SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Revive Church.
SPEAKER_00: Glad you're here.
SPEAKER_00: My name is Pastor Kyle, and I'm excited to bring God's Word this morning.
SPEAKER_00: If you have a Bible, or if you have a Luke, or not a Luke, an Acts journal.
SPEAKER_00: I'm still doing that.
SPEAKER_00: If you have an Acts journal, turn to Acts chapter 8.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have an Acts journal and you want one, uh make sure you grab one on the way out.
SPEAKER_00: This is a great way for you to get in God's word and write down what He's telling you as you are reading.
SPEAKER_00: This morning we're going to cover 25 verses in Acts chapter 8.
SPEAKER_00: And here's the big idea of this morning.
SPEAKER_00: It was hard to put this in a sentence because there's so much going on in these 25 verses, but here's the big idea.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is carried by everyone to everywhere through the power and free gift of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is carried by everyone to everywhere through the power and the free gift of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Anybody's lawn having trouble right now growing?
SPEAKER_00: Anyone with me on that?
SPEAKER_00: If you're retired and your lawn looks like you could hit a pitching wedge, I don't want to see your lawn.
SPEAKER_00: My lawn looks like a basically a dirt patch.
SPEAKER_00: And so a few weeks ago, uh there was a guy that was aerating and overseating my neighbor's lawn.
SPEAKER_00: So I just did that thing where you go across the street and you're like, hey, as you can see, I need what you have.
SPEAKER_00: And so uh he came over, paid him to do it.
SPEAKER_00: And over the last couple weeks, with a lot of rain, starting to see some sprouts, which is awesome.
SPEAKER_00: And I just go out there because you can still see the holes from the aeration.
SPEAKER_00: I just go out there and I just start tossing seed, like hoping and praying that the seed will find one of those holes and will begin to grow.
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's starting to happen.
SPEAKER_00: Um, that was the picture I got when I thought about this sermon, because there's so much going on, and not everything that I say to you probably is going to apply to your life right now in this moment, but there's a lot of seed in this sermon.
SPEAKER_00: And so if you walk out the door with a sprout in your heart of what God wants to do, um, it'll be awesome.
SPEAKER_00: And so that's my prayer this morning as we look at God's word together, that he would work to grow us into followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We are in the midst of this second movement through the book of Acts that we have titled Unstoppable The Church on Mission.
SPEAKER_00: And last week we walked through the tragic death of the stoning of Stephen, and we saw this Stephen, who was one of the deacons and the early leaders in the church.
SPEAKER_00: He was brought before court with all of these kind of sham charges where he was being charged with things that were not true, and we watched as the crowd became a mob and they stoned him to death.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're turning the page from that moment, and we're gonna see what happens in the story of the early church.
SPEAKER_00: Acts chapter 8, beginning in verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: And Saul approved of his execution, and there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles.
SPEAKER_00: Devout men buried Stephen and made a great lamentation over him.
SPEAKER_00: But Saul was ravaging the church and entering house after house.
SPEAKER_00: He dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.
SPEAKER_00: Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word.
SPEAKER_00: If you take notes, write this down.
SPEAKER_00: God uses what the enemy means for evil to move the gospel forward.
SPEAKER_00: Just when it looks like the church has its back against the wall as they watch one of their leaders being stoned to death.
SPEAKER_00: In plain sight, we find out in verses one through four that God is going to use this evil and he's going to make things that are good.
SPEAKER_00: Couple weeks, we'll do a deep dive into Saul, the character of Saul, who later becomes Paul.
SPEAKER_00: But here's what you need to know for right now.
SPEAKER_00: Saul was a Pharisee.
SPEAKER_00: He was a powerful Jewish religious leader who was trying his best to follow the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: And so he saw Jesus the Messiah as a false Messiah.
SPEAKER_00: And so what he was doing is he was trying to kind of blot out all, get rid of all of the people who were associated with this ministry that Jesus had after his death.
SPEAKER_00: And so we find out early in this passage that Saul was literally showing up at people's homes, dragging men and women out of their houses and sending them to prison.
SPEAKER_00: So think of Saul as the church's public enemy, number one.
SPEAKER_00: So people, they're literally running out of Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: You have these 10,000 plus new converts, new followers of Jesus, who many of them didn't live in Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: They just happened to be in Jerusalem for the feast at Pentecost.
SPEAKER_00: And when the Holy Spirit came on the 120 and they began speaking in tongues, you had people that were getting saved left and right.
