Lord, we just commit this morning to you and we
praise you in Jesus name, Amen. So starting in the 18th chapter
chapter, and a 24th verse, I want to read this the rest of
the chapter. Now a certain Jew named Apollos,
born at Alexandria, an eloquent man, and mighty in the
Scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man had been instructed in
the way of the Lord, and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and
taught accurately the things of the Lord, though he knew only
the baptism of John. So he began to speak boldly in
the synagogue. When Aquila and Priscilla heard
him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God
more accurately. And when he had desired to cross
to Archaea, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to
receive him. And when he had arrived, he
greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he
vigorously refuted the Jews publicly, showing from the
Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ.
So Apollo's an interesting man, man who was called by the Lord
to serve him at this particular time.
But there was one problem. He didn't have all the
information yet in regard to the Gospel.
He only understood up until the baptism of John.
He was baptized by John and John was on the other side of the
cross. He was still part of the Old
Testament, the covenant. And when John the Baptist came,
he told the Jewish people in the desert, he was crying out a
repent for the remission of sin. And he was the one who came to
to prepare the way of the Lord. And so Apollo's, his whole
formation, if you may, his spiritual development was based
upon his experience with John the Baptist.
Up until this point, he hadn't really understood that Jesus had
actually come and died on the cross, was crucified and also
resurrected. He wasn't aware of the fact that
the Holy Spirit had come to dwell inside the lives of those
who would believe in Jesus Christ, but he didn't know the
Old Testament Scriptures. He did know that these
scriptures prophesize about this event of what had happened in
Pentecost and Jesus and his resurrection.
So in this particular section, we just read it.
Really beautiful. He's preaching the Lord's using
him, but up to a certain point. And so Aquila and Priscilla, who
were disciples of the apostle Paul, could sense that he was
missing some information in his preaching.
Wasn't that he was a heretic or he didn't know what he was
talking about. He only knew what he knew
because of only what he had experienced up until this point.
And so it says that they took him aside privately and they
explained to him the way of God more accurately.
And and this is a wonderful thing in the Scriptures and we
see the humility of a servant of God.
All of us are works in process. All of us are learning about the
Lord and the ways of God. And there's not one of us in
here that can say that we know it all right, that we're still
not in process of learning and growing and developing in our
spiritual of life. And Apollo's whenever Priscilla
and Aquila approached him, he said, well, don't you realize
like I'm, I'm part of this Apostolic movement and who are
you to tell me like whatever. No, he humbled himself and he
sat down and he listened. And it says they explained to
him more excellently the way of the word of God.
And so he received it at that time and he, I'm sure, was
greatly encouraged because he got the rest of the information.
And so this is really important to realize when we go into
chapter 19, because the apostle Paul is going to run into some
people that Apollos ministered to before he had the rest of the
information. And so it says in chapter 19,
verse one, and it happened when Apollos was at Corinth that Paul
having passed through the upper regions, came to Ephesus.
Now Ephesus was a very prominent city at the time.
Ephesus is is in modern day Turkey today.
That's where that particular city is.
At the particular time though that this was written, it had a
lot of influence. It was about 300,000 people.
It was a port city by the rivers, a very fertile ground.
It was really a place of a sort of a cosmopolitan area of a lot
of people from different backgrounds in the world were
there for people who are into philosophy and a lot of various
kind of teachings of, you know, mysticism and various thoughts
of people that really didn't know Jesus.
And, and it was also the center of one of the seven wonders of
the world at the time, Temple of Diana.
It was about 425 feet long by about 250 feet wide.
It had 127 columns about 50 to 60 feet high.
So it was an amazing structure. People would go to Ephesus just
to see their architecture that was influenced by Athens and all
the Greek scholars and those who knew how to build pretty amazing
structures. It was there, though,
unfortunately, to represent a false God, Diana.
Diana was a concoction of people at that time.
They believed perhaps a meteorite came down and crashed
and they had this, a big stone and they chipped away at it and
they turned it into this horrific looking deity of many
breast. On this particular woman, Diana,
she was a fertility God and people would go to worship her
and the temple prostitutes would be there.
