What Now? (Acts) | Scattered

In Acts 8, the early church faces real persecution. People are dragged from their homes, imprisoned, and scattered. But something unexpected happens: the scattering doesn't silence them. It spreads them. The enemy's strategy to destroy the church ends up planting it in places it had never reached.

In this message, Pastor Derek looks at what it actually means to live as resurrection people not just in theory, but in the moment when someone says something cutting, a decision gets made without you, or a relationship goes sideways. If Jesus was raised from the dead, that changes what's available to you in the next sixty seconds. You don't have to defend. You don't have to win. You don't have to protect anything.

The sign of people who actually believe that? Not anger. Not bitterness. Joy.

Part of the ongoing series What Now? — walking through the book of Acts together at Summer Street Church on Nantucket.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What do you do when you feel persecuted? I'm not asking this in any like judgment uh judgmental way or accusatory way. In fact, I'm sort of doing the opposite because when I look in the mirror and I put that question to myself, I have to confess, I in just a minute, but I'm talking about even lesser forms of persecution. And those lesser forms, even for for most people. For example, when we feel misunderstood, or when we feel unheard, when we feel judged, or when we feel excluded, we've all experienced persecution in all its forms, mostly maybe some of the lesser forms. And as a result, we've developed ways to and ultimately to protect ourselves, to stay safe and to get what we need out of the world. Uh some of us, when we feel persecuted or judged, or misunderstood or whatever, we we defend ourselves. We try to explain, we we reason, we we try to make our case. Some of some of us counterpunch. Oh, you you want to swing at me, I'll swing at you. So we attack or we blame the people around us or we try to get bigger when we feel ourselves under attack. Some of us just retreat, we go internal, we we lock the doors, we decide to just sort of keep people out for a little while. And what I want to say about the normal ways we react to these feelings when we have them is that they are pretty natural human responses or reactions. We we learn them and we began learning them when we were very young. And they have served, these strategies, they have served to keep us safe in in many ways. When we talk about persecution, what are we talking about? I would define it this way: persecution is opposition, mistreatment, or exclusion that causes you suffering. Okay, I'm gonna say that again. Persecution is opposition. Many of us have felt opposition this week, mistreatment or exclusion that causes you suffering. And so what I want to sort of get across this morning is this idea that persecution in all of its forms, great and small, is unavoidable. We're all going to experience persecution throughout life in some way, and most of us experience some version of it actually every single day. Now, each Sunday throughout our teaching series here on the book of Acts, we've been asking one question. And the question is, what now? And what we mean by that, underneath that very simple question, is a more specific question. And the real question we're trying to get at throughout this teaching series is what effect, if any, does the resurrection of Jesus have on how we understand and live our lives? You got that? If the resurrection is real, what effect, real effect, does it have on me in my real, everyday life? We can divide history in all sorts of ways, but one of the most profound ways for us to divide history is before the resurrection and after the resurrection of Jesus. That's how Christians, in essence, divide history. Because Christians are resurrection people. We believe that we are living in a period post-resurrection. We live in light as Christians of the resurrection. In other words, we try to see everything that we experience through the lens of the fact that the person that we now follow is someone who died in history and was raised again. He didn't stay dead. God raised him from the dead. Christianity as a movement is unique in this belief. And it's what drives us, it keeps us moving, it's what keeps the church alive. And if it's true, if the resurrection of Jesus is true, then it changes everything. Now, here's the problem we have. The problem that we have today is that many Christians live as if the resurrection never happened. I'm not saying that Christians believe the resurrection never happened, but what I'm saying is we live practically as if it never did. Many Christians have a way of seeing and living in the world that is completely unaffected by the claim of the resurrection. You don't find that in the pages of Scripture. You don't find that throughout the book of Acts as Christians are being dragged out of their homes and they're being persecuted. You see Christians standing on the fact and dying for the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead. The resurrection had a profound and complete, total effect on the lives of people in the early church. So I want us to look honestly at our lives, not judgmentally today, but let's look honestly at our lives. And I want us to notice are there areas of our life or ways that we are living as if Jesus weren't actually raised? We'll get to some of that in just a second. So we open ourselves up, Holy Spirit, would you just show me? Like, is there some way I'm living as if the resurrection didn't happen? And then, as the Holy Spirit shows us the answer to that question, we would be willing today to make a radical change, whatever change is necessary in order for us to live the peculiar way that resurrection people live. So I want you to begin by just asking yourself a couple of very simple questions. First, do I relate to the people in my life right now according to the light of the resurrection? Maybe a better way to phrase that is does the resurrection of