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.
They were multiplied, they were growing, they were expanding.
The crowds were being drawn to the word of God.
And, and, and that's what is encouraging because Jesus says
if I be lifted up, I'll draw all men to myself.
If Christ is being lifted up in your heart and your daily life
and your activities and your job and your home and your
neighborhood community, you will have divine encounters with God.
You will have opportunities to tell people about the Lord.
It's just going to happen supernaturally.
When you're fully surrendered to God, you'll get to see him move
through your life more. He'll use you if you're
committed to following where He calls when He calls you.
Today you'll be with Pastor Clark looking at the conversion
of Paul. God used a man who once
persecuted Christians to be one of the most influential people
ever for Christianity. It may be in small ways or ways
you never imagined possible, but God will use you too if you let
him. He just wants you to be faithful
to do what he says. Now here's Pastor Clark in the
book of Acts Chapter 9 with today's edition of Living Waters
of Grace. Paul is being sent back home out
of Jerusalem, or most of the activity is at the time, and
he's going to be there for approximately 812 years,
studying, preparing, perhaps working with some of the early
church plants in Cilicia and Tarsus and Syria, that region.
But the Bible doesn't give a lot of details on that time that he
was there. He was there like I say, 8 to 12
years. So think about this.
He was in the desert for two to three years in a time of
silence, and now he's going to be sent back home and he's
really not going to be able to fully be engaged in what it is
that's on his heart or what he sends God calling them to deuce.
He had to learn patience. He had to learn the trust in in
God's plan and not his own. He wasn't striving.
He didn't argue with these guys. He submitted and humbled
himself. And so he goes down to Tarsus,
it says in verse 31. Then the churches throughout all
Judea, Galilee and Samaria had peace and were edified.
So we remember the church at Pentecost started in Jerusalem.
That's all we heard for a period of time in Acts, the city of
Jerusalem. And now we see that the church
has spread into these other regions in Judea and Galilee and
Samaria. Remember the great Pentecost
that says you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes
upon you should be my witnesses in all Jerusalem, which they
were at Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.
And this is happening and it says that they had peace and
they were edified, meaning they were built up in their faith.
It would be hard to have peace under persecution.
The Lord got a hold of Paul's life and he was a major
instigator of the persecution. He was endorsed by the governing
authorities to basically take Christianity down.
He was the big influence, the big leader of this, and that is
not happening. So the church, even though
persecution was occurring, it wasn't to the degree it would
have been or was whenever Paul was lost.
And it says they were walking in the fear of the Lord and in the
comfort of the Holy Spirit. Walking in the fear of the Lord.
That's something that I believe we all need to understand more
deeply. What does it mean to walk in the
fear of the Lord? How do we know when we're
becoming more like Jesus? Is it based upon how much we
know the Bible, or how many people we witness to, or how
many people we gave a promise book to or a Bible?
The Holy Spirit tells us that His attributes are Lovejoy,
peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness and
meekness, temperance, self-control.
Whenever the Lord is getting a hold of our lives and we're
beginning to fear the Lord, we begin to be repelled from sinful
lifestyles, sinful patterns, sinful activities that we may be
at one time engaged in to a great degree.
Even after being believers for a period of time.
As we're growing, we're learning to to be holy as He's holy.
It's not an overnight experience where we're being made into the
image and and likeness of Christ, but you can be certain
that you're walking in the fear of the Lord whenever you notice
you're becoming more gentle, less abrasive, when you're
becoming more humble, when you're becoming less critical,
when you're becoming more loving, when you're becoming
more patient, when you have more joy in your life, you can be
encouraged that you are becoming like Christ.
And that's really what it's all about, isn't it?
The church is to feed the sheep that we might become more Christ
like that when we drive down the road after any given message of
wherever we've been in church, that we're thinking about
becoming more like Christ, that that should be our desire.
That should be our heartbeat. When we see the unchrist like
characteristics in our heart, it should bother us and to disturb
us that we don't want to be that way.
We want to be a different kind of people.
We want to live our lives for the purposes of the Lord.
And, and so this fear is not this anxiety or anxiousness of,
of, of God being upset with us or we're being going to
discipline us or, or something. That the fear is a loving,
tender work of God's Spirit where he's massaging our heart
and renewing our mind and talking to us about things that
he wants us to begin to live and does not know about.
