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July 16, 2024 6:00 am

Acts 6 - Part B

Connect with Skip Heitzig / Skip Heitzig

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July 16, 2024 6:00 am

The early church faced a problem of preferential treatment, but instead of sending the multitudes away, they came up with a solution to fix the issue by appointing seven men of good reputation to oversee the business. These men were chosen for their integrity, wisdom, and fullness of the Holy Spirit, and they were tasked with prayer and the ministry of the Word. The story of Stephen, a deacon who was filled with faith and power, is a testament to the power of the Holy Spirit and the importance of standing up for one's faith, even in the face of persecution.

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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.

If God hates something, it's a pretty good sign that you should avoid that thing. And today on Connect with Skip Heitic, Pastor Skip shares a message about the dangers of sowing discontent. Now here's more about this month's resource to help you remember the sacrifice of Christian martyrs who came before you. We are witnessing an escalation in Christian persecution like we have rarely seen since the first century. Many people don't realize that today thousands of Christians are dying cruel deaths throughout much of the world. The new book of Christian martyrs commemorates these modern day heroes, highlighting key martyrs of past centuries and featuring stories of contemporary martyrs around the world. This compendium of heroes from the first century to the 21st century, from Europe to Africa and from Asia to the Americas is sure to inspire you to courageously stand up for your Christian faith, just as they've done for countless Christians around the globe. The new book of Christian martyrs comes as our thanks for your gift of $50 or more to keep messages like this one today on the air for you and others, equipping you to know God's word and follow His will with courage and conviction. So request your copy when you give today.

Call 800-922-1888 or give securely online at connectwithskip.com slash offer. Okay, now let's join Skip for his lesson today. We're in Acts chapter 6 as we begin. 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.

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 anomonopoetic word.

That is, the word sounds like what the action was. It sounds like you're complaining, gongosmon. 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. I smile when I read this because I'm so proud of these apostles. I want to go in the room and pat Peter on the back and grab John and go, man, you guys have grown so much. And if I would have done that, they'd look at me and go, first of all, who are you and what are you doing in our story?

And second, what do you mean we've grown so much? And I would say, well, guys, do you remember back when Jesus was feeding the 5,000 or wanting to, and all you could say is send the multitudes away that they may get food in the villages around here. Remember that?

That was your solution. Send everybody away. And do you remember when that Canaanite woman brought her little daughter who was demon possessed and the apostles said, send her away. She's crying after us. Boy, they've grown a lot. Can you imagine the early church coming to these apostles and saying, we need help, man. One group is getting preferential treatment. And the apostles saying, go away.

Find your own food. But they've grown. Now they're facing the problem head on. They're coming up with a good solution to it. Not send them away. Let's fix this issue.

Let's get people who can fix this issue. Now, here was their problem back in the Gospels in those two stories I brought out. When they said send the multitudes away because we don't have enough food for them, the problem the disciples, the apostles had back then is they saw themselves as manufacturers rather than as distributors. They thought, well, we have to come up with this food thing. We don't have enough food.

Send them away. Jesus wasn't asking them to come up with food on their own just to distribute what he was going to manufacture. So they should have just said, okay, I don't know what you have up your sleeve, but we're here to serve whatever you say. But they saw themselves as the ones responsible when they weren't doing anything.

Jesus was doing all the work. They just had to distribute it. Now they get it. Now they see themselves as distributing whatever provision the Lord has brought into their hands. And so they set their priorities. We're not going to leave the Word of God and serve tables. We want to give ourselves continually verse four to prayer and to the ministry of the Word.

I love their priority. We're not going to leave the Word of God and serve tables. I'm going to speak candidly to you. Over the years, I have seen many a church leave the Word of God and serve tables. Starting out as a Bible teaching church after a while saying, you know, people don't really want to hear Bible teaching. They don't really want to hear deep Bible study.

They don't care about Greek words and Hebrew words and syntax and context and history. They just want to have a pep rally. So I'm going to change. Let us change as a church and start preaching the social gospel and having pep rallies instead of giving them meat. They set their priorities. We're not going to leave the Word of God and serve tables. We're going to give ourselves continually to prayer and the ministry of the Word.

Those two priorities. Churches I have seen leave the Word of God. I've seen pastors leave the Word of God. And it's easy to do.

Here's why. It's not easy to study all day and teach. It's not all day to pour hour after hour into the text and get the bearing of the text and the meaning of the text to make it plain and understandable. It takes a lot of work. And I remember J. Vernon McGee, when I asked him, I've told you this before, I said, why don't more pastors actually teach the Bible? And he just said, because they're lazy. And it's easy to get lazy.

And it's easy to get distracted. There are so many things that get involved in a church. So when we first started this fellowship, I did it all. I led the worship along with Laura and a few others. I kept the books for the corporation. I did the counseling.

I did studying for Bible studies and was newly married and had a full-time job. Something had to give. And as the organization grew larger and larger, more had to give and more had to give and more had to give.

And you just have to specialize. But one thing you can never give up, as a pastor at least, the Word, the Word, the Word. Preach the Word, Timothy. Be instant in season and out of season. That was their priority.

