Philip and the Samaritans

Today on Summit Life, a message of unity from J.D.

Greer. Here's how you know you're in a multicultural church. At some point, you become uncomfortable. Because when people do stuff outside of your culture, you're like, I'm not really sure about that.

That's not how we grew up, you know? But see, that's what happens in a multicultural church is the different cultures are influencing and the unity that we find in Christ outweighs any of the things that divide us. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovich. You know, most people say they want peace and unity, but few people will do the hard work to obtain it because it challenges us to step out of our comfort zone and to cross the barriers of our own personal and cultural preferences and meet people where they are. Today, Pastor J.D. shares the powerful New Testament story of one man who accepted that challenge, part of our series called Scent. And if you've missed any of the previous messages in our series in the book of Acts, you can find them online at jdgreer.com.

Pastor J.D. titled today's message, Philip and the Samaritans. Acts chapter eight, if you got a Bible, that's where we're going to be. Acts chapter eight. Let's just begin verse one.

Here we go. Saul and Saul was approving or approved of his execution. That, of course, is Stephen. There arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. Stephen's martyrdom sparked an outbreak of mass violence against Christians. So they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria except for the apostles.

That's an important detail that I'll come back to in a little bit. Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church and entering house after house. He dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. Stephen's execution, you see, really got to Saul.

So Saul first responded, not with repentance, but with frenetic violence. Some of you may realize this. Sometimes when people get under the conviction of the Holy Spirit, their first impulse is not to repent. Their first impulse is to lash out at whoever is bringing the conviction to them.

And maybe in some cases that has been you. Verse four, now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Philip, who was another one of the deacons, you may recall, a layman, not an apostle, went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ. And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip when they heard him and they saw the signs that he did.

For unclean spirits crying out with a loud voice came out of many who had them and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. And so, verse eight, there was much joy in that city. This passage gives us a pattern for reaching our city. If you are taking notes, jot down this definition because this is how we see our mission to our city. Evangelism in the New Testament is basically a group of ordinary Christians living intentionally in a city to bring joy to it through word and deed. The New Testament pattern for evangelism is a group of ordinary Christians living intentionally in a city to bring joy to it through word and deed. Let's look at a few key words in that definition.

Ordinary people. Luke makes the point, who is Luke is the author of Acts, makes the point that the very first time the gospel left Jerusalem, the apostles were not its carriers. He points that out. Verse one, they all went out of Jerusalem except for the apostles. Why did he include the detail except for the apostles? Well, it wasn't to tell you what the apostles did when they stayed because he doesn't tell us that. The only reason he would have pointed that out since he didn't tell us what the apostles did when they stayed is to put the focus on those who left and what they did when they left. And so the focus is on the people who are leaving. They're the ones that are carrying the gospel.

Hear this. The very first time the gospel expands beyond Jerusalem, it was carried in the mouths of normal people, not apostles. This, I believe, is the Holy Spirit's sign to us for how the Great Commission would be accomplished. You see, I'm afraid that I'm going to make this point so often in this series that you're going to get absolutely sick of hearing it, but it is the theme of the book of Acts. The church grows not by the preaching of a few anointed apostles.

The church grows when every believer is filled with the Spirit and testifies to the gospel in the streets. You see, sometimes God takes you into these places. Sometimes He does it through a divine call. You just get this sense that God wants you to take the gospel into a place where it hasn't been taken. Maybe it's a career field or maybe it's a desire to move to a new city. You just have this desire like, I feel like God is moving me here. Sometimes it's through a divine call, but other times it's just through life circumstances that are out of your control. In this case, it was persecution.

I wouldn't recommend that way if you can avoid it, but they were moved to a place they didn't really have any say about. Maybe for you it's a job that carries you to a place that you're like, I'm not sure why I got transferred here. Maybe it's because God is controlling the circumstances of your life because He intends for you to take the gospel in the place where it's not known.

