Grace Under Fire

Sometimes we read about Christian heroes from the past and we think that they are in a special category.

Don't ever forget that Stephen is ultimately imitating Jesus Christ who is within all of us to become more and more like him. Godliness is not the privilege of a few select believers. It is the privilege of submissive believers. It isn't a matter of special privilege or special standing. It isn't a special class of Christian that has this kind of life.

It isn't some kind of special standing with God, but it does have everything to do with a special submission to the Lord. Today on Wisdom for the Heart, we look at the first martyr of the Christian church. He was a follower of Jesus Christ named Stephen. He wasn't given time to say goodbye to his family and friends.

He wasn't allowed to put his financial affairs in order. In fact, he was condemned and put to death right in a matter of moments. But Stephen was ready because he was controlled by the Holy Spirit. How about you?

You can be ready also, and today you'll learn how. Here's Stephen Davey with a lesson called Grace Under Fire. In our last discussion, we discovered several ageless principles concerning the New Testament church as we observed them struggling with the sense of unfairness that had developed and the caring of widows. One of the things we discovered that there is no such thing as a perfect church. Even vibrant, effective, growing churches are not immune to problems and divisive issues.

And we studied in the sixth chapter how they grumbled and complained over this apparent lack of fairness. And the Hellenistic widows were being overlooked in favor of the Hebrew widows. And indeed, there is no place for prejudice of any sort in the church, whether it is an issue of social standing, or race, or education, or financial status. Whatever it may be, it is never right for a saint to act like a snob.

As one author put it, the ground at the foot of the cross is level. Another thing we learned from the way the church handled that divisive, potentially explosive issue is that leadership in the church is not based upon experience, it is based upon character. And that principle sort of introduced us at least to the name of the man that arrests our attention over these next few sessions. Together he will occupy the center stage in the history of this early church.

He will be known as the man who preached only one sermon, only one time. In Acts chapter 6, we actually discovered his name identified along with six other men. Verse 5 identifies his name as Stephanos, or translated Stephen or Stefan. The Greek word Stephanos means crown. One of my Greek lexicons translated by a man named Thayer identifies Stephanos as that crown that was of royal or exalted rank, or it could have been a word referring to that wreath placed upon the head of the victorious athlete as he stepped forward to the bema seat where he was met by the judges of those athletic contests.

Another lexicon added that Stephanos could have been something that was given to someone for distinguished service in the community. I think it's ironic that Stephen will live up to his name here. He will distinguish himself as a servant of the church, and he will also distinguish himself as one who literally will wear the martyr's crown. He will be the first martyr of the New Testament church. The lens of Scripture now sort of focuses on this man, and over the course of the next 68 verses he will occupy our attention, and I want to spend a couple of sessions on his brief life and even briefer ministry. We discovered just what kind of man he is, though I want to caution you, if you have notes, I want to give you a couple of things to consider as we begin a study of a character or a biblical character. We can come to the conclusion as we study Stephen's life that he was some unusual saint who had it made with God, that he was some rather incredible character who had some extra help from the Lord.

He maybe had a better start. You might come to the conclusion that he had some special privileges from the Lord, or maybe even that God just made him a little better than the rest of us. Well, that kind of thinking can result in you ending up in one of two erroneous mindsets. The first mindset that would be wrong when you consider a biblical character is the mindset of complacency. That is, Stephen is such a special class Christian that God would never expect me to live like him, which is certainly in the truth. The Bible and all of its characters have been given to us not to pedestalize them, but to emulate them. Even the apostle Paul wrote to the believers in the Corinthian church in chapter 11 and verse 1, he said to them, he exhorted them, imitate thou me.

