Boldly at the throne we come to hear the Lord's voice.
He speaks to us this morning. Now in these days, when the
disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the
Helenus arose against the Hebrews, because their widows
were being neglected in the daily distribution.
And the 12 summoned the full number of the disciples, and
said, It is not right that we should give up preaching at the
word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out
from among you 7 men of good repute, full of the Spirit and
of wisdom, whom we will appoint this duty.
But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of
the Word. And what they said please the
whole gathering. And they chose Stephen, a man
full of faith, and the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and
Procurus, and Nick Candor, and Timon, and Parmenius, and
Nicholas, a proselyte from Antioch.
These they set before the apostles, and they prayed, and
they laid their hands on them. And the word of God continued to
increase, and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in
Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to
the faith. And this is the word of the
Lord. Gracious God, we do pray once
again that you would bless us with an understanding of this
word so that we would not just hear it and walk away empty, but
rather that we would be transformed by it, shape it and
mould it. Lord, so that we might serve you
more and more faithfully. We pray through Christ our Lord.
Amen. Please be seated.
If you would grab your Bibles, you can turn to Acts Chapter 6.
It'll be helpful to have the Scriptures in front of you as we
work our way through this text together.
I want to begin, though, by expressing thanks again on
behalf of Kelly and myself for your generosity and allowing
Kelly and I to be gone the past two weeks.
Obviously, great appreciation for the staff and the elders and
others who hold down the Fort so wonderfully.
Kelly and I went to visit my mother and to spend some time
together in Florida. We had a wonderful rejuvenating
time. So we appreciate that very much.
Your freedom to allow us to do that, encouragement to allow us
to do that. In addition to which, I want to
point out something that I hope at this point is somewhat
self-evident, that we're at the beginning of Holy Week, then the
Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday.
That's what we're celebrating today.
If you know the story of long Palm Sunday, you might question
the use of this text to highlight the Palm Sunday theme.
Palm Sunday is that moment. If you haven't read it, I
encourage you to do so. You can look very close quickly
at it. And Mark, Chapter 11 in
particular is a great account of the triumphal entry when Jesus
enters into Jerusalem and all of the people gather, come out and
welcome him in. Now, the welcome that they are
offering is not the kind of welcome that we would offer
somebody who's coming to visit or something like that.
It's very specifically a welcome for a king.
And so the key thrust of Palm Sunday is the fact that all the
people gathered together and are celebrating and welcoming him as
a king. Now, of course, the irony of
Palm Sunday is in four days, all the same people are screaming,
crucify him, crucify him. But we'll look at that in a
couple of days here. What we want to focus upon is
the fact that the people have gathered together and are
recognizing Jesus and celebrating him not for being a
great prophet, not for being a great teacher, but for being
their king. And this is essential in the way
in which they cheer him on when they say hosanna, hosanna in the
name of David. We cried that together in song
numerous times, and then in reading the text we heard it.
Hosanna is basically a transliteration is the way in
which we say save us, Oh God save us, Oh God.
That's what we're saying when we say this.
And it's not just a plea, it's sort of a please save us, O God.
But it's primarily a shout of joy, a shout of excellent
exclamation. Here comes the King, and we want
us, and we praise him by acknowledging that central core
aspect of who he is. Save us, O King, save us, O Lord
Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest. And so we are praising and
saying, Hosanna, praise the Lord to acknowledge his kingship.
Now, one of the things that we recognize when we get to the
book of Acts is it crucial, not a side issue, not a second
thought, but crucial to Christ being a king is the formation of
his Kingdom, and central to that Kingdom is a formation of a
people who will be his church. Now as we've been working our
way through the book of Acts, we keep highlighting that central
characteristics of the church, the Spirit, the church in the
world, those themes that run through the book of Acts that
stress that they are the result that the church comes about
because of the work of Jesus Christ.
It is so common for a lot of Christians to think of church as
important but somewhat secondary to the work that Jesus has done.