Maybe you did not get into a particular school that you thought you should have got into. Maybe that was God saying, you know what? I've actually got a bigger purpose for you than you realize.

I want to use you as a witness over here. Maybe you got transferred to Raleigh Durham and you're like, I'm not sure why I'm here. Maybe it's because God intended for you to be able to reach a group of people here and He had to control the circumstances of your life to get there. See, what I understand as a pastor is that I'm looking at a group of people whose lives have been sovereignly controlled by God for the purpose of putting you into places where you can testify to the gospel.

And I also know that I'm looking at a large group of people who are working for multinational companies who will transfer you and send you into places overseas that we could never get to sending mission teams over there because it'd be too expensive or we just couldn't get into it. The gospel is natural, excuse me, God is naturally taking you into those places and we want to equip you to be able to carry the gospel into those places. That's what we do as a church because the greatest advances for the gospel are not coming from me up here.

They're coming when you are going into those places naturally. So I've told you one of my favorite images for the church, you know, I've told you that some people, they use this analogy, the church is not like a cruise ship. You know, if you're comparing a church to ships, it shouldn't be a cruise ship. A lot of churches like that.

You got, you know, gyms and football fields and six flags over Jesus and the whole, you know, the whole bit. And if a church sent me a cruise ship, you know, vacation with Christians, it ought to be a battleship, you know, a battleship. And that's better than cruise ship, but I still don't like battleship because a battleship, you know, basically battleship pulls about a mile off the island and shells the island. That's how a battleship does battle. A much better image for the church, in my opinion, is aircraft carrier because an aircraft carrier, its whole goal is to equip planes to take the battle somewhere else.

An aircraft carrier never wants to fight battles on the aircraft carrier. The whole point is to equip planes to load them up, to be able to take the battle to the enemy. What we are trying to do is load you up with gospel ammunition so that as God takes you into the places, whether it's overseas or whether it's jobs or campuses or schools right around here in Raleigh Durham, you're equipped to be able to take the gospel like Phillip did into Samaria. But what I need you to hear church before we move off of this is listen, the Holy Spirit's plan for advancing the gospel around the world did not so much involve me on a platform, it involved you in places like Samaria. You have the Holy Spirit.

Do you understand how significant it is? The whole point of Acts is laid out in Acts 1.8, you'll receive power, Holy Spirit will come upon you, you'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, uttermost parts of the earth. The next time Judea and Samaria are mentioned after Acts 1.8 is Acts 8.1. So the first time the gospel goes into Judea and Samaria, it is in the mouths of regular people, which means that the power that he's talking about in Acts 1.8 was given to you. And I'm telling you, once you start operating in the power of the Holy Spirit, it is amazing. Some of you have never experienced that because you've never opened your mouth to let him use you. I've told you, it's like you start speaking and it's just weird the way the Holy Spirit will start working in your mouth and making you say stuff.

Jesus promised that. He's like, the hour that you need it, I'll put the words in your mouth. I've told you before, it's like, I saw this interview with Michael Jordan and they're asking him, how do you do all these crazy dunks? You just go up, it's so creative. And he's like, look, I just jump and decide in the air. After I jump is when all this stuff comes out. And I thought that's a pretty good little picture of evangelism. Because half the time I get into these conversations, I have no idea where they're going. I have no idea what I'm going to say, but you just open your mouth. And the moment you jump, the Holy Spirit begins to guide you and he shows you how to slam the gospel home to complete the analogy there. You have the Holy Spirit, do not underestimate that. Jesus, one time, I mean, this is one of my favorite promises.

I gave it to you last year, I think. Jesus said, he said, the greatest pre-Jesus prophet to ever live. You know who that was? Greatest pre-Jesus prophet to ever live? John the Baptist. John the Baptist could preach with more power. He was more eloquent and just, he was awesome, right?

Greatest one of all of them. Jesus said, the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John the Baptist. Which is just, I mean, think about it. Somebody in this church is the least capable in our church, right?