SPEAKER_00: And so they created a subculture and a community within the city of Jerusalem, where Acts 2 tells us they gathered together every day.
SPEAKER_00: They took communion with one another, they listened to the preaching of God's word, they shared with one another to the point where no one had a need.
SPEAKER_00: And so before the stoning of Stephen, it looked like the church was pretty content with just staying in Jerusalem, kind of staying in this holy huddle, but all of this was part of God's plan.
SPEAKER_00: God was working in the background.
SPEAKER_00: If you remember back to the beginning of this series, Acts chapter 1, verse 8, before Jesus left and ascended to the right hand of the Father, do you remember what he told his disciples?
SPEAKER_00: He said to his disciples, Go to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to send you my spirit, and empowered by my spirit, you're going to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Where does Luke tell us right now in this moment that the people spread out to?
SPEAKER_00: Well, they spread out to Judea and Samaria.
SPEAKER_00: And so we find out God's in control of this situation.
SPEAKER_00: And what looked like the church being pushed back was actually the gospel going forward.
SPEAKER_00: The picture I have is this fire that is beginning to spread, and you start to kind of stamp out the fire.
SPEAKER_00: You want to put the fire out, but as you're stamping out the fire, guess what?
SPEAKER_00: Sparks begin to fly, and all of a sudden, what was a small fire becomes a forest fire.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what's happening in the church.
SPEAKER_00: The devil is trying to silence the church, but God is scattering it in order to send it.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 4.
SPEAKER_00: Luke says, Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word.
SPEAKER_00: Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Write this down.
SPEAKER_00: The mission belongs to every believer, not just church leaders.
SPEAKER_00: You see, there were three words that Luke said in the first three verses of this chapter that I don't want us to miss.
SPEAKER_00: In the midst of Stephen's martyrdom, when the church began to spread all throughout Judea and Samaria, did you catch what the apostles did?
SPEAKER_00: It says that everyone left, all 10,000 of these new converts left Jerusalem, but guess what?
SPEAKER_00: The apostles stayed.
SPEAKER_00: Except the apostles.
SPEAKER_00: Everyone went except the apostles.
SPEAKER_00: As I read this this week, I was a little convicted as a pastor who leads with other pastors and elders and church leaders to make sure that we are modeling within this church the purpose of why we gather together on a Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_00: The reason why we gather together on a Sunday morning is to be equipped by the Word of God to then go out and take the gospel everywhere we go.
SPEAKER_00: You see, the apostles stayed back in Jerusalem, but guess what?
SPEAKER_00: All 10,000 plus other people, they went out.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is crazy when you think about it.
SPEAKER_00: The apostles like Peter and John, the ones who were preaching the sermons in the first seven chapters of Acts, the ones who were the vocal leaders who had the vision for where the church was going.
SPEAKER_00: They were the ones who were given the mantle of teaching God's word, and now in the midst of this great persecution, when everyone else leaves, they stay.
SPEAKER_00: Now we associate the word preaching with this idea of what I'm doing right now.
SPEAKER_00: Like all across Denver, right now, there are other versions of me that are standing on a stage and they are teaching God's word right now.
SPEAKER_00: And that is kind of a limited definition of what we think about when we think of the word preaching.
SPEAKER_00: But when the Bible talks about preaching, it doesn't use the word in that sense only.
SPEAKER_00: It uses preaching in the sense of the Greek word here, which is to evangelize.
SPEAKER_00: To evangelize, to live our lives in such a way that through word and deed, through demonstration and proclamation, we are sharing and showing the gospel right where we are.
SPEAKER_00: One of the foundations of who we are as a church is our mission statement.
SPEAKER_00: And we do it every single week, right?
SPEAKER_00: At the end of the service, I stand up here, or someone else stands up here, and we ask you to hold out your hands and we say something to the effect of God sent Jesus to die on a cross for the brokenness of this world.
SPEAKER_00: And now Jesus is sending you to live and love like Jesus right where you are.
SPEAKER_00: And so to be on mission means to be sent out.
SPEAKER_00: It means to be sent ones where we live, work, study, and play so that other people can see the gospel and taste and see that Jesus is good.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this requires a shift of mindset, particularly in the Western church.
SPEAKER_00: Part of the reason why I think we've seen a decline in the Western church, although we're seeing a rise in church attendance among Gen Z right now.
SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons why we saw that big dip for a long period of time in the church is because preaching or sharing the gospel was regulated to the people that stand on a stage once a week for an hour in different parts of the world.
