Standing Firm

SERMON: 2010-10-11--ac1054--standing-firm-part-1 SOURCE DURATION: 00:45:06.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with the speaker setting up the sermon context (Acts chapter 4). The main body of the sermon concludes in segment [468] just before a sustained acoustic music interval begins, marking the end of the spoken exposition. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:41:09.180-00:45:04.840 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, I want to ask you this morning to try to picture the scene that is before us here in Acts chapter 4. Peter and John have just been released by the Synhedrin, the religious court, after they had been detained for preaching Jesus. And they have not only been sternly warned against ever speaking the name of Jesus again, they have also been threatened because verse 21 tells us after further threats, they let them go. Now the word threaten means to state your intention to take hostile action against somebody in retribution for something they did or didn't do. And we're all familiar with threats. We use them regularly, sometimes wisely, sometimes not. A parent will say to a child, if you don't finish your main course, you're not going to get dessert. If you keep sassing your sister, you're going to your bedroom. The law will threaten us with imprisonment if we break the law. And sometimes when we're good and mad at each other, we'll tell each other, I'll kill you if you ever do that again. And fortunately, most of the time we don't act on that, but threats are one of the ways in which we use power to get other people to conform to our will. And so here are Peter and John. What do they do after they have been released and threatened by the powers that be? Well, they travel back to the church and they fill the church in on what happened. We read in verse 23, on their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. And all that undoubtedly included all the threats they had heard because, please remember, these were not idle threats. The Sanhedrin had already demonstrated their power in arranging for the death of Jesus. And they demonstrated their power later on in the stoning of Stephen and eventually James loses his head. So these are not idle threats. And so here they are. They go to the church and they gather the church together and they tell them, listen, this is what we were told. Now here's the big question, how do you think the church reacted to the story of these threats? Well, the Bible doesn't tell us in so many words, but human nature being what it is, I suspect their reactions were not very much different from your reactions or my reactions. In fact, it's pretty safe to predict that their reactions would fall within the range of what's known as the traditional bell curve. This is a tool sociologists used to try to demonstrate the range of responses in a given group of people to a particular situation. And so here I have graphed for you what is likely the reaction of the early church to the words, we're going to threaten you with imprisonment, we're going to threaten you with death, we're going to threaten you with selling your wives and your children as slaves. All of that was reality. And so on the one hand over here, you've got those who are strong. These are the people with steel in their spine, fire in their belly. They're not easily intimidated. They're the ones that say, bring it on, bring it on. And we're going to fight because nobody's going to tell us not to do what Jesus has told us. But you know, I suspect if the early church was at all like you and me, there was probably also a percentage on the other end whose reaction to those threats was a much weaker reaction like can we please talk about this? Maybe we shouldn't be so in their face. I mean meeting together in Solomon's colonnade in the temple, that's like rubbing their noses in who Jesus is and maybe instead of boldly proclaiming him out in the public, maybe we want to just sort of do it from house to house and quietly behind the scenes because we don't really want to get into all this trouble, do we? Can you identify with either of those two extremes? Well, chances are the two extremes are the minority of a given community. That's what the bell curve always demonstrates, maybe one or two percent. But the majority of the people will find themselves right here in the middle, somewheres between this weak fearful response and this overly strong reaction. In fact, the percentage in here typically according to sociologists is in the neighborhood of 68 percent and we've seen some of that in our own congregation. You will recall when news of the lawsuit was announced, there were those who said bring it on, people who said I relish a challenge and then there are some of us who say well this is scary, this could cost me money, it can hurt my reputation and then there's a lot of us somewhere in the middle saying well I don't really want to fight but I don't really want to go away from a fight either. And this is the situation where the early church finds itself when Peter and John come to them and they report on this situation. It's pretty safe to say they had a whole range of reactions. And just to show you how relevant that is to life, let me just read you a little piece from an email that I received this past week from Nigel