I had a homiletics professor, Dr. Nat Van Cleave, who said to us one evening in our class, he said, if you preach for one hour or teach for one hour to a group of 100 people and you are ill-prepared to do so, you've just wasted 100 hours of God's time. As you can see, I never forgot that. That stuck with me. Arrow to the heart. Okay, pull it out.

Make that a priority. So that was the stake they placed in the ground. So did you notice the qualifications in verse three?

I know I'm moving slowly. First of all, seven men. Why seven? I don't know why, except, well, it's the number of completion and perfection.

No, there's a more fundamental answer than that. It seems that the early church, when it came to organizing things, because they didn't know what to model their organizational structure on, they were organizing the early church based upon the model they saw in Judaism. In Judaism, in any community, all of the public affairs were done by a group of seven elders. Seven men were selected from the town, from the community, who had integrity and were notable and noteworthy, and they were in charge of gathering together and settling disputes and settling issues within the community. So it seems that they were simply modeling what they knew in Judaism.

I can't be sure, because we're not told, but that seems to be what they were doing. But notice, seven men from among you. Don't go outside and hire people you don't know who have a good resume.

Get somebody from your own church who has been with you. They understand the philosophy of ministry. They're part of the fellowship. They get it, and full of good reputation. So they have to have been there a while. They have to have been able to be observed, to be watched, to be involved in some capacity.

And as others watched them, they developed a reputation, and in this case, a good reputation. Notice next on the list, full of the Holy Spirit. You know, you can have all the other previous qualifications.

If you don't have this one, it's worthless, filled, controlled by, managed by the Holy Spirit, person whose Spirit led, and wisdom. You know what wisdom is. You can be smart and not wise. You can have a high IQ. You can have a degree. You can have several degrees. You can have a Ph.D. degree, but God will give you the third degree if you're not wise, because knowledge is one thing. Wisdom is the right application of that knowledge.

So all of that is observable. They're wise in their transaction and decisions, whom we, the apostles, may appoint over this business. You select them. We'll appoint them. We will give ourselves, verse 4, continually, over and over again, as a priority to prayer and the ministry of the Word. And get this, the saying pleased the whole multitude.

That's unusual. And they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit. You'll read more about Stephen in the next chapter. And Philip, you'll read more about Philip in the chapter after that. Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, you won't read anything more about them. A proselyte from Antioch, whom they set before the apostles, and when they prayed, they laid hands on them. Point of contact, recognition. Then the Word of God spread.

I love that description. The Word of God spread, and the number of the disciples multiplied. There's God at it again.

He's been adding, subtracting, multiplying again. They multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests, the Jewish priests who served in the temple, were obedient to the faith. Now, something to make a note of with those names, all seven names are Greek names. So who was complaining? The Greeks, the Hellenists, the Greeks speaking Septuagint oriented, Gentile country oriented, Jewish believers. So, what a beautiful way in grace to solve a problem. The Greeks are complaining? All the ones in charge of the problem and distribution will be Greeks.

Love that. It's like affirmative action, New Testament style. They set before the apostles, they laid hands on them, and they prayed. And the Word of God spread, et cetera, et cetera. Now, verse seven, I just want you to notice it, because there's a mark.

There should be. You might even put a little pencil mark between verse seven and eight, because verse seven ends one section of the book of Acts. Verse eight begins a whole other section. Verse seven is a summary statement given by Dr. Luke, the author of this book, which he gives throughout this book when he wants to sum up or conclude or give you some kind of a field report on what God has done. He gives a summary statement and then moves on to another section and another section. So in chapter two, verse 47, praising God and having favor with all the people and the Lord at a daily to the church, those who are being saved.

That's a summary statement. Then there's a whole other section of the book of Acts. Verse seven, I want you to notice it, there's a whole another section and it's ended by this summary statement. There will be another one in chapter nine, another one in chapter 12, another one in chapter 16. God does a work.

He sums it up neatly in one little principle form. That's what verse seven is. Now, verse seven ends the witness of the gospel in Jerusalem.

Not for good, not historically, but primarily. Remember the outline of the book, chapter one, verse eight. You will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth. We have seen the witness in Jerusalem in these chapters. Now there's a shift and the gospel is going to go out throughout Judea, Samaria, and then to the uttermost parts of the earth. So the next three events are those introductory events.

What three events? The first martyr, Stephen, will be killed. Saul of Tarsus will be there witnessing it because they lay his clothes at his feet and he's observing it. Philip goes and spreads the gospel to Gaza and to Caesarea. Then Saul of Tarsus gets saved in chapter nine and that becomes the catalyst to bring the gospel outside of Judea, Samaria, and he'll take it to the uttermost parts of the earth.

So Luke is following his outline. Chapter seven, see it as a summary statement, or verse seven of chapter six is the summary statement. Verse eight begins this, and Stephen, full of faith and power, did great wonders and signs among the people. Then there arose some from what is called the synagogue of the freed men, Cyrenians, Alexandrians, and those from Cilicia and Asia disputing with Stephen. We know that in Jerusalem there was one big central place of worship known as the temple.