I mean, mathematically that has to be true. So right now at one of our campuses, you're like, I think that might be me. And God's like, yep, it's you. You're at the bottom of the pile.

You have less capability than anybody. Even you, even you, whoever you are, have more power and potential in the Holy Spirit than John the Baptist. All right, so get out there and start to experience what God wants to do through you because he uses people like you and like Philip, ordinary people through word and deed. This passage tells us that Philip's ministry was both word and deed.

They heard him and they saw the signs that he did. Verse 7 explains to us that the lame were healed and the demons were cast out, which points to a physical deliverance, the lame being healed, and a spiritual deliverance, the demons being cast out because a true witness, hear this, always involves both elements. A true gospel witness always involves both word and deed. It has to involve word because the gospel is, in its essence, an announcement about what Jesus has accomplished.

You can't communicate that without a verbal witness. I've told you, the statement, you know, preach the gospel, if necessary use words, is cute but completely wrong because there's no possible way to preach the gospel without words. The word gospel was not a religious word. The word gospel just meant an announcement of good news. A Greek general would use it when he won a battle. If a Greek general won a battle on behalf of Greece, he would send out a gospel announcing that he'd won the battle. He was not inviting other people to come help him with the battle.

He was not teaching people to do battle. He was just saying, I already won the battle, so you don't have to be afraid anymore because the enemy's been vanquished. That's the word that was chosen to describe our message. It's an announcement, not about how people should live, not an example that they should emulate. It's an announcement about what Jesus accomplished on our behalf when he went to the cross, paid for our sin, resurrected in victory, and we believe in him and have eternal life.

That's the gospel, all right? So it's in word. It has to be in word, but it was also always done in deed.

Deed means they demonstrated things about the gospel by, whether it was miracles or the way that they lived. In fact, the word that's used here for what filled up his deeds were signs. That's a really important word because a sign always points, you know, to something else.

Grand Canyon, that way. The point is not the sign, the point is what the sign is pointing to. Well, Jesus' miracles and the apostles' miracles were called signs. I've explained this before, but Jesus' miracles were not magic tricks that showed how awesome he was, you know, in power. He wasn't like, you know, I'll prove I'm the son of God. Watch me levitate, you know, and he'd hover about six feet above the ground. That would have been awesome.

He didn't like, you know, have you hold numbers behind your back and guess them a hundred times in a row. I mean, that would prove that he was awesome. His miracles, here's how we say it, his miracles did not show off the naked fact of his power. His miracles were a message about the redemptive purpose of his power. You get that? They were signs that pointed so Jesus would heal the sick showing that his gospel brought spiritual healing. His miracles were raising the dead because he brought life to dead sinners, giving sight to the blind, multiplying bread and fish because his kingdom was a kingdom of abundance. See?

Right? So they were signs. Now, what you see in Acts is that sometimes these signs, like in Acts 8, are supernatural.

Other times they're more, I might say, natural. In other words, just the way that they lived was a demonstration of the gospel. For example, Acts chapter nine, there's a story in there of a disciple by the name of Tabitha who had the unfortunate nickname of Dorcas and scripture records that for you. But she made cloaks for widows. And it says that she made so many cloaks for widows that when she died, the community gathered at her bedside and wept because of what she had done for them. Her cloaks were a demonstration of the gospel, the generosity of the gospel, the fact that the gospel creates this kind of attitude in people that they show to their community. 1 Peter calls it adorning the gospel.

It's always done in word and deed. The result, here's the next little phrase in our definition, it brought joy. It brings joy to the city. That's in verse seven. It was that phrase, by the way, for those of you that are newer here, that really convicted us as a church because it made us ask this question. Was there much joy in our city as a result of the summit church being here?