SPEAKER_00: But the Bible doesn't prescribe the gospel going out in that way only.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean you shouldn't go to a church.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that you shouldn't invite someone here to listen to the gospel and hopefully respond to the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't mean that you should stop coming to church and being equipped to share the gospel right where you are.
SPEAKER_00: But what it does mean is that each of us have a part to play in living out the gospel through demonstration and sharing the gospel through proclamation right where we are.
SPEAKER_00: Starting in our home, in that circle, and making its way out to our other circles of influence.
SPEAKER_00: Every Christian is a sent person on mission right where we are.
SPEAKER_00: So if you're a Christian, listen, you are more than a consumer, you are a contributor.
SPEAKER_00: Because here's what I know: you can come to this church, you can sit in this room for 20 years and never tell anyone about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You can come and you can gather faithfully, you can give of your money and you can give of your time, and you can walk out these doors actually never joining Jesus in his mission right where you are.
SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
SPEAKER_00: He wants to use you right where you are as a conduit for the gospel of Jesus Christ to go out so that others can receive it and follow him.
SPEAKER_00: But when the gospel does move through ordinary people, we're gonna see in the story, it doesn't go to familiar places.
SPEAKER_00: It actually is willing to cross any boundary, ones that we wouldn't normally or naturally want to cross.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 5.
SPEAKER_00: Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip when they heard him and saw the signs that he did.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 7.
SPEAKER_00: For unclean spirits crying out with a loud voice came out of many who had them.
SPEAKER_00: And many who were paralyzed or lame were healed.
SPEAKER_00: And then verse 8.
SPEAKER_00: So there was much joy in that city.
SPEAKER_00: Write this down.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel crosses boundaries and brings joy where no one expected it.
SPEAKER_00: Here we're introduced to Philip.
SPEAKER_00: Philip served alongside Stephen.
SPEAKER_00: He was one of the seven early leaders of the church that were tasked with making sure that the Grecian widows were not pushed out of the food line, making sure that the widows were cared for.
SPEAKER_00: But he also had a ministry like Stephen, where he was now going from city to city and he was preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And what we see in this passage is something that I've tried to make very clear as we've walked through the book of Acts.
SPEAKER_00: Everywhere you see God moving, you will also see the devil moving as well.
SPEAKER_00: Everywhere where you see God taking ground or throwing a punch, guess what?
SPEAKER_00: The devil is right there to counterpunch.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not just talking about the book of Acts that was written 2,000 years ago.
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about in your own life.
SPEAKER_00: When you come into agreement with God that his mission is your mission, you better be prepared for a counterpunch from the devil.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, he's happy for you to come to church every week.
SPEAKER_00: He's happy for you to even throw a little money toward the mission of God.
SPEAKER_00: But as soon as you get serious about being empowered by the Holy Spirit to live in love like Jesus, right where you are, you got to expect the counterpunch.
SPEAKER_00: This is war.
SPEAKER_00: I want to make that clear.
SPEAKER_00: This is war that we're in right now.
SPEAKER_00: We continue to see this as a church.
SPEAKER_00: I've seen more spiritual warfare and evidence of darkness pushing back on what we're doing as a church right now.
SPEAKER_00: I've seen more in the last three years than I saw in the 15 years combined before we launched the bridge.
SPEAKER_00: Your relationship with Jesus, I hear this sometimes, it's just me and Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That's fine.
SPEAKER_00: Your relationship with Jesus can be personal, but I'm gonna tell you right now, it should never be private.
SPEAKER_00: It can be personal, but it should never be private.
SPEAKER_00: It's meant to be shared with others.
SPEAKER_00: I love this.
SPEAKER_00: The name of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Luke tells us that when Philip came into the town, he didn't start preaching all kinds of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: He just preached Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Very simply.
SPEAKER_00: He preached the name of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Did you see the result when Philip preached the name of Christ?
SPEAKER_00: Did you see what happened when the gospel came into this new territory?
SPEAKER_00: The demons started shrieking and coming out of people.
SPEAKER_00: Like people in this moment are literally being set free.
SPEAKER_00: We struggle with this.
SPEAKER_00: We we still a little bit are kind of like, I'm not sure I believe in demons.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not actually sure that I believe in evil spirits.
SPEAKER_00: I was listening to a preacher a few weeks ago and we had a phone conversation.
SPEAKER_00: He was talking about ministry that he does in Kenya.