Jesus have any bearing whatsoever on the way that I relate to other people? Does the resurrection of Jesus have any bearing whatsoever on the way that I show up in work or at work, in the work that I actually do? Another question might be do I make decisions about my time, about my money, about my, you know, just general decisions about life. Do I make those decisions in light of the resurrection? Okay, so I want you to just hold those questions this morning as we begin to enter into the text. Look at we, me, look with me at Acts chapter 8, starting in verse 1. If you need a Bible, there's probably one on your row. You can please feel free to use that this morning. Acts 8, starting in verse 1, and Saul approved of their killing him. Talking about Stephen. On that day, a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. So let's just pause right there. On the day that Stephen is killed, everything breaks open. We are confronted with this word persecution. And it comes from a verb that means to pursue or to chase or to hunt down. I mean, you can picture a hunting party tracking and hunting down a wild animal. That's the idea of persecution that Luke is using here. It carries this image of being driven out. But what I want you to see is that it's the same word that Jesus has already used in Matthew chapter five. And he uses the word persecution here to cover everything from violence, like we're seeing beginning to break out here in the book of Acts, all the way down to exclusion and even insult. All of those are caught up in this one word. It's the same category, which tells us that persecution exists on a spectrum. So as I talk about persecution this morning, we might be tempted to go, well, I'm not really persecuted. Well, I'm not really, I mean, we live here in America, and I mean, like someone might insult me or whatever, but I'm not afraid, I'm not being persecuted for my faith. Others of you may have a very different opinion of that, and I and I get that. But understand that persecution covers a whole wide range of experiences that cause us some sort of suffering. What happens to Stephen where he dies for his faith is certainly on one end of the spectrum. What happened to Jesus, according to his own claims, of course, is one end on the spectrum. The conversation where you got steamrolled and everyone ignored you is on the spectrum, but maybe a little bit, you know, on the opposite end of the spectrum. But it's it's all part of the same problem. Both are real. And here's what Jesus never says. Jesus never says, if you are persecuted, no, he says, when you are persecuted. You can't get through life without experiencing this sort of thing. In other words, persecution, suffering at the hands of other people in any form, is not exceptional. It's expected. It's baked into what it costs to be a person who actually stands for something in a world that pushes back against the thing that you stand for. And so on this day here in the book of Acts, persecution begins. And the followers of Jesus we're told are scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. This is the larger surrounding areas around Jerusalem. Now I want you to notice Luke's detail here. He says the apostles stay, but everybody else goes. And everyone who goes, these are ordinary people. They're regular men and women. They're not clergy. They don't have titles. They're not the trained ones. They are the regular ones. They go. They are being persecuted, and that persecution necessarily causes them to go. They're not doing anything wrong. They're doing what they have to do to survive. I'll look back here at the beginning of Acts 8 again. We'll continue reading. Godly men buried Stephen and they mourned for him. They mourned deeply for him. But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison. Stephen is murdered, and this launches this campaign now by the religious establishment to weed out every rebel faction, every member of this renewal rebel movement within Judaism. And so people are being dragged out of their house. Men and women are being put in prison. This isn't metaphorical. It wasn't like things got really hard as if they were these things were happening. No, it was these things were actually happening. It's real persecution, real fear, real loss what the people were experiencing. But here's what Luke notices in the very next verse. Look at verse 4. Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. And Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah there. The persecution that Saul and the religious establishment and ultimately the forces of evil have in mind to levy against the church has the opposite effect. They never should have persecuted the church. They were contained within the walls of Jerusalem. They did the worst thing they could possibly do in scattering these people because when they went, they didn't go silently and they didn't go into hiding. They preach as they go, they tell the story, the gospel, the good news of Jesus everywhere that they are scattered. I want you to think about what that means for a second. I mean, you've seen what happens when the wind picks up and it catches the top of a dandelion. What's happening there, right? The seeds are being scattered. The wind is taking it elsewhere where that the seeds will be spread. Or when a bird lands in the middle of a field and it takes off and it scatters seed in every direction. Scattered doesn't mean destroyed, it means spread. And so the enemy's strategy was to silence the church by breaking it apart. But here the scattering of the seed is just planting the kingdom in more places. You see what happens. See what happens here when we react to persecution using our usual strategies where we defend or we swing back or we go into hiding. What happens when we react to persecution in our lives that way is that it stops the seed of the gospel from spreading through our lives. Perfectly natural to want to defend ourselves. But something supernatural is happening here. And so what now, in light of the resurrection, what do