We get to the next chapter, Acts 9, about Tabitha and the cloaks that she made and people gathered at her bedside and weeping. And we asked, all right, if the summit church died, would anybody in our community weep? And I'm not saying that we're trying to make everybody happy and we're trying to win friends because whenever you've got a message as word and deed, you're going to bring joy and you're going to also make people mad. We want our community to look at us and say, now we may not believe what those crazy people at the summit church believe, but thank God they're here because if not, we'd have to raise our taxes because of the way they bring joy to this city. So here's my very simple question for you. Are you involved in that? Because that's not because of a charismatic preacher.

It's because of people like Philip carrying out the gospel in word and deed in our city. You say, well, how do I get involved? Well, start small. Just ask this question. What can I do to bring joy to my workplace? What can I do to bring joy to my campus, to my neighborhood?

Ask God to show you needs that you can meet. Now, one more thing in the story before I go to the second half of the story there is, and it's shorter than the first half, is that one of the primary sources of joy in this city, I don't know if you call it this, was the reconciliation of races. You see, Philip was a Jew and the people of Samaria were Samaritans, obviously. Well, the Jews and the Samaritans had history to say the least. I mean, they had animosity that stretched back about a thousand years because the Samaritans were half Jew, half Gentile. And you know how the Jews were. They were not into the mixed thing, right? I mean, they would not wear mixed clothing much less, you know, except somebody who was half Jew, half Gentile. They would not even sit on a seat that a Samaritan had sat on. If you were taking a trip from, you know, from the southern part of Israel to the northern part, Samaria was kind of right in the middle.

And so if they were trying to get from the south to the north, they would walk around Samaria, which added a day to their journey. But they do that rather than have to mix with these, you know, half blood muggles that were up in Samaria. They just weren't into that. Now, you might like feel sorry for the Samaritans, be like, oh, poor Samaritans.

Okay. I wouldn't necessarily feel sorry for the Samaritans because they were not the nicest people either. In fact, the stuff that they did ranges from the comical to the cruel.

They would, okay, so I told you they're right in the middle. When you want to communicate to people up in the north and tell them to come down for like a, you know, national meeting, they didn't have, you know, phones, obviously. So what they would do is they would, they had this series of mountains that you would light fires on top of, like the Lord of the Rings, you know, scene.

Remember that? And so the Samaritans would go out to the mountain, just to the, you know, to the east of them, and they would take captive the people that were on that. Then they would light the signal. And so then they would, you know, it would cause the rest of the people to come down.

And so they would cause the rest of the ones to light. So they'd all run down to Jerusalem and be like, what's up? And they'd be like, nothing, you know? So that was one of the jokes that they played. They would, before Passover, there are several stories of them launching, get this, launching pigs over the temple walls the night of Passover so that they would splatter and you would be defiled, you know, for Passover.

They would, I mean, it sounds like bad college pranks, right? Except people died with this kind of stuff. They would raid pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem and steal their money. And it just, I mean, years of animosity and hatred between these people.

Now you've got Philip, who is a Jew, being embraced by a Samaritan. And when they believed there was much joy in the city, because you see the gospel creates a unity that can overcome years of hurt and mistrust. It is a unity, listen, that we as people long for. And most people long for this kind of unity, but we seem powerless to accomplish it. It's easier than theory than it is actually in practice. I was reading one African-American sociologist who said this recently, talking about race. He said, we know how to forcibly integrate society. We know how to pass laws to guarantee fairness, but we have not been able in a hundred years, what we have not been able to do is make races and cultures love and embrace one another. What politics is unable to do in a hundred years, the gospel accomplished in an afternoon.

Why? Because the gospel defined a whole new reality. The gospel said, there's one common problem, sin. There's one common solution, the blood of Jesus. And that creates a new humanity.

Follow me here, because I don't want to lose you on this. It creates what some people have called a third race, a third race. Let me explain this because you could really kind of get this wrong.

You could really kind of get this wrong and then it would go. All right. So you got a Latino man living in a mostly white society. Let's call Latino his first race. And let's say that the white that he lives among is like his second race.