And that the fear then causes us to want to change, right.
We don't fear God. We don't care about change.
But when we begin to fear God and we're walking with him to a,
a deeper degree, we begin to hear him more and understand his
ways. We're, we're begin to slowly
become more In Sync with the Spirit who lives in us to want
to guide us and make us Christ like we, we're not interested in
grieving the spirit or quenching the spirit because that's
evidence that there's No Fear of God in US, right?
And so this is all work of God and how he, he changes us and,
and, and transforms us and, and the fear of the Lord, the Bible
tells us is the beginning of wisdom and they depart from evil
is understanding not only the fear of the Lord, but they were
comforted of the Holy Spirit. I think so much anxiety that we
experience in our lives, there's so much nervousness or double
mindedness or, or stress or whatever the term might be,
depression, despondency, all the things that can affect us many
times are a result that if we're not fearing the Lord, the, the
Spirit can't comfort us because we're going our own way, doing
our own thing right, just living the way we think we should live.
And then we have anxiety. If we're not living the way God
wants us to live or we're anxious, there's something in
our soul that isn't restful. We're, it isn't well with our
souls because of this lack of fearing the Lord.
When the Lord looks down upon the planet and he sees his
people, the people he can most use and work through are the
people that are beginning to understand the healthy aspect of
fearing the Lord and begin to become more Christ like.
And what many times we don't even see it in ourselves.
We don't know it that other people pick up on it or they
say, you know, you're different. The wife says to the husband,
you're, you're so much more patient with me.
You're you're, you're, you're more gentle, you're less
abrasive or arrogant or obnoxious or whatever the
comments might be at times. And, and it should encourage us
if our wives say something like that to us, because that means
we're becoming a little bit more like Jesus, right?
Because we know what we're like without Christ.
We know how we live and how we act without the Spirit of God.
And we should know the difference when the Spirit of
God is at work in our heart. And so then we have this comfort
of the Holy Spirit, the, the, the peace of God, because what
we're, we're living under his lordship.
We want to fulfill the, the purpose of our being here on
this planet for whatever long period of time we're here.
It's not for my purposes, It's for his purposes.
And it's, and it's really hard to hear what his purposes are if
I'm not fearing him, if I'm not sitting at his feet and desiring
to listen and to have him have his way in my heart.
And it's as a result of what was happening here in this church,
these churches at the time, because of this experience of,
of the fear of the Lord and also the comfort of the Holy Spirit,
they were multiplied, they were growing, they were expanding.
The crowds were being drawn to the word of God.
And and that's what is encouraging because Jesus says
if I be lifted up, I'll draw all men to myself.
If Christ is being lifted up in your heart and your daily life
and your activities and your job and your home and your
neighborhood, your community, you will have divine encounters
with God. You will have opportunities to
tell people about the Lord. It's just going to happen
supernaturally because God works through vessels of clay like us
that are filled with his life. The the purpose of expansion of
the Kingdom. We have the Bibles that you guys
can grab if you're so inclined, or, or just the promise book.
Maybe the people have the Bible already that has never read it.
But the promise book is a neat little book and what's beautiful
and all the topics in this little book talk about the
struggles of of human life and the issues of life and, and the
verses are all there. You know about belief.
What does it mean to believe? He that believeth on him is not
condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already,
because he's not believed in the name of the only begotten Son.
John 318. John 336.
He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he
that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of
God abides on him. Jesus says, I am come a light
into the world, that whoever believeth on me should not abide
in darkness. John 1246 Verily, verily, I say
unto you, he that believeth on me hath everlasting life, just
the promises of God. And so someone who who doesn't
know the Lord, or maybe knows the Lord but never got into the
Word, has a chance to go through this, and all of a sudden, you
know, begin to see that the Lord is speaking to them through the
Word of God. Thou hast put gladness in my
heart more than in the time of their corn and their wine
increased. Psalm 4.
Seven. They that sow in tears shall
reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepest,
bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with
rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.
Psalm 1/26, 5:00 and 6:00. So we want to expand the word of
God in our community and we can do it one-on-one through these
kind of tools that the Lord's given us.
Now we Segway into Peter. Peter shows up on the scene when
Paul went up to Jerusalem. It tells us in Galatians that he
spent 15 days with Peter at his house.
And boy, that must have been cool.