we do when we're persecuted? Do we just go into our little hole? Not if we want to follow the example that we see in the scriptures. Persecution and suffering become a beautiful sort of opportunity for the kingdom to grow, for it to move. So kingdom people recognize that whenever they face persecution of any kind, it's the perfect circumstance to share the good news, to live the gospel. So this is what happens: persecution breaks out, and we're told that then Philip goes to Samaria. Samaria is not a neutral place to go. The Samaritans and the Jews, they have quite a history, centuries and centuries of history, actually. Mixed race, mixed religion, mutual contempt on all sides. Jewish people notoriously and famously just wouldn't go to Samaria if they could avoid it. It's partly what makes the story of Jesus going to Samaria and meeting a Samaritan woman so scandalous. What Jewish person would go there? But Philip goes there and he proclaims the Messiah there. And what we see is that the people who scattered scattered Philip end up being the reason the gospel gets to an unreached people. It gets to the people that Jesus always intended to reach. There might be some things in our lives that we're going to have a hard time getting to, some things maybe that God has in mind for us to do or to experience. And God will use suffering in order to make us uncomfortable, sometimes, oftentimes, to move us from where we are toward the thing that God has for us. Is God bringing the persecution on the church? No, he's not. No, he's not. But he will use that to unseat us, to unrest us so that we will move. And that's what we see happening here. Now, most of the time we don't choose how to respond to persecution. We just react. We just react in one of the ways that I spoke about earlier. Someone says something cutting, and we're already defending before we even know what happened, right? A decision gets made without us, and we're already retreating without even giving it a thought. Why? Because we're on autopilot. This is just what we do. Our autopilot's been running for a really long time. And so what I want to offer you this morning is not a theory. I want to offer you a practice. Something you can actually do the next time that you feel that pressure rising up, when you feel opposition or when you feel mistreatment or exclusion, before you react, I want to encourage you to stop. And we're going to start here. We're going to stop and we're going to ask ourselves one question. Do I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead? Okay. Understand how I'm asking the question. I'm not asking, do I generally believe that God raised Jesus from the dead? What I'm asking is right now, in this situation, do I believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead? And that that matters in this situation somehow. Because if Jesus is resurrected or has been resurrected, then this moment that I'm in, this moment of suffering is not the whole story. It's not the whole moment. This thing or this person, the situation, it does not have the final word. If Jesus has been resurrected, we see that he's overcome both sin and death. That gives Jesus the final word. Jesus determines the outcome of resurrection people. The outcome has already been determined by Jesus who's walked out of the tomb. And that changes what's available to you when you experience persecution. It changes what's available to you in the very next 60 seconds of the persecution that you're experiencing, great or small. You know, you don't have to defend. Why? Because resurrection people have nothing to lose. We look at Stephen and we go, oh my gosh, how did how did he do that? I mean, that's Stephen had nothing to lose. He was a resurrection person. Jesus had the final say, it determined the outcome of Stephen's life. Nobody, even those carrying rocks, were going to determine Stephen's outcome. Jesus had already done it. You know, when you're experiencing persecution, you don't have to counter. Why? Because the victory isn't yours to have to go try and win. You don't have to win the situation. Jesus has already won. You don't have to retreat in the situation. Why? Because you're not alone. You stand there, not exposed by yourself. You stand there with Jesus. Now you can choose. You can choose to react. You can choose to allow your fear to cause you to react or to react from your instinct, or you can choose to react from hope. It's actually possible. I was thinking this week, what would this look like? Like what would it look like if I had a toolkit that I could carry around with me and pull it out? Emily and I were watching a show that was set way back in the day when people talked funny and dressed up in funny costumes. And someone got sick, like they fell ill suddenly, and the doctor said, Get my bag. You remember that kind of thing? Like a doctor was in the house and they had an actual bag that they carried around with them. I thought that would be really helpful if when we find ourselves in a situation where there's some sort of mistreatment or judgment or something that rises up against us, we could say to the person standing next to us, Hey, get my bag, right? Get my toolkit. All right. So we've put a toolkit, I say we, I have put a toolkit together for you that I want to encourage you to carry, begin carrying around with you, so that when you enter into conversations or relationships or places where you sometimes or often experience persecution in one form or another, you can be prepared to begin to choose a different reaction, to react to that persecution in light of the resurrection instead of your own strategies for trying to survive life. Here's the tools. I'm going to give you three tools that I would consider carrying around in your toolkit. Maybe it's a belt. If it's just three tools, maybe we can just carry them on a belt. All right. And maybe if the tools are small, we just carry them in our pocket, but you get the idea. All right, here's the first tool I would consider carrying around. If I wanted to react to persecution