What Christ has done upon this earth is to come and to save us
from our sins and to give us eternal life.
And so he wonderfully has. And yet the church is not
ancillary to that. The church is not a second
thought. The church is central to the
God's work in doing that. And so when we read a text like
this, we are not reading something that is on the side of
Jesus, Jesus Kingdom or Jesus kingship.
We are reading something that is central to what it means that
Jesus is king. And what we see in the early
parts of Acts is the church and its flourishing and its
greatness. We see the church as its caring
for its members, loving one another in such a way that the
whole, whole world can see and notice this.
We see the church expressing the word of God, proclaiming the
word of God, and worshiping together as a group, and of
praying together and of eating bread together, of spending all
this time in the temple doing all these wonderful things that
the church is doing. And yet we also see the
pushback, the counter attack from Satan himself.
Over the past couple weeks in particular, some of this has
become clear. The Satan's use of the world
itself to hinder the work of the King, to oppose the work of the
king, how Satan uses the world to persecute the Church and to
toss barbs and arrows at the work of the Church in this
ministry in this world. And we see also the work of the
sin within our hearts and Satan using that very sin that is part
of each and every person in this room.
Each and every member of the church has that indwelling sin
that is working against us and that Satan uses that to affect
and to work against the work of the king.
And today we're going to see again the work of Satan as he
tries to hinder the coming of the Kingdom of our Lord.
Satan uses the persecution of the church to oppose your king.
Satan uses the corruption of your soul to oppose your king.
Satan uses the distraction of the good to oppose your king,
the persecution of the world, the corruption of our own souls,
and yes, the distraction of the good.
Let's take a look at that for a second.
Here in Acts chapter 6, we can see again one of these problems
that the church early on has to fix.
One of the problems that the church has to deal with
articulated right away in verse one.
Now in those days when the disciples were increasing in
number, this is the church is growing and here we have a
problem of growing pains. I remember when I was younger
seeing a video of a butterfly fighting its way out of a
cocoon. You know, the butterflies birth
from a cocoon and they have to fight their way out.
And I remember thinking to myself, oh, that's just
terrible. I wish somebody could just help
the help the little butterfly RIP open the cocoon so the
butterfly could fly and those kind of things.
And at some point or somewhere in my life, I voiced that idea
of somebody and says no, no, the butterfly.
If the butterfly doesn't struggle to get out of the
cocoon, it never learns to fly. It is because of the struggle of
getting out of the cocoon that enables the butterfly eye to be
able to fly eventually. In the same way we have the
church experiencing the growing pains.
We've got the disciples increasing in number, and so the
church is growing faster and faster.
And that introduces a problem. Here's the problem at the end of
verse 1A. Complaint by the Helenus arose
because the Hebrews against the Hebrews because they were their
widows were being neglected in the daily distribution.
And I fumble that. So let's try it again.
A complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews
because their widows were being neglected in the daily
distribution. Now unless you're real familiar
with the Scriptures, etcetera, there's a lot of words in there
that maybe make sense to you that you don't know how they all
fit together. So I'm going to help fit
together. What's the problem that the
church runs into? Well, as the church has grown,
as the church has brought in more and more new members, they
have brought in members. Overwhelmingly all of them are
Jewish at this point, but they fit into two different
categories, two different levels, two different statuses,
almost a caste system that easily existed within Judaism
that we have to explore here. And this is the difference
between Helenus and Hebrews. OK, Now the Hebrews, those were
the Jews who were born somewhere in Jerusalem or Judea, maybe
extending all the way out into Galilee.
But they were the Jews who were born somewhere nearby, right
around Judaism. And they probably spoke Aramaic,
which is most closely related to the Hebrew language itself.
So they were the pure Jews. They were the Jewish Jews.
They were the upper tier level Jews, and then below them,
though, were these Hellenist Jews.
Now, if you're really up on world history, you know that
about 300 years ago, Alexander the Great has swept over all of
known Europe and from India, sorry, the known world.
From India all the way through Egypt and into Europe itself.