All right. Third race is what he is in Christ. What he is in Christ does not erase his first race because he's still a Latino man with Latino culture. But for a Christian, that third race becomes so weighty to him that it outweighs any of the things that would separate the first race from the second race. The unity he finds in the third race outweighs the cultural preferences.

It outweighs the mistrust and the division. It's not that the first race disappears, it's that the third race becomes the most defining element in his life. You see what a church is, is a group of people of different races and cultures who have found unity together, not because they see culturally everything eye to eye, not about their preferences, not even about their history, but because they find something so weighty which is their unity in Christ, that it makes those other things seem not as significant. Now, if the gospel could come out overcome their racism, some of church, don't you think it can overcome ours?

Don't you want this? See, I mean, what we want is a multicultural church here. That's different, listen, than a multicolored church. If I could talk as one white guy to some other white people in here, a lot of white people, when they want diversity in a church, what they want is multicolored, which is basically a bunch of different colored people all singing white songs, doing white things. Wouldn't it be awesome if you all became a part of our culture and we just had the United Colors of Benetton up there doing that?

Wouldn't that be awesome? But that's not multicultural. Here's how you know you're in a multicultural church. At some point, you become uncomfortable because when people do stuff outside of your culture, you're like, I'm not really sure about that. That's not how we grew up. But see, that's what happens in a multicultural church is the different cultures are influencing and the unity that we find in Christ outweighs any of the things that divide us. You see, these people, it shows no evidence that they sat down and got the history books, went back and resolved everything in their history. They chose to put away mistrust and suspicion. It didn't say that they all magically decide they're gonna listen to the same radio station.

They chose to put aside cultural preference and they found a unity in Christ that overcame the things that divided them. Do you want that? Because if you want it, it's not gonna come naturally. If it's coming naturally, if it's coming naturally, you're not doing it right. It's gonna become because we choose to let the gospel be a way to your reality and our church than any of our cultural preferences. There are no shortcuts on the road to unity.

It takes a lot of intentionality and even more humility. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. We're in a series called Scent, and we're learning about the birth of the early church and God's mission for our lives today. Acts tells the story of the early church, often following the steps of apostles like Peter and Paul. But Pastor J.D., they aren't really the main characters, are they? I remember my pastor growing up, you know, saying that the book of Acts was wrongly named in the Bible. We call it Acts of the Apostles when it should be the Acts of the Holy Spirit.

Because really, Acts doesn't have a main character. I mean, Peter is sort of prominent in the first chapters and Paul is definitely prominent in the last chapters. But when you really get down to it, the actor in the book of Acts is the Holy Spirit.

He's the one that's building the church. And the good news of that is that that same Holy Spirit that was at work in the book of Acts is now at work still through us. And just like he empowered Peter and Paul and James and John and even Luke to speak and to write and to fight sin and to overcome the obstacles of the enemy, that same spirit is now with you and ready for you to access his power to overcome the things that God wants you to overcome in your life. Because this study is so important, we've created a new Bible study to go along with it.

It comes in two parts. Right now, you can get part one that covers the first eight chapters of Acts and then part two will be available in June. It'll help take you deeper into the truths of Acts and uncover the power of the Holy Spirit in your life. To help you gain a better understanding of how you can be more in tune with the Holy Spirit, we'd like to send you an exclusive new resource created by our Summit Life team that's based in our study of Acts. It's volume one of a personal Bible study called Sent, the book of Acts. It's more than just a study book too.

It's actually designed to help you discover your own personal role in the Great Commission. We'll send you a copy as our way of saying thanks for your support of this ministry. Ask for Sent, the book of Acts study guide, when you give a suggested donation of $25 or more today by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or go online and request your copy at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Bidevich inviting you to join us again Thursday. We've all seen or heard of people who say they follow Jesus, but when you look closely, their lives seem to be a reflection of their own game, not God's.

So we're rediscovering what it means to be focused on Jesus's plan rather than our own. That's Thursday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.