Are there interesting words? Whenever you study in the Bible the lives of men like Joseph and Abraham and James and Paul and Stephen, and ultimately when you study the God-man, Jesus Christ, you should hear coming from the pages of their biographies, the words imitate thou me, at least that which is in their life of good character and of good repute. The second mindset, though, that would be discouraging to the spiritual walk of a believer would be that of discouragement. Stephen is such a special kind of Christian, you might erroneously conclude, with special advantages and benefits that I could never measure up to his lifestyle. Well, don't ever forget that Stephen is ultimately imitating Jesus Christ, who is within all of us, who seeks all of us to become more and more like him. Godliness is not the privilege of a few select believers, it is the privilege of submissive believers. It isn't a matter of special privilege or special standing, it isn't a special class of Christian that has this kind of life, it isn't some kind of special standing with God, but it does have everything to do with a special submission to the Lord. You and I can enjoy the consequences of godliness if we will, like he evidently did, pursue the character of godliness.

Two more cautions, let me give them to you. First of all, when imitating godly biblical characters, do not expect perfection, neither from them nor from yourself, instead look for progress. One of my favorite professors used to say often in class, God isn't necessarily looking for perfect Christians, he is looking for progressing Christians. Secondly, when studying biblical examples, don't try to imitate their performance, instead imitate their attitude.

We cannot repeat performances in different cultures and in different ages and dispensations, but we can't imitate and emulate their attitude. We won't be hauled in, as Stephen will be in a few verses before the same hedon, to give testimony to the deity of Jesus Christ. We probably won't take a stand before many, we probably won't be taken outside the city walls and stoned until we're dead, but we can learn from him how to be placed in a high pressure situation where you need to know how to respond. We can learn from him and we can imitate his control, his emotional stability, we can learn how to act like Christ. With that in mind, the question then comes, what can we learn from and what can we imitate from the life of one man that God placed in scripture, not because he needed a filler for the book of Acts, but because he wanted to teach us some things.

Well, let's find out. If you're not already there, Acts 6, verse 3 is where we pick up our study, and we learn right away that Stephen was a man who had a good reputation. Now, reputation is what people say about you, we know that character is what God says about you, and they could be vastly different from each other, but it's interesting to me that it says that Stephen, to those without, had a good reputation and obviously to the body within. I think it'd be interesting if we subjected leadership in the church to perhaps some interviews of secular employers or co-workers.

Tell us what this person is like outside of this holy huddle. Tell us what a person is like Monday through Saturday and we'll determine whether or not he or she can be involved in leadership in the church. Well, evidently, this was part of the requirement for these men, because the apostles said we want to make sure you choose men of good reputation. Choose men with a good name. Solomon wrote that a good name is to be chosen above gold or silver.

Find some individuals who are known for their purity and their integrity in the community. And so they sought out these men and they came up with, among them, this man named Stephen. Then the passage goes on to repeat the same phrase about Stephen five different times, and whenever you see a phrase or a grouping of words repeated over and over and over again in the New Testament, it isn't because God is stuttering, but because God wants to impress us with something.

So you want to get your pencil and underline these five expressions. In verse three, we read that Stephen is full of the Holy Spirit and he is, secondly, full of wisdom. In verse five, we're told that Stephen is full of faith, and then again that he is full of the Holy Spirit. Then in verse eight, we read that Stephen was full of grace and then he was also full of power. Now, each of these five references, in each of them the word filled or full is the word plerase, which could be translated dominated by or controlled by.

And you want to get used to translating the word filled with that similar expression that sort of denotes a different idea. We're not gas tanks who need to be filled up and we get low and we need to get filled up again of the Holy Spirit. It means dominated by or controlled by. So the Bible tells us that he was dominated by five different things.

Let's take a closer look. First of all, in verses three and in verse five, we're told that Stephen was full of the Holy Spirit. In other words, Stephen was dominated by, controlled by the Holy Spirit. We've already studied what that means in other sessions, and so I won't repeat myself, but as I thought about Stephen, it struck me that it would take a man controlled by and dominated by the Holy Spirit to not become either overwhelmed or enamored with what had happened to him over the last few months, in fact, less than a year's time.