Alexander the Great came and conquered all this territory.
And one of the things that he was very intent on doing, his
spreading not just his fame and not just his role, but also his
culture. And so the Greek culture was
spread throughout the whole world.
And this Greek culture came under the name of Hellenism.
Hellenism was the name, the title in which we use for the
Greek culture. Then that Alexander the Great
spread throughout the world. So by the time of Jesus, 300
years later, once again, most of the entire world that everybody
knew would have been Greek culture, would have experienced
Greek culture in general. Their language would have been
there. The religion would have been
present, the culture, the attitudes, the, the, the, what
am I trying to say the, the way in which the people live their
lives. The whole culture would have had
this Greek undercurrent to it. And any Jew that was born
outside of Jerusalem, any Jew that was born outside of Judea,
the immediate surrounding area around Jerusalem would have been
exposed to Hellenism, would have probably spoken as their first
language, Greek, would have been exposed to all of the
Hellenistic cultural traits that would have been part and parcel
of things. Now, when they come, they're
still Jewish. And when they come to Jerusalem
and become part of the church, there's this second tier sense.
This is just short of racism, and maybe it is racism a little
bit, the way in which people would look down upon the
Hellenistic Jews. Well, yes, you're Jewish, but
you know, you have this cultural baggage of being part of the
Greek Empire, part of the world, so much influenced by this.
And So what happens? You have these two groups of
people, the real, real Jewish Jews and then the Hellenistic
Jews, and a complaint by the Hellenistic Jews arose against
the Hebrew Jews because they're widows.
The Hellenistic widows were being neglected in the daily
distribution. Now this goes back to a couple
of weeks ago when we looked at this earlier in the book of
Acts, that the church early on was able to care immensely for
one another. Their compassion and and love
expressed to those around us was overwhelming by their ability to
help one another and to care for one another.
And certainly one of the essential aspects of that was
for caring for the widows. Now, why emphasize on the
widows? The widows are a character, are
a caricature of the poor. In Jerusalem at this time,
widows would not have had access to land, would not have had
access to food, the agricultural that is born.
So widows, you know, we think in today's society, well, you can
go out and get a job. 99% of everybody back in this in these
days lived off of farming, subsistence farming.
And so they needed access to land in order to provide food.
And a widow would not have access land passed from male to
male to male. So a widow would not have had
access to the to the land. There are not social services,
there were not a big government that would come along and care
for the widows and the poor in this world.
And so by caring for the widows here, the church was expressing
God's concern for the poor, God's concern for those who have
not, do not have access to the very necessities of life.
And so the church, stepping into this marvelous role of
demonstrating the kingship of Jesus Christ, the rule of God
himself, is able to care for and nurture those who are in
poverty, those who are in need. And so they do so by a daily
distribution. By this means they, they pass
out food, They were able to pass out food to those who do not
have access to food and to strengthen them by giving them
the very substance in which they need in order to live.
So you can see now what the problem is that you've got a
community of 5000 people, 5000 folks, and you've got a number
of poor that are associated with this.
And people are prioritizing giving food to the Hebrew Jews
and taking it away from the Greek Jews.
Now, in our mindset, we could go a day without food, maybe some
of us, sort of. We could possibly go 2 days
without food. But if we were stuck on three
days without food, many of us would be talking to our
families, talking to our church, talking to the government.
There's no such situation. There's no such scenario
available to the Hellenistic Jews, the Greek Jews.
And So what happens when they miss the daily distribution for
one day, 2 days, three days, Literally, this is a life and
death situation. And so you have people starving
in the church and the church is this community is committed to
demonstrating the King's love for his people.
So what's the solution? Look in verse 2, verse 2, then
the disciples, that's the 12, the 12 summon the full number of
the disciples. So they gathered the whole
church together. Now there's 5000 or so
believers, we were told at this point, I don't know how they got
all 5000 of them together, but they brought the full 5000 of
them together and said it is not right that we should give up
preaching the word of God to serve tables.