SPEAKER_00: And he was talking about Kenyan people when they see something like a sickness or a disease, their first question is to ask, hey, could this be this disease or sickness be something outside of the spiritual nature of life?
SPEAKER_00: Could it be that?
SPEAKER_00: We go to the complete opposite perspective.
SPEAKER_00: We don't consider any of that as spiritual.
SPEAKER_00: And yet what we see in this text is that when Philip showed up, not only were these demons being cast out, but the lame were walking.
SPEAKER_00: People were getting healed in every sense of the word.
SPEAKER_00: Philip showed up in Samaria.
SPEAKER_00: Samaria, yes, Samaria.
SPEAKER_00: Why is this significant?
SPEAKER_00: It's significant because the Jewish people and the Samaritan people were enemies, like ruthless enemies with one another.
SPEAKER_00: You remember in Luke's gospel, we're told that Jesus went to Samaria, and we don't know where the other disciples went.
SPEAKER_00: Most likely they weren't very comfortable with being in Samaria because Jewish people avoided Samaria.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus, where did he go?
SPEAKER_00: He went right to the public place, the well, where he encountered a woman, and it was through that conversation where Jesus showed up, and that woman, after encountering Jesus, was saved.
SPEAKER_00: And then we see also in Jesus' teachings the parable of the good Samaritan.
SPEAKER_00: You remember this story?
SPEAKER_00: A Jewish man, he was beaten on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, and this Jewish man he was left for dead, and a Jewish priest passed by and just kind of looked at the man from the other side, didn't even cross the street to go help him or bandage his wounds.
SPEAKER_00: And yet a Samaritan came and stopped, bandaged the Jewish man up, and then took him to a nearby inn where not only did he pay for his bill to nurse him back to health, but he said, I'll pay for as long as he needs to stay.
SPEAKER_00: And what's Jesus doing in that parable?
SPEAKER_00: He's showing the religious leaders of his day, and he's showing us that oftentimes the human response is actually to not have any love for enemies, to have no care or thought of them as our neighbors.
SPEAKER_00: Samaria, and this cannot be missed, Samaria is the first place that the gospel goes out of Jerusalem, where it is preached, but not only where it is preached, but where it was received with great joy.
SPEAKER_00: There is no boundary to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to and is embraced in areas where it's least expected.
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm curious, who or what is your Samaria?
SPEAKER_00: Who are the people that you naturally avoid in your life?
SPEAKER_00: Who are the people that you assume are too far, too different, too hostile, too uninterested, too unlikely to receive the good news of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is to be carried by everyone to everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: But as we see in the story, whenever the gospel enters new territory, it also exposes false powers.
SPEAKER_00: It exposes false worship and false hearts.
SPEAKER_00: And what we see as we get to verse 9, and there's a shift in Luke's writing.
SPEAKER_00: You know when you're watching a movie and everything in the movie seems to be fine, and then all of a sudden there's this ominous music that comes in the background.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm talking about?
SPEAKER_00: This is the ominous music in the movie background.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 9, but there was a man named Simon who had previously practiced magic in the city and amazed the people of Samaria, saying that he himself was somebody great.
SPEAKER_00: They all paid attention to him, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the power of God that is called great.
SPEAKER_00: And they paid attention to him because for a long time he had amazed them with his magic.
SPEAKER_00: But when they believed Philip, as he preached the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women.
SPEAKER_00: Even Simon himself believed, and after being baptized, he continued with Philip.
SPEAKER_00: And seeing signs and great miracles performed, he was amazed.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so we meet Simon the magician.
SPEAKER_00: Your Bible might call him a sorcerer.
SPEAKER_00: And Simon, he took special interest in not really Philip, but in Philip's miracles.
SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about this before.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's worth mentioning again.
SPEAKER_00: God is not the only one who can do miracles, signs, and wonders.
SPEAKER_00: Actually, darkness can also manifest the miraculous.
SPEAKER_00: If you remember our study in Exodus, when God began performing the plagues in judgment on Pharaoh and Egypt, you remember that Pharaoh, he had some magicians who could mimic some of those plagues.
SPEAKER_00: So we have this guy named Simon.
SPEAKER_00: We don't know everything about him, but he's clearly messing with some kind of darkness, some kind of sorcery or black magic, and he has this reputation among the people of his city as being the power of God that is called great.
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine having that nickname?
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine how big your head and ego must have been?
SPEAKER_00: You are literally called the power of God that is called great.
SPEAKER_00: So Simon thought of himself very highly.