in light of the resurrection, the first tool I would carry would be a tool to slow things down. To slow things down. Someone says a careless word. The first thing I want to do is to slow things down. I don't want to just react. Right? Listen to James 1.19. Everyone should be quick to do what? Listen. Slow to become angry. Resurrection people know how to slow things down when they experience suffering or persecution. How do I slow things down? Maybe your parents told you when you're growing up, hey, count to ten. Count to ten. That's way that's too long. I don't think we need 10 seconds. Count to five. Let's just start there, right? Count to five before you actually respond. I'm not saying that metaphorically. I mean literally engage your brain in counting to five. Uh it's going to create an automatic pause, a necessary pause. It's going to pause your normal strategy, your normal reaction, which, let's be honest, is most often a pre-resurrection reaction to persecution. It's going to give us the space we need. Five seconds is long enough to let that autopilot stall out and to allow the spirit to begin to speak to you. Got it? So we need a tool that will help us slow things down. That's the first two. Here's the second tool. We need a tool to respond with a question instead of a statement. Your second tool is a question. Listen to Proverbs 18:13. To answer before listening. This is folly. And shame. To answer before listening is folly and shame. What does a statement do? Someone makes a statement, we're offended, we feel persecuted in some way. What a statement does is it defends or it counters or it closes. What does a question do? It opens. Now I admit it's counterintuitive for someone to hurt us and for us to ask a follow-up question. Say more about that. What do you mean specifically? Right? That's counterintuitive. It feels like inviting more pain. But if we've paused, we're allowing the Holy Spirit to enter into the moment, and then we ask a question. It gives us the opportunity then to answer after listening. Asking a question, it keeps us curious instead of reactive. Help me understand what you mean by that. That's a resurrection move. Say more about that. Here's the third tool. We need a tool that will help us say less than we want to say. And some of us need that tool in this room really badly. A tool that helps us say less than we want to say. Well, where in the Bible does it say that, Pastor? Well, Proverbs 10, 19. Sin is not ended by multiplying words. But the prudent hold their tongue. More words isn't going to help. We feel like we need to get it all out. We need to say everything. We're defending ourselves. They need the full picture here. No, they don't. No, they don't. When we feel threatened, most of us overexplain. We make our case, we we cover our bases, we justify ourselves. But the person who believes that Jesus has already run one doesn't need to win the argument. So the encouragement here is when we when we find these moments where we're we're feeling some sort of suffering brought on by some sort of persecution, we want to say the necessary thing and then just stop. Just stop. I'm going to give you an extra tool, all right, to carry around. This might come in clutch. Some of us might need more than five seconds. What's been done to us or said to us is just too painful. It's too big. And so the bonus tool here, I think, is a timeout tool. Did you know that as an adult, you're also allowed to take a timeout? That timeouts are not reserved for just bad children. Derek, children aren't bad. Yes, they are. They are some of them. Ours were. And so our kids took a lot of timeouts. But as an adult, you can take a timeout. It's good to take a timeout. Timeouts are nice. They help you breathe. They stop the action. They give you a second to think, to regroup. And so a timeout in your situation, if it's possible, it might look like literally just may I can I just excuse myself for just a minute? I will be back. But I just need to excuse myself. Maybe you need to step outside, or maybe you need to just go to the bathroom and give yourself 60 seconds to remember who you are before you speak. Contrary to what some of you may be thinking, what I'm offering you this morning, I know this feels very practical, but what I'm offering you this morning is not weakness. Some of us might think, oh man, you're not standing up for yourself. You're not doing this. That's weak. It's not weakness, it's wisdom. And so if you want to keep living in the same pattern and the same loop and experiencing the same challenges and the same tension, then keep employing your strategies, the ones you've always used. But if you want to begin to live in a resurrection reality and experience breakthrough and in fact allow God to move through you in these moments, then we'll choose a different response, a resurrection response. This is how you live in the moment as a person who believes and hopes in an outcome that has already been determined by Jesus and the life that he brings. I want you to look at the fruit of what happens when resurrection people live differently. Look at verse six. When the crowds heard Philip and saw the signs that he performed, they all paid close attention to what he said. Well, what was going on here exactly? For with shrieks impure spirits came out of many, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. And so when the crowds, they, you know, here in Samaria, they they hear Philip and they they see the signs that he's performing, they pay close attention. I mean, you can't deny the fruit of what's happening in the moment. What we're seeing here is the kingdom of heaven breaking into a physical place on earth. You see that? We see stuff that we saw happening in Jerusalem, and now it's spreading, and the kingdom is breaking into another physical place, a geography, a location. The kingdom of heaven is breaking in. The power of the kingdom is breaking into Samaria. That same power that raised Jesus from the dead. It's showing up in the person, the body of a man who is