Well, think about it for a moment. It had just been several months earlier where the Spirit of God had descended at Pentecost and Peter had delivered the first sermon, as it were, of the New Testament church. Stephen was evidently among those who received Christ as his own personal savior. He had accepted the Lord into his life. Shortly thereafter, this body of believers that he is involved in explodes to now more than 20,000 people. The Bible tells us earlier that they have at least 5,000 men listed on their membership roll. An explosion is occurring, and then the Bible will inform us that among these thousands of men, the apostles say, select seven, and of those seven and the first of those seven is this man named Stephen, and he hears that the body has confirmed that he is filled with wisdom and the Spirit, that he has indeed a reputation of integrity in the community and among those believers in the Christian community. Before long, we'll look at in a moment, he is performing signs and wonders. He is given that unique position along with that apostolic body to confirm the Gospel as being from God with miraculous signs. Here is the man who has had all this happen to him in less than a year.

Can you imagine that? It would take a man dominated by the Holy Spirit to not be overwhelmed with it or to not be enamored with himself because of it. Second, we're told in verse 3 that Stephen was controlled or dominated by wisdom. Now that's a study all of itself.

Several studies. What is wisdom? I like the way one person put it.

They said, wisdom is that intelligence that keeps you out of situations that require wisdom. That's good. I like the wise example of that old gentleman who just celebrated with his wife his 50th anniversary. Somebody asked the gentleman how could he attribute, what did he attribute their marital bliss to, and he said, well, he said, here it is. He said, when my wife and I first got married, we had this agreement. It went kind of like this. When she was mad at me and bothered with me, she would just tell me everything and just get off her mind and she'd just lay it all out.

And when I was mad at her and bothered with something about her, well, I just took a long walk. So he said, I guess you could attribute our happy marriage to the fact that for the most part I've led an outdoor life. That's wisdom. Now you need to understand that when you come to the word to define wisdom in the Bible, wisdom never refers to how much a person knows. Wisdom always refers to how quickly a person obeys. It isn't what you know or what you've learned, it's how you live what you say you've learned. To say you know and not do is really not to know at all, according to the Bible. And a wise person is that person who obeys the truth in spite of outward pressure.

When you're living one way and your entire world around you is saying you really ought to be living this way, when you're saying this is right and everybody else is saying no, that's wrong, this is right, it takes a wise person to be guided through that domination of godly wisdom, through this maze of pressure and opinion so that you arrive at what God would consider the truth to be, even though no one else is telling you that's the truth. Well you need to understand as you come to this passage that Stephen, who is filled with the wisdom of the word that is far different at times than the wisdom of the world, is about to go up against the establishment. He's going to take on Judaism. He's going to say that in effect Judaism is to be set aside and there's something new now and it's called Christianity and it follows a person, not a ritual, and that person's name is the one you killed, Jesus Christ.

That's going against the grain. That's going against the current of public opinion and the current of thought for that day. And Stephen, who was dominated by wisdom, would be able to get up and carry through with his conviction that Christ was the truth. Now third, in verse 5, the Bible also tells us that Stephen was a man full of faith. Now you could write into the margin of your text the word conviction.

It could be rendered that way. It could also be translated faithfulness. This is being filled with conviction about the truth of Jesus Christ and it will take, by the way, conviction to live out the life of wisdom because what you discover to be the truth in the word is not easily lived out. It will take conviction. It will take faith. It will take faithfulness for you to be able to say to the world, you're wrong.

This book is right. What are some of the public opinions of today that are acceptable? It is the public opinion of today that abortion is alright, that that is not a living child. It is a public opinion today that divorcing your spouse is acceptable. You go to the word and you hear a different message.

It will take conviction in you to be able to follow through with certain things that the world says is alright. I was listening on the radio some time ago to a teenager who was being interviewed on Focus on the Family. I may have shared this with you.