Approximately 150 temple prostitutes were available every
day for men to go in and have relations with.
And this is all part of their horrific Pagan religion.
So there was nothing really good about this structure other than
it was pretty amazing to see. They even found coins later.
This place was destroyed around the 3rd century and by the
Goths, it was completely taken down.
But they did find coins in the area when they did the
excavation that on one side had the inscription of this temple,
Diana, on the other side Nero. And so, again, just a very
difficult place to be to try to preach the gospel.
But Paul had a real heart to be in Ephesus.
He actually stayed in Ephesus probably longer than any other
city that he had ministered to in his missionary journeys.
This is the third missionary journey now that Paul's on and
he's getting ready to eventually face his martyrdom.
Anyway, he's he's running into these people here.
It says he finds some disciples and he says to them, did you
receive the Holy Spirit when you believe?
That's quite a open-ended question, isn't it?
If you don't understand the context of what was being talked
about prior to this, you might think, well, is there something
maybe I'm missing in my life, or have I received the Holy Spirit?
We'll get into that in a minute. But the reason Paul asked them
this was that he understood that these people only were impacted
up until the baptism of John, and there was something missing
in them in their lives. The Bible tells us that his
Spirit bears witness with our Spirit that we're the sons of
God, sons and daughters of God. You know how you meet someone
for the first time and you just know in your heart they got to
be a believer because there's this witness, the Holy Spirit,
you to them and them to you. We had a a long day yesterday.
16 of us were certified by Red Cross to know how to use the AED
that's on the wall back there and also to do CPR.
So you're in good shape right now, but we don't want to
practice on any of you guys. But what was interesting though,
two of the people there, a couple times they dropped some
names of some people that only Christians would know.
And there's a marriage course out there called Love and
Respect. It's really a fun thing to go
through. You can Google it.
And it's when men and women, husbands and wives have conflict
in their marriage. This former pastor started this
ministry and talked about how men look through blue glasses
and women look through pink glasses.
And our worldview sometimes and how we perceive life is
completely different. A woman sees things different
than men. Anyway, this young woman who was
one of the leading trainers, she says, Oh yeah, love and respect
or something. So finally at lunch, I asked
them if they were believers and they were.
And I just sensed that her and the fellow that that help with
us. But whenever you're around
people that don't know Jesus, you also know that too.
You just censor something missing in their life and so you
want to somehow be able to be used to impact them, to tell
them about what the Lord's done for you and how they can also
know Jesus like you do, so that they can have the same wonderful
encounter with the Lord who loves them.
And so Paul's asking them this open-ended question and they
said to him, we have not so much as heard whether there is a Holy
Spirit. Now John whenever he preached,
it was obvious anybody that was around that he talked about a
baptism that would come by Jesus.
And of course, the baptism of the the Holy Spirit of placing a
lost person into the body of Christ is something that only
the work of the Lord can do with the Holy Spirit cooperating with
the Lord through the Father of the Holy Trinity.
But these guys that were here were so clueless that they
didn't even really, and this is hard for me to grasp.
I'm sure you do too. But you got to realize there's
no Internet. There's no newspaper, there's no
telephone. These people are spread out all
over the the known world at the time.
And to get news to people took time.
And you had to have people that knew the good news to bring the
good news, right. And Ephesus at this time had
really not anybody like that there.
There was no church there yet. And so Paul's asking them this
question and he said to them, into what then?
Were you baptized? And then here's the big answer.
So they said into John's baptism.
So Paul, you know, obviously the light goes on.
Well, they only knew up and to the point of what John the
Baptist had prepared for people to know at the time.
Now Jesus was baptized by John and the the picture of what had
occurred, the dove ascending from heaven upon the Lord, you
know, baptizing him was was a powerful experience and the
voice this is my beloved son and who am I who I am well pleased
and John was so humbled by this whole experience.
Everybody was trying to lift him up as though he was something.
He says I'm not even fit to tie the shoelaces of of Jesus.
I'm this the forerunner. I'm the one that this prepared
the way of the Lord, but I'm not the Lord.
