Acts 6 - Part A

Persecution against the church was the first tool Satan employed. It didn't work. So he tried another tactic, corruption, hypocrisy, Ananias and Sapphira, lying to the Holy Spirit, in effect lying to God.

That didn't work. God eliminated them, purified the church, and the church grew as we saw last time. It's the end of that story. But now he employs another tactic, and here we see that division, that dissension. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Pastor Skip shows you how Satan uses division in the early church to try to thwart God's plans. But first, here's a resource that honors the heroific sacrifice of today's martyrs for the Christian faith. Today's modern martyrs actions mirror the courage of a long line of brave Christians. And as believers, it's important that we know the heroic sacrifice of those who gave it all for the Christian faith, so that we too can boldly stand for Christ.

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Call 800-922-1888 or give securely online and connectwithskip.com slash offer. All right, it's time to get started. Let's turn to Acts 6 as Skip begins his teaching. You'll remember from last time that we discovered that God has some incredible mathematics. That at first the Lord added to the church daily those who should be saved. Acts chapter 2 verse 47. The Lord was adding. Then as we continued to read through this book, we saw multitudes coming. So we saw that the Lord not only adds, but he multiplies. That his work was spreading so rapidly that there were multitudes of people in the early church that was at one time only 120 people. So the Lord adds, the Lord multiplies, but then last week we discovered the Lord is also sometimes in the business of subtracting.

Ananias and Sapphira were eliminated from the church. They were subtracted from the church by the Lord. So the Lord adds, the Lord multiplies, the Lord subtracts. One thing he never does in his math, he never divides. That's the devil's work. And he employs people to do it, but we're going to see division here in this chapter. And then we'll see how the Lord corrects that through his church and then continues to add and continues to multiply. But we're in Acts chapter 6 and we have a very interesting case of church life. And church leadership. I love church leaders, but I know that no church leader is perfect.

You know that too. No church is perfect. But I heard a story about four leaders of a particular denomination. They all went together to a conference of some kind of leadership summit. And while they were there, the emphasis at this conference was on being real with each other, bearing our souls, confessing our sins, being honest, getting to know one another. So at a coffee break, these four leaders over coffee started talking at a deeper level.

And the first one said, brothers, I just need to tell you that I have a particular thing I struggle with. Even though I'm a leader in a church, I struggle with drinking. I know I shouldn't do it. My congregation would be shocked if they found out.

I even preach against it, but every now and then I just feel like I need a sip. And they were giving him their ear and they were trying to sympathize with him. And the second guy said, well, brothers, I need to tell you that I have a problem with gambling.

Whenever I travel, I have a strong temptation and I have lost a lot of money in gambling situations. The third one hung his head and he said, I have a struggle with my income tax. Being honest at the end of the year and reporting what I brought in, what I need to do, reporting what I brought in and fudging with the numbers because though I know we should pay our taxes to the government, I also struggle with my finances and I could use a little extra money.

And so I've cheated on my income tax. The fourth guy in that little circle of leaders was strangely silent the entire time. And so all three of them afterwards looked at him and he said, well, guys, I've never been attracted by alcohol.

I don't struggle with that, never have. Gambling is not appealing to me whatsoever. I pay all my income taxes, but I do have a vice. My big vice, my big problem is gossip.

And I just got to tell you, I can't wait till this conference is over so I can tell everyone about you guys. Ouch. Nobody's perfect. No church is perfect. No leader is perfect.

There's only a perfect God with a perfect son who gives perfect salvation to imperfect people. And that's us. And we discover that truth here in this chapter. And let me just say, I'm very thankful for the book of Acts. I am thankful that we have a record in which we have a record, an honest record of the earliest weeks, months and years of church history and how it unfolds.

And the reason I say I'm thankful is that it doesn't pull any punches. It doesn't gloss over any personalities. It tells you straight up who these people were, where they excelled and where they failed. For example, we have already read about the suicide of one of the apostles. Judas killed himself. That is honestly portrayed in this book. We have already discovered the elimination by God, the judgment of God on a couple, a notable couple in the early church, Ananias and Sapphira, his wife. Later on, we're going to read about two leaders, Paul and Barnabas in chapter 15, getting into such an argument that they have to split company and go in two entirely different directions.

So it's a very honest rendering. Now we have another problem here. The problem is a complaint of one group against another group. And the complaint brings dissension, brings division in the church.

As I mentioned earlier on, division is seen in this chapter. I've told you before that little truth that whenever you turn the lights on, the bugs come. And whenever the light of the gospel shines brightly, Satan will send his bugs and you'll get bugged.

He'll make sure that you do. And if you are preaching the gospel, teaching the word, raising up leaders, you have a vision for another country, you're going to get attacked. It comes with the territory. So far, we have watched Satan attack the church, first of all by persecution. He's always done that.

He's done it since day one. He did it in Jerusalem. A law was passed that it's illegal to preach the gospel. Peter and John didn't seem to care. They just said, you know, you're going to have to figure out if it's okay to do that.