I apologize if I have. He was being questioned. He had started sort of a movement in his school that was spreading. And somewhere in the conversation, one of the men, Dobson or the other man, I can't remember his name, but they said, now, you know, you're a teenager and you're involved in a place where we all agree is an area where there's a lot of peer pressure. How do you handle the peer pressure on your campus? And I'll never forget this guy's response over the radio. He said, Dr. Dobson, you need to understand on my campus, I am the peer pressure.

Isn't that great? Well, at IBM, you be the peer pressure. On your campus, you be the peer pressure.

In the shop, you be the peer pressure. I was talking to a gentleman in our church this past week and he said they moved me to the floor at work. And he said, it's interesting how now over the course of a few days, in fact, some of the language is now changing and some apologies are being made. And when I arrived, some of the jokes are stopped sort of in midair. He said, I imagine they've noticed that I read my New Testament during my lunch break.

And he said, they're now coming and asking me certain questions. And I say, hallelujah to that as taking wisdom, learning from the Word and having the conviction to live it out in the world. Stephen was filled with conviction and it would cost him his life, by the way. It wouldn't make his life easier. I think our problem is that we believe that if we have conviction with God, things will get easier. God will smooth it out.

Maybe not. Fourth, another ingredient in his life that I found unusual. Verse 8 tells us that Stephen was full of grace. This is more a characteristic of his personality than it is a theological description of the grace of God that had been put to work in his life. Stephen was dominated by this character of choriss, gentleness, winsomeness, grace. People would say of him, he is a gracious man, which is kind of surprising to me.

In fact, F.F. Bruce makes the statement that if you translated the word in today's vernacular, you could easily translate the word charming. And so I found it interesting that this man who was deeply moved with conviction to the point where he will say some astounding things to the establishment of his day, you would characterize him as, he's winsome.

He smiles a lot. He's gracious. One of the things that struck me about Dr. John Walvoord, the chancellor of Dallas Seminary, where I attended, when we had him here to preach at our church, it was my first opportunity to be up close with him, because before then it was in the classroom and he was up front. And, you know, you don't go up to guys like that and talk about the weather.

You kind of leave them alone. And one of the things that really struck me was when he came to our home, how much he laughed, how much he joked. In fact, I was kind of shocked at times. Dr. Walvoord told a joke. I made sure I laughed, too, by the way.

Funny. We had a Christian artist in our church, and before he sang in concert, he asked to have my office. And I thought, that's great. He wants to go in there and pray and, you know, be alone. That's good.

You know, I kind of expect that. And I went in later to get him and discovered that he had rolled my office. There was toilet paper everywhere.

Around my chair, the lamp, the curtains, from bookshelf to bookshelf. I thought he was praying. I mean, I cut his honorarium in half and I thought that was a great lesson to learn. I remember as a college student mopping floors in a florist shop to earn some money for tuition at night and worked a few hours each night, and when I was there early on, I turned the radio on. They had high up on a shelf and tried to find something that I could listen to as I worked and just happened to dial by this guy that was preaching. And I was fascinated with his preaching, and so I'd tune in each night at the same time. One of the things that really surprised me, not having come from a similar world, was the fact that he laughed in the pulpit of all places. I would learn later his name was Swindoll.

You know, I think we need to rewrite in our minds this attitude that the deeper you go with God, the gloomier you look. That wasn't the case, at least, with this man that we are to emulate. He was filled with courage. He was filled with the Holy Spirit. He was filled with conviction. He was a man of faith, and yet people liked to be around him because of the way he laughed and talked.

Fifth thing, one more. Verse 8 tells us that Stephen was full of power, that word dunamis or dynamic. He was filled with a dynamic and was performing great wonders and signs among the people. It's interesting that he is given that special apostolic power to confirm his message with signs and wonders. Prior to the completion of this word, we know that apostolic community was able to verify what they said with wonderful signs and miracles.

He evidently was able to do the same thing. And as a result, Stephen would become the next target of the Sanhedrin. They had been focusing on Peter and John.