Let me clarify something for a second here.
That sounds pejorative. You know, the disciples are
like, hey, you know, we, we've got the word of God here.
We're the important people. It's not important.
We, we can't wait tables. We can't do that lowly job.
That's not at all what's going on.
And you can see that earlier, later in this text, as we go on
later in the Ted text, you'll see how important the disciples
recognize the ministry of loving and of caring for our, our our
brothers and sisters is how central it is to the work of the
gospel message. That's not what the disciples
are doing. What the disciples are saying,
the apostles are saying, is we can't get distracted from what
God has called us to, to pursue something else That is very
important. This is the distracting.
This is Satan's attack against the church.
In this point. Let's bring forward something
that is, is it important to care for the widows?
Is it important to care for the poor in this world?
Of course it is. It's crucial to the expression
of the gospel message. The book of Acts up until this
point has made that crystal clear to us, and we all have to
recognize it. And is that important to our
ministry? It's central.
It should be central to our ministry.
People should walk in. Do you remember the silly little
song from the 70s? They will know we are Christians
by our love. OK, Somebody acknowledged that
they recognize that song. No, because otherwise I'll sing
it. No, you know, So, yeah.
Thanks, Chris. They will know we are Christians
by our love. Tacky, gross song.
So true. So true, it is exactly what's
supposed to happen, visitors, and we have some among us that
right now visitors are supposed to come in here and they're
supposed to be overwhelmed by the love in which we show one
another. That is gospel message.
That's crucial to the gospel. And the disciples, the apostles
here are saying we can't afford not to do that good ministry,
but at the same time we can't get distracted from preaching
the gospel message. So what do we do in verse 3?
Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you 7 good men of
good repute. The the weight, the importance
that the the apostles put on this task is seen in in the
people that they choose and how they're charging to do this job.
Just don't find any flunky that can do the work.
No, what do we need in order to show God's love, to demonstrate
the care and compassion that God has for his people, the king has
for his people. What are we supposed to do, pick
out seven men of good repute? It's too, we don't have time to
develop the intent of that. This is not just, you know,
they've got a good reputation. There's so much behind this,
this word of good repute, full of the Spirit and full of
wisdom, and we will appoint them to this duty, but we will devote
ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the Word.
How do we combat the attack of Satan here in this case?
To distract from the good, from the best by the good, to
distract us by the good, helping, caring, loving for one
another, from what is best for the disciples.
The apostles are called to proclaim and to preach the Word.
What's the solution? Gather among us, the people of
God, and the task becomes not theirs, but ours.
Just to build on that a little bit, look in verses 5 and 6
again, what they said, please, the whole gathering.
And so they chose Steven, a man full of faith in the Holy
Spirit. Once again, he's passing out
bread. No, that's not the point.
The point is that this is the ministry of the king.
This is work for the king. And what is work for the king?
Demand work for the king, demands those who are full of
faith and of the Holy Spirit, Stephen, Philip, Procurus, Nick,
Andor, Timor, Permanius, and Nicholas.
Now I read those names. To communicate something that
you're probably not going to be able to pick up.
And I understand that this is one of the things for studying
scripture. You come across things that you
wouldn't picked up otherwise. All of those names are Greek.
All those names are Hellenistic names.
In other words, it's the Hellenistic Jews that are losing
out on the on the daily distribution.
They're the ones that are suffering.
And so how do we go about compensating?
How do we fix this problem? We pick people who will care for
them. And specifically, we on behalf
of the whole community are not picking Hebrew Jews, we're
picking Hellenistic Jews. There's wisdom in what they are
doing to solve this very problem.
What's this? If this is the solution that
they come up with, what's the result?
Sorry, we should read verse 6. These they set before the
apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands on them.
And what's the result? Verse 7?
And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of
disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of
priests became obedient to the faith.
The result is 3 things. Look at it.
And again you can see the word of God continued to increase.