Of course, everything took off after Jesus baptism, but these
people here had not experienced what you and I have experienced
or Paul at the time. And I was thinking about this
this morning preparing as I was getting ready to come in here.
I don't know if you remember what it was like when you didn't
know Christ, but I had some flashbacks of thinking about the
bondage I was in to live a life of nothing but sin.
All I could do was sin. I had no way of stopping sin,
even though my conscience would tell me the things I did were
wrong and not right. I didn't have any power to
change my ways. Down deep inside I knew I needed
to get it together, but I didn't know how to get it together
because I habitually kept living my life in the same pattern
every day. And that's what lost people do.
That's what people without Jesus Christ are living like.
They're living under the power and the bondage of sin.
They don't have the ability to to break out of it.
Now they might go get some counseling or try to get some
help that way, but that's temporary.
That's like a Band-Aid because you, you have a corrupt, fallen
Pagan nature. And no matter how much you try
to do good, you, you can't be good enough ever to be accepted
to God. You need Jesus to save you from
your sin and you need to come to the point in your life that you
realize you need to be saved from yourself sin.
I knew when I was 20 years old that I needed a miracle of some
sort to Get Me Out of the pattern of life I was living and
I hated it. I would go to bed at night and I
would this be in such despair and depression and
discouragement of my addictions to so many different things that
were not right. And it wasn't till Jesus Christ
came into my life and I was given the gospel and I realized
that He died for my sin to save me and to forgive me, but also
to free me from my sin. That's the big missing
connection. Sometimes when we preach the
gospel, we tell people to believe on Jesus.
He'll forgive you of your sin. You go to heaven and you don't
have to worry about going to hell and he loves you and all
those things are true, but you have to 1st realize that you're
a Sinner and that you need to turn from your sin.
That's called repentance and that you need Christ to do a
miracle in your life so that you don't stay stuck in your sin,
right? And whenever Jesus does that
work, when we're born again, we are given his nature, even
though we still have this old nature trying to take over every
once in a while, we have a new nature, we have a new life, and
not any that the Holy Spirit comes into our life to live in
us at the time we're born again. And when he's in us, he gives us
the ability to live a completely different life.
Amen. We're not perfect, but we're
certainly not the way we used to be, right?
Certain things bother us now that never used to bother us.
And there's certain things that we used to do that we detest
now. And there's no longer, we, we no
longer can do them. That's the work and the power of
the Holy Spirit. So these people that Paul's
speaking to, they have this desire to believe, but they're
missing these key ingredients. They're missing the power of the
cross and the and the resurrection, and they're also
missing this power of the Holy Spirit Spirit, God the Holy
Spirit, because they haven't received him yet.
And so Paul says to them, John in verse 4, indeed baptized with
the baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they
should believe on him who would come after him, that is on
Christ Jesus. So they were prepared to believe
in the Messiah. Apollos preached the fact that
John proclaimed the baptism of repentance, being prepared for
the one who was prophesized in the Old Testament to be the
Messiah. OK, but the Messiah has now
already come. He's been crucified, He's been
buried, He's been resurrected and the Holy Spirit came down
upon the church in the 2nd chapter of Acts at Pentecost to
begin to dwell inside the life of the believer for the first
time. And the Old Testament, the Holy
Spirit came upon people and then he would take off when they
offended him or they sinned. The, the, the power of the Holy
Spirit. Even in the the times of Gospel
when Jesus was walking, the Spirit was working in and
through Christ. And Jesus even said that the
apostles at one time received the Holy Spirit and he blown on
them the, the wind of the Spirit and they, they sensed the
presence of God, but there was no indwelling of the Holy Spirit
until Pentecost. This is the great teaching of of
the book of the Acts, the power of the Spirit, God the Holy
Spirit coming to indwell in US and to stay in US and to be the
guarantee of our salvation and the reality of our experience
being real until the day that we're taken out of here.
So Paul said yes, John and Dee baptized with the baptism
repentance. Saying to the people that they
should believe on him who would come after him, that is on
Christ Jesus. So they're already in man.