We're going to obey God, not you. And they kept doing it. They got arrested. Angels sprung them out of jail. They went back and did it again.

But persecution against the church was the first tool Satan employed. It didn't work. It didn't work. In fact, it backfired. It grew more. It went from addition to multiplication. So he tried another tactic, corruption, hypocrisy, Ananias and Sapphira, lying to the Holy Spirit, in effect, lying to God.

That didn't work. God eliminated them, purified the church, and the church grew as we saw last time. It was the end of that story. But now he employs another tactic. The Bible says we are not ignorant of his devices.

He will always employ one of these devices. And here we see that division, that dissension in the early church. Whenever there is a church that is complaining, backbiting, quarreling, disagreeing, arguing, one group against another group, the message that they preach is so watered down, it is ineffective.

The world can't hear it. The church needs to be purified, cleansed of that. And we'll see how the Lord does that in chapter 6 through organizing by the early church leadership.

Now, I know we haven't even started yet, but again, there's only 15 verses, so stay calm. I mentioned organization. I just want to say a word about that here. Because the problem that existed in the early church of chapter 6 was fixed by the Holy Spirit leading the leaders to organize the church in a different format so as to solve the problem. Why is that important? It's important because sometimes people think that organization is bad. I don't believe in organized religion. I'm suspicious at organized religion. I hear that term, and I hear it in a scornful way, in organized religion. Ooh, that's bad. As if to imply they would rather have disorganized religion.

But some would. Some think that if you organize anything the Holy Spirit is doing, it's wrong. It's of man.

It's evil. But as I read my Bible, I discover my God is a very organized God. And He says, let everything be done decently and in order, in an organized fashion. And the more people you have, the more organization is necessary. The church is both an organism and an organization. Now, an organism is something that is life and life-giving. It's living, moving, expanding. But unless you organize an organism, you have a problem.

You could have a cancer, or you could have just a blob. So the organism must be organized, and God is organized. That's why we have sunrise and sunset every day, or the revolution of the earth around the sun, to be more precise. But we call it a sunrise and a sunset. And we can program it.

We know exactly when it's going to happen tomorrow and when it's going to happen in a month, because we have observed an orderly, organized universe. On the other hand, you can organize things too much as if to say, well, Holy Spirit, we're going to form our structure, and we expect you to just sort of follow what we've organized. Now, what you do with organization is the only time you need to change the organization is if there is a need or a demand that the organization will solve the problems within. And we're going to see what the problems are.

The first is growth. So in those days, verse 1, when the number of the disciples was multiplying, please note that, there arose a complaint against the Hebrews by the Hellenists, because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution. Then the 12 summoned the multitude of the disciples and said, it is not desirable that we should leave the Word of God and serve tables.

The church at one time had 120 people in an upper room. Life was grand. It was awesome. It was simple. They waited on the Holy Spirit. He moved.

It was just, let's see what the Lord's going to do next. The problem came when it started growing. Now, I know I've heard it a lot over the years. Well, that's a good problem to have.

I remember hearing that when our church at first started growing and growing and growing. People said, man, I wish we had those problems. That's a good problem to have. It's a good problem, but it's still a problem. It still needs to be addressed. I can recall back when the church was growing so fast, so large, there were so many people that we were finding ourselves not ready.

We didn't prepare any infrastructure or organization yet. We were just reacting to the growth. So the number of the disciples that says we're multiplying, part of the problem that is created when the growth is larger and larger, I can think of a couple of complications. Number one, there is a perceived, and I underlined that word, perceived lack of concern. Oh, it's so big. They don't care about me anymore. That's just, it's going to happen. People are going to automatically think that large means not able to touch the individual, impersonal. There's a perceived lack of concern. And another problem is there's an expectation that comes along with this, that, well, you're a leader. You got to personally fix this. You yourself have to be the one pastor to fix this. And I love this story because the disciples fixed the problem. They address it head on, but they're really not going to be the ones fixing. They're just going to be the ones ratifying and going, amen. I like that. Good idea.

Good choice. But there's a perceived lack of concern, and there are expectations that come with it. I can hear some of the original 120 members of that upper room congregation murmuring to each other.

It's not like it used to be. Unless I get there early, somebody takes my seat. I like the orange carpet better.

Who likes orange carpet? Who knows? All sorts of complaints going around, but this is one in particular, we're told in verse one, there arose a complaint, a murmuring against the Hebrews by the Hellenists because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution. So there's internal conflict. And it's one group of women against another group of women. It's in the women's ministry. No, I'm not impugning.

I'm not indicting. I'm just noting that in the early church, this was the case. One group were arguing against another group. Then the 12 summoned the multitude of the disciples. Now notice the word disciples. It's the very first time the word is used in the book of Acts. It's used a couple hundred times in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It's used 28 times in the book of Acts.

It's used for the first time here. Organization at the very beginning was very simple. There were apostles and there were disciples. Now back in the gospels, the disciples that followed Jesus, there were lots of them, but Jesus chose to follow the apostles. He chose 12 of them to become his apostles.