Can you imagine? Like hearing Peter and Paul talk
have been fascinating. And, and, and Paul's like, I
knew something about you. Weren't you the one that walked
on water and you got afraid and then you started going down?
Yeah, That was me. Weren't you the one that said
that, you know, you didn't know Jesus after you were following?
What was that all about, You know, Well, you wimp.
Paul's all full of the Spirit now.
You're not thinking about, like, denying Christ.
But he probably had some interesting conversations with
Peter. And Peter and Paul were the
foundational guys, along with a few others that the Lord really
used in the early days. But Peter now is interesting.
He's going up to Joppa, up to Light.
I mean, Light is about 25 miles north of Jerusalem.
So he's getting out of Jerusalem.
The Holy Spirit's moving these guys around now.
They're just not hanging in Jerusalem anymore.
And so he comes to pass. Peter goes went through all
parts of the country that he also came down to the Saints who
dwelt at Lyda. Now on the map, you look at Lyda
as Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.
I remember when we flew in there, this would have been the
region that the Peter was was working at.
And so he came down to the Saints who dwelt at Lyda.
So there's believers there. So he's going to, I'm sure, do
some teaching, equipping, encouraging.
There he found a certain man named Ananias who had been
bedridden 8 years and was paralyzed and Peter said to him,
Ananias, Jesus of Christ heals you, arise and make your bed.
Now this is astounding. Peter didn't do any like laying
of hands on this situation here. He just had a word from the Holy
Spirit that Christ was going to heal this person supernaturally.
He had really nothing to do with it other than being there and
telling this man what the Lord was going to do for him.
This man was paralyzed for all these years and wasn't able to
move. I can't comprehend what that
might have been like. And Peter said to him, Jesus the
Christ heals you. Arise and make your bed.
Then he arose immediately. So all who dwelt at Lina and
Sharon saw him and turn to the Lord.
They immediately became believers because of the
experience of seeing the Lord supernaturally touch this person
who was not ever able to move before this miracle that
occurred. And then he goes down to Joppa.
Joppa's about 10 miles from Lyda.
That was one of the first places we saw when we were on the
pastor tour in, in Israel. And, and Joppa was the home of,
you know, Simon the Tanner and Joppa.
There was a certain disciple named Tabatha, which is
translated Dorcas, which means gazelle.
That's the Greek translation. This woman was full of good
works and charitable deeds which she did.
So the thought was that Philip, whenever he was taking the
gospel after the Ethiopian Union got saved, he was in this
general region and he was responsible as one of the people
who were set aside to take care of the orphans and the widows.
And so he had relationships with perhaps some of these people
here and and and believers. And so she had this life of this
being a blessing to people. But it happened in those days
that she became sick and she died, and when they had washed
her, they laid her in the upper room.
So she must have been a woman of some degree of wealth, because
usually when you died in those days, they put you right away.
The body would be decomposing and this kind of stuff.
But she was in this upper room, which would signify there was
some degree of financial, well, wherewithal.
And they washed her. And maybe they knew that Peter
was in the area. Maybe the word got done about
Ananias that was healed, that maybe he's going to come down
here. Who knows?
You can't read too much between the lines.
But they laid her in this upper room.
And since Lada was near Joppa and the disciples had heard that
Peter was there, they sent two men to him, imploring him, not
the delay and coming to them. So they wanted Peter to get down
there ASAP. It's about a day's journey,
about 10 miles. Then Peter arose and went with
them. And when he had come, they
brought him to the upper room and all the widows stood by him
weeping. So that the group of widows,
this, this woman was a real testimony of, of someone who did
many, many blessed works to help other people.
She's a real servant. So Peter's up there and on all
these widows stood by him weeping, showing the tunics in
the garments which Dorcas had made while she was with him.
So she was very gifted in, in sewing and and making things.
We know that Jesus was the one who trained Peter.
Peter was an understudy and he would be invited into these
places to see the Lord do miracles.
He was there in the room when Jesus healed the little girl,
Jairus's daughter and the things that Jesus said he he cleared
the room out. They had professional mourners
there people be paid the mourn, the screaming, yelling, the
crying. In this instance these are
genuine mourners that knew Dorcas and they were all broken
hearted as to what happened. So the first thing Jesus did
when he was with Jairus's daughter was he cleared the room
out of of all the confusion. And this is what Peter is doing
now. Peter puts them out and he
kneels down and he prays and turning to the body, he says,
Tabatha arise. Jesus said to Jairus's daughter
Talithia arise, Tabatha Kume means to to rise and she opened
her eyes. Now this is a day after she
died. Her body would have been
starting to decompose. And we know Lazarus had talked
about the smell of the of the body.