Temple structure, sacrifices were done there, priests worked there, an enormous amount of activity was there. But not only that, but because of the captivity in Babylon, they developed the institution known as the synagogue. You never read about synagogues in the Old Testament, suddenly they appear in the New Testament. That's because they develop between the Old and the New Testament in captivity.

By the time we get to the New Testament, they're everywhere. Jesus in Capernaum went into the synagogue, he went into the synagogue and all the cities around Galilee. The Talmud tells us, the Jewish writings tell us, that at this time there were 390 synagogues in Jerusalem alone. So think of the synagogue back then as sort of like churches today, each synagogue had its own flavor, its own kind of emphasis, its own style of people that were from different parts and they just sort of got along and saw things that way, their own little cliques, their own little groups.

You know how people do that today, I don't like that in church because my friend goes, I don't like that in church because my friend goes to this church, I'm going to that church. All of that happened in the synagogue, 390 of them in Jerusalem. The synagogue of the freedmen was a synagogue comprised of ex-slaves, freed slaves, or the family members of freed slaves, hence freedmen. We know that Pompeii, the general of the Romans, took an enormous amount of different people from North Africa and Asia Minor as his personal slaves in the city of Rome. They eventually were freed in Rome and a lot of them who were Jewish made their way here back to Jerusalem.

They established a synagogue. Again, you're told where they come from, North Africa, Cyrene, Alexandria, Egypt, and also from Cilicia. Now who comes from Cilicia? Saul of Tarsus.

Tarsus was a city in the province of Cilicia. So no doubt, here is a synagogue that Saul of Tarsus, aka Paul the Apostle, that was his synagogue. Even though he wasn't a freedman or the relative of a freedman, because he will say, I was actually born a Roman citizen, freeborn. Nonetheless, because of the family ties to Cilicia, this was probably the synagogue he went to. So he's going to be there that whole time Stephen is going to give his message in the next chapter.

Just setting you up for that. And verse 10, they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spoke. Again, he's filled with the Holy Spirit. That was one of the conditions to be a deacon in the early church. That's what these men were, servants, deacons.

They couldn't resist the wisdom by which he spoke. Then they secretly induced men to say, so they fabricated a story, we have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God, and they stirred up the people, the elders, and all the scribes, and they came upon him and they seized him and they brought him to the council. They also set up false witnesses who said, this man does not cease to speak blasphemous words against this holy place and the law.

Does this sound familiar? Does this not sound an awful lot like the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin when they made up stories? And because Jesus had made this statement when he said, destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up again, speaking of the temple of his body, they misinterpreted that on purpose to mean, I'm going to destroy the temple.

So they came up with a threefold fabrication. He's speaking blasphemous words against God, blasphemous words against Moses or the law of Moses, and blasphemous words against the temple. That's what it is here, this place. For verse 14, we have heard him say that Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs which Moses delivered to us. That's the accusation. Now that's going to set you up for chapter seven, because after hearing the accusation, the high priest in verse one of chapter seven will say, are these things so? That's all the opener he needed. He now launches into a, well, there's 59 verses after verse one in the next chapter. He goes into this incredible historical witness to share the gospel based on Jewish history to that nation in Jerusalem. You know, some people say, well, I'm waiting for an open door. I want to share my faith, but I haven't seen it. The Lord hasn't opened a door. This dude would take a crack in the window. Are these things so?

That's all I need. And he goes with it. But look at the last verse of chapter six, verse 15, and all who sat in the council, looking steadfastly at him, saying, steadfastly at him, saw his face as the face of an angel. You know why that's noteworthy? Because they said Stephen is speaking against not only God, not only the temple, but against whom? Moses.

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, having received the law covenant of God, coming down to the people after having intimate concourse communication with God, he comes down and the Bible says his face shone brightly. I mean, these Jewish leaders should have looked at Stephen and thought, oh, my word. This is just like what we read about happened to Moses. It's happening to this guy because that would show them he's not against Moses. He's like Moses. This dude is shining brightly like Moses. One was when he had that intimate contact with God.

That's Skip Hyten. His message is from the series Expound Acts. Find the full message, as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskip.com.

We're glad you've tuned in today. Connect with Skip is all about helping listeners like you strengthen your walk with Christ. Today, we invite you to connect others like you to the life-changing power of the gospel with the gift to help keep these teachings you love on the air all around the world. Your support is essential to help grow this ministry to reach many others by expanding into more major US cities. Just call 800-922-1888. That's 800-922-1888, or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate.

That's connectwithskip.com slash donate. Thank you. Come back tomorrow as Pastor Skip looks at the work of the Holy Spirit who helped propel the Acts of the Apostles. The Holy Spirit, rather than convicting of individual sins, he'll convict of sin. And more particularly, he will convict you of the sin your conscious will never convict you of and society will never convict you of.

And you know what that is? Unbelief. He'll convict the world of sin. What did Jesus say? Because they believe not on me.

The Holy Spirit convicts people that their unbelief is a sin. Make a connection. Make a connection at the foot of the crossing. Cast all burdens on his word. Make a connection. Connection. Connect with Skip Hyten is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever-changing times.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-07-16 04:10:20 / 2024-07-16 04:19:49 / 9

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