SPEAKER_00: Now it's important to note here that Simon and the people of Samaria, they were syncretistic in their approach to religion.
SPEAKER_00: Have you heard the term syncretism?
SPEAKER_00: Syncretism is this.
SPEAKER_00: Syncretism means to combine different forms of belief and religion into one.
SPEAKER_00: I like to call this smoothie spirituality.
SPEAKER_00: Any smoothie fans in the house?
SPEAKER_00: Well, my kids are smoothie fans.
SPEAKER_00: And when someone in my house decides to make a smoothie, I'm telling you, every cupboard's open, all the refrigerator doors are open, we're looking in the freezer, they're scrounging.
SPEAKER_00: And they're asking the question: can we find enough ingredients that if we put them in the blender and we mix them together, even if it doesn't look like they'll work on the surface, it'll taste good.
SPEAKER_00: And so they're grabbing strawberries and they're grabbing bananas and they're grabbing mangoes.
SPEAKER_00: And the worst is when you get all the fruit in there and you realize, I have no milk.
SPEAKER_00: And then you gotta drink a water smoothie.
SPEAKER_00: Come on.
SPEAKER_00: Colorado, the state of Colorado, and I don't want to just put Colorado in this box, I would just say our world in general right now is a very syncretistic culture.
SPEAKER_00: People seem to embrace this smoothie type spirituality.
SPEAKER_00: You can you can you can see if you go to Boulder today, if you drive up to Boulder, Boulder is one of the darkest places on earth, and yet if you walk down the streets of Boulder, here's what you will see: you will see people crying out to a God that they don't know.
SPEAKER_00: You will see all kinds of stores, you'll see palm readings, you'll see horoscopes, you'll see all kinds of things.
SPEAKER_00: And so there is this approach right now, even in the midst of darkness, to try to figure out a way to take all of these kind of spiritual approaches, throw them in the blender, blend it together, and then there'll maybe be something that will work for my life.
SPEAKER_00: You see, Orthodox churches like Revived Church are growing, but so are churches that are progressive and unorthodox in theology.
SPEAKER_00: Churches that don't see the Bible as the authority of God, churches that want to kind of mix and kind of take from here and take from here.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm gonna tell you right now that this type of thinking is even making its way in Orthodox churches.
SPEAKER_00: It's not just other churches or other sects where you see these kinds of things being put together, even within the church.
SPEAKER_00: I've heard about witchcraft and crystals and horoscopes and astrology and palm reading and dark magic and spellcasting games.
SPEAKER_00: This stuff's becoming more and more common.
SPEAKER_00: I've been in conversations recently where I've been asked if some of these things can be mixed with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: No, they can't.
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely not.
SPEAKER_00: Deuteronomy 18, 10 through 12 says, Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or their daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcrafts, or casts spells, or who is a medium or a spiritist who can or who consults the dead.
SPEAKER_00: Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Because of these same detestable practices, the Lord your God will drive out the nations before you.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is not one ingredient to add into the spiritual blender.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is Lord or He's nothing.
SPEAKER_00: He's the banana, the strawberry, the yogurt, the milk, he's all of it.
SPEAKER_00: Now, Simon, he doesn't just represent magic in the story.
SPEAKER_00: He represents a heart that wants spiritual power without surrender.
SPEAKER_00: And this is where we gotta stop for a minute.
SPEAKER_00: This is where the Lord convicted me.
SPEAKER_00: Because here's what we see in this story that is so powerful.
SPEAKER_00: We see someone who, when you just look at the outside, they've done all the things.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Simon, it says that he believed.
SPEAKER_00: It says that he was baptized.
SPEAKER_00: And yet we're gonna get to the story in a moment at the end of it, and it's gonna cause great concern.
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna, to be honest with you, it's gonna feel like the Bible's stepping on your feet a little bit.
SPEAKER_00: And I know that because it felt like the Bible was stepping on my feet this week.
SPEAKER_00: So here's what we're gonna do.
SPEAKER_00: Time out.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna pause the story of Simon.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna come back to him in just a moment.
SPEAKER_00: There's a little detour that happens within the context of this story that is actually from a theological perspective, it's really, really important for us to understand what happens in this detour, and then we'll come back to Simon.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 14 of chapter 8.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: For he, being the Holy Spirit, had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Write this down.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit unites one church in one baptism under one Lord.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit unites one church in one baptism under one Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I'll just be honest, when you read this passage, it can sound really confusing because the Samaritan people, they clearly have put their faith in Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: They're seeing miracles all around them.