You remember those stories. But the organization in the nascent part of the church, there were disciples, which means learners, students, and there were apostles designated as sent out individuals. So there were the apostles, the 11. Judas was gone. A one was added. So you really have a bulk of 12 apostles and you have a bunch of disciples. So this is the first time it is mentioned.

It won't be the last time. You read about it again and again. But notice that they were complaining because the widows were neglected in the daily distribution. It seems that in addressing the poor in the church, the poverty that was existing in the early church at Jerusalem that we described reasons about last time. So many of the jobs were temple-related. Many of those early messianic believers lost their employment.

When they addressed the issue of poverty, the early church would give out a daily food distribution. Well, one group thought another group was getting more than they were. The Hellenists, I'll describe them in a moment, thought the Hebrews, I'll describe them in a moment, were getting the better end of the stick.

They, the Hellenists, were getting less. Now, there were two types of Jews back then in Jerusalem. There were what's called the Hebrews. These were Aramaic-speaking Jewish men and women. They read the Hebrew scriptures. They spoke some Hebrew in the liturgy of their worship, but they spoke daily Aramaic, the language of Jesus, the language of the Near East at that time.

They held tightly to no translation, just the original Hebrew scriptures. But there was another group called the Hellenists. They were primarily Greek-speaking Jews of a group known as the diaspora. Have you heard of the diaspora? It means the dispersion, the Jews that have been scattered all over the world. That's the diaspora. If you're not living in Israel, you were part of the diaspora.

You had been scattered elsewhere. So many of these scattered Jews stayed scattered. Many of them came back to Jerusalem. When they came back to Jerusalem, they congregated with people like themselves. They spoke Greek.

They had a lot of people. They spoke Greek. They had a Greek background, a background of different cultures, and they congregated together. They had their own synagogues. The Hebrew had their own synagogues. The Hellenists had their own special synagogues. They didn't read from the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament, but from the Greek translation called the Septuagint version.

That was their version. Well, you can just see that there's going to be a conflict because the Hebrew-speaking and Jew-inclined local Jerusalemite Jews always felt that they were a cut above those who were the Greek-speaking, worldly, from other places, Jewish people. So there was always this tension. They had their own synagogues so they could worship separately, but now they're called together in one church, one fellowship.

Both Messianic Jews, both believers in Jesus, but both very different backgrounds. Now they're put into one church. And whenever you have different people in one group, you're going to have problems, and they had problems, a perceived lack of concern, and an expectation that the apostles need to fix this problem. So the Twelve summoned the multitude and said, it is not desirable that we, we the apostles, should leave the word of God that is teaching the scriptures. That's what we're called to do. The apostles doctrine, Acts 2 42, they were big on that.

That was first on their four-tiered list. We don't want to leave the word of God and serve tables. Now the tables need to be served. The apostles recognize the problem. They're meeting it head on, but they're just saying, we're not going to be the ones to do that personally.

So, or therefore, verse three, seek out from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. Now before I get into that part, let me just for a moment concede that there really was a problem of a lack of concern. Let's just imagine there was. We don't know that there was.

We just know one group said there was, right? They made a complaint. But let's just say there was a problem.

And the Hebrew-speaking Jewish widows were getting preferential treatment and the Hellenists were being shortchanged. Let's say that was a problem. If that was a problem, the problem was made much worse by the complaining about the problem. Can you agree on that part? You may have a problem and, okay, we understand there's a problem, but we're going to try to fix it.

But it's not fixed yet. And so you start talking about it to other people. You start spreading bad seed, bad words, bad ideas, inferior motives that may not be there around.

And you know what? Did you know that God hates that? I don't mean He just doesn't like it.

He outright hates that. In the book of Proverbs chapter 6, there's a list of seven things God hates. Don't do it now, but I commend sometime go look at Proverbs 6 and look at, even memorize the seven things that God hates. It says, six things the Lord hates, yea, seven are an abomination to Him. And last on the list, He who sows discord among the brethren.

God hates that. So there may have been a problem. They made the problem worse by murmuring. And the word murmuring or complaining is a very interesting Greek word, gongosmon. See, you laugh at that because that word is an onomatopoetic word. That is, the word sounds like what the action was. It sounds like you're complaining, gongosmon. They were murmuring.

So they spread that bad seed around the church. So here's the solution. Seek out from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. You do the finding, we'll do the ratifying. You select them, we'll say yes to it. Problem needs to be fixed.

Go fix it. Bring the solution, bring the people to us that we may appoint over this business, but we, here's their priority, but we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word. That's Skip Hyten with a message warning you about Satan's attempts to sow division in the church.

It's a teaching from his series, Expound Acts. Find the full message, as well as books, booklets and full teaching series at connectwithskipp.com. Right now, listen as Skip shares how you can share life-changing teaching from God's word with more people around the world. This ministry exists to connect you and many other people around the world to God's word and to equip you to live abundantly in Jesus Christ. I want to personally invite you to join in that important work today.

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