If he came out of the tomb, what was it going to be like after
being dead for a period of time? Already her organs are shutting
down and all these kind of things.
But that doesn't mean anything to the Lord.
When he's going to do a miracle. He does a miracle.
And it it completely defies anything that we would
understand scientifically or medically.
That's why it's called a miracle.
And she opens her eyes. And when she saw Peter, she sat
up, she wasn't groggy. I mean, she dislike immediately
resuscitated. Basically she was dead, but she
was brought back to life. This is not resurrection.
When you're resurrected, you know, you never die again.
Jesus said I am the resurrection of the life he that believeth in
me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.
And he that believeth to me shall never die.
So when when you're resurrected, you don't have to worry about
dying again. You know, you're out of here,
man, it's it's over. But anyway, you know, she was
healed here. And of course, eventually she
would die. You know, just like anybody else
that had the experience of being raised from the dead.
And he gave her his hand and lifted her up.
And when he had called the Saints and widows, he presented
her alive. And it became known throughout
all Joppa and many believed on the Lord.
So it was that he stayed many days in Joppa with Simon a
Tanner. So we're not going to go into
chapter 10, but think about this.
Peter is a Jewish Christian, deeped in the history of
Judaism, understands the issues of kosher and uncleanness, and a
lot of this stuff is just religious stuff, had nothing to
do with real spirituality. But nonetheless, it took a while
to not be uptight about tradition and Jewish customs.
So for the fact that Peter is staying with a Tanner who would
be represented as someone who's in a industry that's very
unclean, and they said that you have to be so many miles outside
the city and you can't be around like uncleanness.
Well, he lived there with this guy.
So Simon would have been, I'm sure, a deep follower of Christ.
He opened his house up to hospitality.
He let Peter hang out there as a base of operation.
Maybe Peter was learning the trade.
He was a fisherman. Maybe he needed to make some
money too, to help for his livelihood.
So he's working with Simon the Tanner in Joppa.
I actually saw that place right on the coast of the
Mediterranean, quite a a view and very interesting thinking
about what who was in that that particular place that I got a
chance to stand in and think about South.
Exciting things in the book of the act.
The most exciting things I think that take away is that it's all
about the works of the Holy Spirit and the work of the Holy
Spirit is still occurring today in your life and mine.
And my prayer is that as we study more of the book of the
Acts, our faith is growing. It's being more dependent on the
Spirit of God and less dependent on our own abilities.
And we're trusting God for great things and with the gospel and
in our families, in our lives, in our ministries, and in the
communities that we're all from, and with the people we get to
minister to and get to serve, the Bible promises us we will
receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon us.
Amen. And may the Spirit of God be
poured afresh upon us today. God the Holy Spirit, Father God,
we thank you today for your word.
We thank you for the history that we can learn.
It builds our faith. It helps us to understand that
the Christian life is is not an easy life.
Many, many times we see what Paul went through in the
challenges in the beginning stages of his ministry.
And Lord, we'll continually read about the persecution against
the church in the book of the Acts.
But it it didn't stop your work. It didn't prevent your power
from being manifest and from you accomplishing your will.
Remind us, Lord, in the days that we live, regardless of what
we hear on media, what we see on TV, what we read.
Lord, it has nothing to do with circumventing your power.
Because, Lord, you have all power.
And Lord, help us to trust in that.
Help our minds to be fueled with the possibilities of the work of
the Holy Spirit in situations that seem impossible.
Help us, Lord, to have the mind of Christ where you tell us in
Your Word that You have given us the mind of Christ, that we
might see this cosmos, this system, that we live in this
world, this universe as one that is controlled by you.
Father, we pray your blessing upon us and pray your blessing
upon your sheep here today. And that, Lord, we would all go
out looking for opportunities this week, somehow, somewhere,
to someone to share You Lord with.
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 outwards, 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.
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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Thank you for tuning in and spending this time in God's
Word. Be sure to join us again for
Living Waters of Grace.