SPEAKER_00: They were baptized, meaning they were water baptized, they were immersed in water to proclaim their faith in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: But it says here that they were not yet filled with the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Some of my more charismatic friends in the room, you're like, uh oh.
SPEAKER_00: Listen, listen, listen, hear me out.
SPEAKER_00: This is where people get confused on baptism with some people looking at these passages and saying that there are two baptisms: one with water and then one with fire, or you maybe have heard of it as the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: And rightly so.
SPEAKER_00: You have this group of people, they trust in Christ, they're baptized by Philip, but they don't receive the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, Peter and John have to come down from Jerusalem to lay hands on them in order for them to receive it.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when you come to Acts chapter 10, you actually almost have something of the opposite happen.
SPEAKER_00: In a few weeks, we're gonna look at a story of a Roman named Cornelius, and his entire family accept Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And they start speaking in tongues, people start prophesying, and so they clearly have the gift of the Holy Spirit, but it says that after that they were baptized in water.
SPEAKER_00: So what's the deal?
SPEAKER_00: How do we interpret this?
SPEAKER_00: Are there one or two baptisms?
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's where we have to take a step back and we have to understand the nature of what it means to be baptized into Christ.
SPEAKER_00: This is where in the church we have a limited view and a limited understanding of the word baptism.
SPEAKER_00: When we think of baptism, we think of someone being immersed in water on stage as a public profession of faith.
SPEAKER_00: And we'll do that again in July.
SPEAKER_00: But the word baptism does not just mean to be immersed in water.
SPEAKER_00: The word baptism means to be immersed in someone or something.
SPEAKER_00: So right now, if I had one and I wish I did, I could baptize a tortilla chip in queso.
SPEAKER_00: And I hope to do that very soon.
SPEAKER_00: To be baptized in the Holy Spirit is to be immersed in and united with Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It's for everyone who is in Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Not for some of the varsity Christians.
SPEAKER_00: It's not like the JV Christians are left out in the cold wishing they too could get baptized with the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible, particularly Ephesians 1, says that when we put our faith in Christ, we are given the Holy Spirit and we are sealed in Him.
SPEAKER_00: That is our spiritual baptism.
SPEAKER_00: That is in that moment our union with Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That's why when we baptize people on a baptism Sunday, we are very clear in the baptism class, and we are very clear as pastors and elders in our conversation that nothing that you do on this stage where you go underwater makes you a follower of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: There is nothing about the act of water baptism that should be associated with your salvation.
SPEAKER_00: It is simply the place and the time where you follow Jesus' example of proclaiming your faith publicly.
SPEAKER_00: It's where you say, I am all in for Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I'm immersed in Him, filled with the Spirit, committed to a life of following Him.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if that is true, why do water baptism and receiving the Spirit seem separated in places in the book of Acts?
SPEAKER_00: Why didn't everyone just receive the Holy Spirit at the exact time that they believed?
SPEAKER_00: Couple of reasons.
SPEAKER_00: Number one, and I've said this before, at the beginning of the series, I said when you read the book of Acts, you have to read the book of Acts not simply as prescriptive, but descriptive.
SPEAKER_00: There are prescriptive statements in the book of Acts where we are told that we are to be Jesus' ambassadors throughout the world.
SPEAKER_00: We're told that we've been given his spirit in order to be witnesses.
SPEAKER_00: But there are also descriptive statements that are unique to the book of Acts.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: The book of Acts is telling the once in history story of the launch of Jesus' church.
SPEAKER_00: And so there are things that have happened in this book that are unique to this moment in history.
SPEAKER_00: For example, at Pentecost, when the believers gathered in the upper room and the Holy Spirit came on 120 of them, and they began to see tongues of fire on one another's heads, and they start speaking in unknown languages.
SPEAKER_00: That was describing the way, in that moment, that God chose to launch the early church very strategically and specifically during Pentecost, when you had all of these Jewish people from throughout the Roman world who were gathered together in one place.
SPEAKER_00: And yet we should not view that experience as a normative way of viewing the work of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: This is why I push back so hard on people who say that the baptism of the Holy Spirit will always be accompanied with speaking in tongues.
SPEAKER_00: That would be to look at Pentecost and other places in Acts as prescriptive, and there's nothing in the rest of Scripture that even suggests that speaking in tongues is the proof of salvation, or, shall I say, the proof that someone's not saved if they don't have it.