They were having trouble with the church. But now this new man, what's his name? We've never heard of him.

Who is he? Well, his name is Stephen. It would go after him, verse 9, but some men from what was called the synagogue of the freedmen, including both Cyrenians and Alexandrians and some from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and argued with Stephen. Evidently in the synagogue of the freedmen, there were about 480 synagogues in Jerusalem at this time. This particular one was made up of those children of freed slaves, Jewish slaves. And since it was filled with Greek Jews, as it were, Stephen, being a Greek Jew, had evidently found his way to this particular synagogue and he was declaring the truth of Christ. And that sort of started this debate. And there were a number of men from other areas there.

Some were from Cilicia and Asia. It's interesting to consider that one of the men from Cilicia that will eventually begin persecuting the church is a man who may have debated Stephen on that day. His name was Saul. They were unable, verse 10, to cope with the wisdom and the spirit with which he was speaking.

Well, if you can't win publicly, try something nasty and private. They did that. Then they secretly induced men to say, we have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and against God. And they stirred up the people, the elders and the scribes, and they came upon him and dragged him away and brought him before the council. And they put forward false witnesses who said, this man incessantly speaks against this holy place and the law, for we have heard him say that this Nazarene Jesus will destroy this place and alter the customs which Moses handed down to us. Two problems, basically. They're saying Stephen is teaching something that's different than Judaism, the Mosaic tradition. That's a theological problem.

And then they toss in the highly explosive emotional problem. It says he's going to alter our customs. He's going to change the way we live.

And they didn't like change any more than we like change. Boy, they had an explosion here with this argument and they fixing their gaze on him. All who were sitting in the council saw his face like the face of an angel.

This is grace under fire, and this struck me. If you look back to verse 12, where it reads, they stirred up the people, the elders and the scribes, and they came upon him. That Greek verb means to come suddenly and with violence. He's in the midst of a debate where he is with great wisdom and composure, declaring the truth, and they burst through the doors of that synagogue and they sweep him away. Before he knows that he is standing before the Sanhedrin, this is the moment of greatest pressure in his life, undoubtedly the most trying time that will end with the signaled verdict, guilty, execute him. Was he married?

Single? Did he have children? We don't know, but he didn't have any time to say goodbye. He was ripped from the synagogue, tried, and in a matter of moments, stoned to death. And he undoubtedly knew he was in trouble because Peter and John had been here before him, and at least he would get a severe beating and his face shone like an angel. God did something unusual for him, by the way.

We can't repeat the performance, but I want you to see what's happening here. He was dominated by the Holy Spirit, and God did for Stephen's face what God had done for Moses' face. Here Stephen, who is accused of blaspheming Moses, becomes like Moses, as another sign that he is telling the truth from God.

Listen to him, and yet they would not listen. If you turn over in your Bibles quickly to chapter 7, as the mob is stoning Stephen, you see Stephen modeling grace under fire again, modeling the grace of Christ himself. Verse 59, and they went on stoning Stephen as he called upon the Lord and said, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Where did he learn that from? The Lord himself. Verse 60, and falling on his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. Where did he learn that? And having said this, he fell asleep. Without time to say goodbye to anybody, without time to set his affairs in order, without time you would think to prepare his heart, and yet you discover that at that moment he was ready.

Why? Because in his life he was dominated by, controlled by, submissive to the Holy Spirit, which produced in him what we pursue. Conviction, wisdom, dynamic, and grace.

That's what we're here to see. Thanks for joining us for this broadcast of Wisdom for the Heart. Today's lesson from our Vintage Wisdom Library is called Grace Under Fire. We posted it to our website, which is wisdomonline.org. You can find it on our smartphone app. You can use either of those tools to access the complete archive of all our discipleship resources. In this current series, Stephen teaches through the early chapters of the Book of Acts. If we can help you today, our phone number is 866-48-BIBLE or 866-482-4253. Join us again next time right here on Wisdom for the Heart.