They're like ready. OK, so when they heard this,
they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.
They were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.
Many of you, I trust, hopefully all of you who are born again
have been baptized in water. Baptism does not save you, but
it is a confirmation that you have been saved because it's the
first sign of obedience after you become a believer.
For Jesus said, go into all the world and preach the gospel into
every living creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
And lo, I'm with you always, even to the end of the age.
And baptism is, is an awesome thing.
When you get baptized and some of you have had the privilege of
baptized, baptizing it, you come out of the water, smile and it's
just like it's just a blessing because you're doing what it is
that Jesus told us to do. That's the first sign after you
become a Christian that I want to follow you Lord.
And when you're baptized, you're identifying with his death as
you go into the water, his burial, and then as you come out
of the water, his resurrection. You're affirming, I believe that
Christ Jesus is my Lord, that he died for my sins and he was
buried on the on the 3rd and he rose again on the third day
according to the Scriptures. And how how awesome is that?
You know, to be able to identify with the with the Lord Jesus.
A matter of fact, in the book of the Acts, when people were
riding down on their carts and their horses and all that kind
of stuff, they could always tell that something was special was
going on when they saw people being baptized in the water.
And they would say those people are of the way, the way, the way
of the cross, the way of Jesus, as he's the one that says, I am
the way I am the truth. I'm the life.
No man come to the Father but through me.
And so this is an exciting time for these people.
Now they're they're they've been baptized in the name of Jesus.
And when they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the
Lord. And when Paul had laid his hands
on them, and this is really important to understand the
laying on of hands is a wonderful ministry and blessing
that we can all do for one another.
You pray for someone, you, you, you're compelled to lay hands on
them. There's nothing empowering in my
hands or your hands, But it's a it's a sign of a blessing and a
sign of contact that you just want to bring comfort.
And the Bible talks about the this movement of the Holy Spirit
through the elders and the leaders of the church, that if
any are sick among you, let him call upon the elders of the
church that they may anoint them with oil and pray for them.
And they lay hands on them, pray for them.
And sometimes there's healings that occur.
Sometimes God chooses to bring healing, but there's no
guarantee that healing comes every time we lay hands on
someone or every time we anoint someone.
The Bible tells us in First Corinthians 12 that the Holy
Spirit gives gifts, gifts of healing, gifts of all kind of
things in the Bible, that He does these things severally as
He wills. Not as I will, not as you will,
OK, but as God wills. But in the apostles, they were
special group of people. There's no more apostles.
Now some people claim to be apostles, but there is no
apostles in the sense of what was ordained by Christ.
Apostles had to be eyewitnesses of Jesus Christ in his life
physically. OK, that was the first and it
gives the signs of the apostles in in Hebrews.
They were gifted to do miraculous signs and wonders.
This was the sign of authentic apostles.
We're so glad you joined us today on this edition of Living
Waters of Grace. Pastor Clark is teaching through
the Book of Acts, which is the only book that chronicles the
history of the early church immediately after Jesus's
ascension. It gives us a front row seat to
how the Gospel began to move outward, starting in Jerusalem
and reaching into the heart of the Roman Empire.
In just three decades, a small group of frightened ordinary
believers became a bold, spirit empowered movement that
transformed the known world. Acts is not just a history
lesson, it's a reminder of what God can do when His people are
surrendered, obedient, and filled with the Holy Spirit.
And their perseverance still inspires us today.
May we follow their example and live faithfully for Christ in
our own time. We hope today's message
encouraged you. Living Waters of Grace is a
ministry of Calvary Chapel Westmoreland.
If you're in the Greensburg, PA area, we'd love to have you join
us in person. Our Sunday service begins at
10:30 AM at 400 E Pittsburgh St., Unit 6B.
Be sure to visit calvarychapelonline.com to
confirm times and learn more. If you are in the Greensburg
area, you can listen to Grace FM on the new 91.7 frequency.
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Gifts can be sent to Grace FMPO, Box 716, Greensburg, PA 15601.
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Thank you for tuning in and spending this time in God's
Word. Be sure to join us again for
Living Waters of Grace.