SPEAKER_00: But what is true is that all believers in Jesus Christ are actually given at least one gift of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: There are 20 spiritual gifts listed in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: That means the body of Christ, God has specifically made us very diverse, very different, in order to live those Holy Spirit-empowered gifts out in order to play our part in the church.
SPEAKER_00: Second thing, what is happening in this story in Samaria is monumental.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is spreading out of Jerusalem and it's spreading into other cultures, into other places.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna tell you right now, Philip is not some rogue evangelist.
SPEAKER_00: He's operating under the leadership and the authority of the apostles.
SPEAKER_00: And so when he sees the Samaritans, the enemies of the Jews, when he sees them believing in Jesus Christ, repenting, believing, and turning their lives to Christ, guess what he does?
SPEAKER_00: He gets on the first century phone, whatever that looked like, send somebody on a donkey, and said, Oh my goodness, you're not gonna believe this.
SPEAKER_00: Nobody else is gonna believe this.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, no one else is gonna believe it.
SPEAKER_00: You better get down here because you need to be eyewitnesses of this.
SPEAKER_00: And so there's something that is happening in this moment to validate not just the apostolic office of Peter and John and others, but also to validate the fact that the gospel is spreading to their enemies.
SPEAKER_00: And wouldn't it be like God to allow these new Samaritan believers to have a similar experience to the Jewish believers at Pentecost?
SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't that be like God to just be so kind and be so generous?
SPEAKER_00: Not to give a different experience, but to be able to relate them to one another in that deep, profound movement of the Spirit?
SPEAKER_00: Sounds like Jesus Christ to me.
SPEAKER_00: But Luke's not finished with Simon.
SPEAKER_00: Because while the Spirit is uniting true believers, Simon's response reveals the danger of being near the things of God without truly surrendering to God.
SPEAKER_00: I need y'all to hear this.
SPEAKER_00: I had to hear this as a pastor this week.
SPEAKER_00: I need you to hear it.
SPEAKER_00: And so when you hear it, I'm stepping on your toes and at the same time I'm giving you a big hug too.
SPEAKER_00: I need you to hear what Luke is about to tell us here is it is an easy trap and a hole for us to fall into.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands, he offered them money, saying, Give me this power also, so that anyone on whom I lay hands on may receive the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: But Peter said to him, May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money.
SPEAKER_00: You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God.
SPEAKER_00: Repent, therefore, of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you.
SPEAKER_00: For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.
SPEAKER_00: And Simon answered, Pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said may come upon me.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when they had testified and spoken the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel to many villages of the Samaritans.
SPEAKER_00: Let me write this down.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel exposes the difference between external religion and true surrender.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel exposes the difference between external religion, doing the right things that everybody can see, and true surrender, which is a heart posture.
SPEAKER_00: Only God can see it.
SPEAKER_00: And so let's recap Simon for a moment in case we forgot.
SPEAKER_00: He was running a popular magic show in Samaria.
SPEAKER_00: And then all of a sudden, Philip came into town, and when Philip came into town, demons started shrieking.
SPEAKER_00: People started getting healed.
SPEAKER_00: Like people in the city who had never walked began to walk.
SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, Simon's fans became Philip fans.
SPEAKER_00: And then ultimately they became Jesus fans.
SPEAKER_00: And the the magic show that he once had was no longer.
SPEAKER_00: And so he actually sees Simon sees the power of God.
SPEAKER_00: Simon sees the power of God.
SPEAKER_00: And it says that he believes.
SPEAKER_00: And he was even baptized.
SPEAKER_00: So if we just stop the story right there, so far, so good, right?
SPEAKER_00: But then we see Simon's heart.
SPEAKER_00: We see the motive behind his decision.
SPEAKER_00: He wants power.
SPEAKER_00: He wants the gift of the Holy Spirit, but not the giver.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible said Simon believed and was baptized.
SPEAKER_00: This is where I gotta be really careful because when we think of the word faith and believe, the Bible talks about the word faith and believe.
SPEAKER_00: When Paul talks about we are saved by faith in the book of Romans, you have to hear this.
SPEAKER_00: He's not talking about in an intellectual ascent that there might be a God or maybe I believe in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I need you to hear that.
SPEAKER_00: When the Bible talks about being justified before God through faith in Jesus Christ, it is talking about allegiance.
SPEAKER_00: I give my allegiance to Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Not an intellectual ascent that I believe in him.
SPEAKER_00: He was a real man that walked the earth one day.
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_00: He has my allegiance.
SPEAKER_00: He is my Lord and I am his servant.