Now, I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I think we all
kind of get the feel for it. The proclamation of the gospel,
the spread of the message of love, the care for the king, the
elevation of the king of kings. This continued to increase.
In other words, it it was manifested more and more clearly
to the whole community, to everybody that was around.
The gospel continued to increase to everybody around.
That's first. Then secondly, and this is, I
don't know, a pastor that it hates that doesn't hate this
verse because what happens because the number of disciples
multiplied greatly. Now we hate that because adding
them disciples is something we want to do because you can
measure adding them multiplied. That's a lot of pressure
multiplied. In other words, God is bringing
in so many people into the community.
The word of God is spreading so powerfully, so wonderfully, that
it's not that you can tell that, well, we're getting different
people, we're getting new people every week to worship.
It's not that. It's that the number is growing
so big that the only way to quantify it is by saying it's
multiplying. It's spreading that much.
And then thirdly, even priests were responding to the Gospel
message. Now, why do we say even priests
Because they were the opponents of the Gospel message.
In other words, one of the results of not being distracted
from the good, but focusing on the on what God has called us to
do. Is it even the opponents end up
embracing the gospel message. What's the point?
I think the point is this. The king is calling each and
everyone of you to a specific task.
Don't get distracted by what is good from doing what God has
called you to do. That's the easy way of looking
at it. OK, so hold on to that.
Put that aside for a second and realize the second point.
Here's the second point. We can't function as part of
God's Kingdom the way God called us the function as part of God's
Kingdom without the input of every single person in this
room. That's that's what what the
people did. They gathered the disciples, the
apostles, gathered up the whole congregation and said, how are
we going to solve this problem? And then they appointed 7 people
as representative of the whole entire group.
The whole entire group is to love.
The whole entire group is to communicate the gospel.
The whole entire group is to share their faith.
We're going to see this in a little bit.
You might have picked up some of the names that you recognize.
Parmenius never shows up again, Timon, Nickandor.
But you do recognize Steven and you might recognize Philip.
And both of these men communicate the gospel message
in all that they do in life. We need to be pushing forward to
understand what God has called Hebron Church to be.
What is Hebron Church's goal in life?
How do we fulfill that mission calling to be part of the
Kingdom of God? And in order to do so, every
person in this room is needed. That's the message of Scripture
that's communicated over and over again.
The passage that Tim read earlier for us hits on that very
point. Every person, no matter how
young you are, you have a role in God's Kingdom.
No matter how old you are, you have a role in God's Kingdom, no
matter how immature you are spiritually.
And I know that there are people here that say, hey, I've only
been coming to worship for a couple of weeks.
I've only been a Christian for a year or two.
No matter how immature you are spiritually, you are called by
the King to serve him and called into this community.
Do you have to be a member of this church?
No, you worship in this church. You're part of our community.
God has called you to minister here in this place, and we can't
fulfill God's calling without you.
It's that easy. The Cantor was necessary.
Timon was necessary, Steven Phillip was necessary.
Henry is necessary, Linda is necessary, Alex is necessary,
Mark is necessary, Chuck is necessary.
I'm just naming off people that I see necessary, and I know it
because God's called you here to this place, to his Kingdom.
First off, Lord, speak to me so that I can see what you want for
me to do. Secondly, empower me.
Enable me, fill me with your Spirit, fill me with wisdom.
Enable me to be the man or woman of God that you call me to be so
I can fulfill that Kingdom purpose here at Heaven Church
and beyond. Two prayers, speak to me,
empower me. Go ahead, pray.
Lord, I do pray that you would enable us not to be distracted
by good things, but to listen well for the calling that you
have given to us as individuals, and then as calling to be part
of this community, to see your Kingdom come powerfully here
through Hebron Church and in Penn Hills and in Pittsburgh and
in the United States and across this world.
Lord, speak to each of us individually if we are used to
listening to your voice or not. Lord, speak so that each of us
can hear. And then, Lord, give to us what
we need in order to be faithful to the calling that you've given
to us. We ask all this through Christ
our Lord, Amen.