fleeing for his life. Peter didn't, I'm sorry, Philip didn't have the apostles with him. Peter wasn't standing next to him. Philip didn't have a building or a program or a platform. All Philip had was the spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. That's all Philip had to face the persecution that he was experiencing. And it's all Philip needed. And he went. And that same grace and that same power that we're told filled Stephen is available to all of us, we see. The question is whether we are willing to live in a way that makes room for the kingdom to enter into our most difficult moments. It's easy to kind of gear up and to have some sort of plan to share the good news with somebody. That's not often how the kingdom is spread. The kingdom isn't often spread through human strategies, even good ones. The kingdom is spread through suffering people who are willing to open their mouths and share the hope of Jesus. So I hope there's some hope in there for you. Final verse, verse 8. So there was great joy in that city. I love that Luke includes this joy. I want to hold that up against what we're actually seeing in the American church right now. There are a lot of people in the American church that are feeling persecuted in some kind of way. And I'm not here to deny that, but I just want us to look at what we're actually seeing in the American church in face of perceived and real persecution. Are we seeing joy? Or are we seeing anger? Are we seeing joy as the church gets squeezed here? Or are we seeing defensiveness? Are we seeing joy? Are we seeing bitterness? Contempt for our enemies. I just want to point out this morning that is not a resurrection response. The people in Acts chapter 8, they lost everything. They were hunted, they were being imprisoned, and so they run. But in the wake of their running, in their wake, they leave behind them joy. Joy is a sign of people who actually believe that Jesus is risen. Anger says, I have to protect what I have. And joy says, I don't have to protect anything. Jesus is already one. Defensiveness says, it's my reputation, my safety, my position. That's what's on the line. But joy says, none of that is mine to hold. That's what living in light of the resurrection actually looks like. And so we come back around to the question, what now? When you feel mistreated this week, what will you do? When you feel misunderstood this week, what will you do? When you feel excluded or pushed out, what will you do? And the Christians here in Acts chapter 8, they give us a way forward. They trust the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead to do the rest. They go, and as they go, they just trust the Spirit who raised Jesus to do the rest. Some of you are in a season of real pressure right now. I know in a room this size, there have to be a handful of us in this room who are in a relationship that has gone sideways somehow. Some of us might be in a work situation that feels hostile or unbearable. Others of us in this room, maybe there's a family dynamic that has left you feeling sort of pushed to your limits. I just want to remind you this morning, you might not be able to change the circumstance that you're actually in. Feel like we have much less agency to actually affect the outcomes than we think we have. But what you can do is choose how to carry that. How to carry that suffering, how to carry that persecution, how to carry that judgment. You can change how you carry it. You can defend this week, you can counter this week, you can retreat this week, or you can go, oh, I'm being sent, and this is a moment. I can take the very ground that I'm standing on wherever I've been scattered, and I can bring the kingdom here. Maybe it's just the ability to say, maybe this isn't even about me. What I've made about me and experienced and am taking on. Maybe it's not even really about me. Maybe this is about the kingdom advancing on Nantucket or wherever I'm, wherever I happen to be as I experience these challenges. Some of you are in a difficult season right now. Others of you might not be in such a hard season right now. Things seem things seem pretty steady for you, which is wonderful. It's great. And maybe the question for you then is just a little bit simpler is just do you believe it? Do you actually live as if Jesus was raised from the dead? Not in theory, but in your kitchen, in your truck, at your job. This is gonna be a hard one, with the person that irritates you the most. Are you willing to live as if Jesus were actually raised from the dead? Because if you do, what comes out of you, Pastor Corey did such a great job of articulating this last week, what comes out of you when you get squeezed won't be anger. It won't be defensiveness. To your surprise and the surprise of everybody else, it just might be joy. Joy that God would include us in this amazing work of renewing and restoring creation, this incredible project begun by Jesus and carried on by the Spirit through his people today. Joy is a sign of the kingdom of heaven breaking into our reality. And I just pray, let me just say this. If I could point to one thing that I've seen increase over the course of the last several years in our church, I think I'd say it's joy. A lot of beautiful things have been happening. But I'd say I feel like we're experiencing more and more joy, more laughter. Doesn't mean that life has gotten easier. In fact, for some of us, it's gotten more difficult. But because of what God is doing here and people willing to say it's not about me, what's being produced is a kingdom kind of fruit, a fruit of the spirit, which is joy. I want to encourage us this week. We can be different. We can live as resurrection people and ought to, with the spirit's help. So carry your toolkit this week. Report back. Tell me how it goes. I want to know how your timeout went and how long you stayed in the bathroom before you came out and faced the person. I want to hear what God does as a result of us stepping into and choosing to carry the persecution. Let's all stand together.