SPEAKER_00: And that's it.
SPEAKER_00: James 2 reminds us that even the demons believe.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus told us, hey, there's going to be people on that day of judgment that show up and they're going to claim, Man, I cast out demons in your name, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I prophesied in your name, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I did all of these miraculous things, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus is going to say, Depart from me, I never knew you.
SPEAKER_00: You see, you can be close to the things of God and still not be surrendered to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: When I was in college, I was facing some trouble.
SPEAKER_00: Bunch of my friends were getting kicked out of my little Christian college for drug use.
SPEAKER_00: And so I decided that I was going to get baptized.
SPEAKER_00: Looking back at that decision, what I was trying to do was to get the attention off of my bad behavior through doing something spiritual that other people could see.
SPEAKER_00: That's how dark and twisted I was.
SPEAKER_00: And that nothing else in my life changed as a result of that decision.
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't filled with the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: I continue living in sin, unchanged, unrepentant.
SPEAKER_00: I was powerless to follow.
SPEAKER_00: You see, true repentance and conversion, pledging your allegiance to Jesus Christ and being filled with the Spirit will always result in life change.
SPEAKER_00: It may feel slow at times, but it will always result in more following and more surrender of your life to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says, I'll know my followers because they will obey my commands.
SPEAKER_00: If you love me, you will obey my commands.
SPEAKER_00: Not just the command to be baptized, but the command to surrender our lives.
SPEAKER_00: This is a passage, it has tons of application that's built in.
SPEAKER_00: So I know you have plenty to think about as you walk out of this room today.
SPEAKER_00: But as I was sitting in here on Thursdays, our staff gathers in this space at 11:30 every Thursday.
SPEAKER_00: So if you want to pray over this space with us, we're here every Thursday, 11:30.
SPEAKER_00: You're welcome to join us.
SPEAKER_00: And we just walk this entire space.
SPEAKER_00: We pray for what happens up in this altar area.
SPEAKER_00: We pray for what's happening in the seats.
SPEAKER_00: We kneel at the cross and we ask God to work in this room.
SPEAKER_00: And as I was meditating and thinking about Sunday, there was something about this text that hit me personally.
SPEAKER_00: When it comes to this story, we see that this character Simon, very early on in the story, he says that he thought of himself as great.
SPEAKER_00: He thought of his name as great.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, not only did he think of himself as great, but guess what?
SPEAKER_00: The people who came to his magic show, they thought of him as the great power of God.
SPEAKER_00: And so when this new name came into town, when this new power came into town, Jesus' name and Jesus' power, Simon saw in that moment that the attention, the people that clamored, that worshiped him, so to speak, they all left him and went toward the direction of Philip and those who were magnifying the name of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And what we see in this story is what I want to warn us of, and it's this when we think about being filled with the Holy Spirit, when we think about doing great things for God, what we see in this story of Simon, in in his attempt to try to buy the Holy Spirit in order to make his name great, in order to make his name great, he actually ends up diminishing the name of God.
SPEAKER_00: Diminishing the name of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And so for each of us in this room, we have to ask this question when we think about serving the Lord, when we think about using his gifts that he's given us to steward, is our sole intention to lift up the name of Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: Because I'm gonna tell you right now, the Holy Spirit will not fill us in the way that he wants to fill us to make the name of Jesus great if we just want to make our name great.
SPEAKER_00: I've said this over and over about the role of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: The role of the Holy Spirit in Scripture, particularly in the book of John, is to magnify the name of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: So why would God give us his spirit to do things on this earth to magnify Jesus, to lift up his name.
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm gonna have Grayson lead us through a prayer time in a moment.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna ask you to just get real honest with God as I've had to get real honest with God this week, because there are things about my life where if I'm honest and I strip everything away, I go, Kyle, that's about your name.
SPEAKER_00: That's about the greatness of you.
SPEAKER_00: That's not about the greatness of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And this passage challenges us as followers of Christ, filled with the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Are we willing to surrender our entire lives not to make our name great, but instead to make the name of Jesus great?
SPEAKER_00: Grayson's gonna lead us.
SPEAKER_01: Uh I was driving home and there was a radio program on Caleb of a Good Friday service, and there was the speaker sharing, and he was talking about his story.
SPEAKER_01: He's from Iran, and his father was in the previous Iranian before the Iranian Revolution.
SPEAKER_01: So when the Iranian Revolution happened uh and the Ayatollah took over, they uh were taking people who were high up in the old regime and executing them.