Edwards. Nigel, as many of you know, now works for Qatar Airlines out in the Middle East. You see the little country there in the Persian Gulf and Nigel is one of our people who listens to our services online. He listened to the last two messages that we did here on the subject of to obey or not and here's what he writes to me earlier this week. He says, "As a Christian here in Qatar, I have already met people who have come into conflict between the authorities and the gospel's call for evangelism. A couple of years ago, many in the Christian community here in Qatar paid a heavy price for exercising their responsibilities to the Great Commission. They gathered blankets, food supplies, toiletries, and of course, Bibles, and entered the various labor camps of thousands of Indian, Nepalese, and other nationalities, construction workers, laborers, and proselytizers, and proselytized the Christian faith." And Nigel says, "That was not a wise thing to do. And as much as one might respect their enthusiasm and courage, the law of the land here in Qatar is that proselytizing is illegal, and the security guards at the camps wrote down license plate numbers, and within a few months, the interior ministry police had rounded up and deported dozens of Christian families. Many of these were single income families and/or had come to Qatar after losing their jobs in their home country. And while following the intendant spirit of the gospel, they and their families ended up paying a huge price for disobeying the law of the land. And when one is deported by a Middle Eastern regime, there is no time to tidy up one's affairs, sell furniture, vehicles, and so on. Many of these families landed back in their home countries homeless, penniless, and jobless." And then he goes on to say that the two messages had relevance for them as parents not only, but also provided a baseline for living here in the Middle East and learning to find that balance between honoring the law and customs of our host country and our duties and responsibilities as Christians living here. You see, fears and threats can come to us in many different forms. It's come to us again just in recent weeks at a meeting in classes, and I may as well tell you this upfront. Our church visitors, working together with a very small group of concerned members in our congregation, managed to pass a motion appointing a five-member committee to investigate things here at Maranatha. Now, we don't fully know what that means. We have asked for clarification. We'll certainly keep you posted. We continue to ask for your ongoing prayer. We have nothing to hide. We're not afraid of any kind of inquiry, but you appreciate it produces another period of instability and unsettledness. And so what do you do when you've got things hanging over your head? What do you do when the boss is after you? What do you do when your husband gives you a hard time? What do you do if you feel that you're being treated unfairly in this situation or in that situation? Well, that's where this passage before us is, I think, incredibly powerful because what the church does is they turn to God in prayer. Listen again to verse 24. When they heard this, that is all the threats that had been directed towards them. They raised their voices together in prayer to God. And in the time that we have this morning, we want to start looking at the prayer of the church in the context of this situation. And I got to tell you up front, I love the prayers of scripture. And I love the prayers of scripture because they so teach us what it is that God is looking for from his people in the midst of situations that sometimes are difficult and very trying. And so as we look at that prayer here this morning, let's begin by noticing they begin their prayer by addressing God as the sovereign Lord. Verse 24 says, "Sovereign Lord," they said, "you made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them." Now the word sovereign means, of course, possessing supreme or ultimate power. And that is demonstrated in the ongoing phraseology. You are the maker of heaven and earth, the sea and everything that is in it. The spiritual powers of the universe, the worldly powers of the earth, and the powers of the deep, the demonic, and any creature in all of creation is subject to your authority because you are greater than anybody else. And what they're really saying is, what is the antidote to the fear of man? What is the antidote to situations where we find ourselves with somebody who is bigger and who has the power to make our lives miserable? It is simply put, the fear of God. And so, all through Scripture, there is an emphasis on looking to God as the sovereign Lord in the midst of challenging and very difficult situations. So there is Psalm 56 verse 11 that says, "In God will I trust, I will not be afraid what can man do to me." There you have that phrase, "what can man do to me." It occurs four times, as far as I know, in Scripture, three times in the Old Testament. It's quoted in the New Testament, in Hebrews chapter 13, where the author says, "So we can say with confidence, the Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid what can man do to me." What's our first response? When we find ourselves in situations or relationships that are intimidating, where people can make life miserable, whether a spouse or a child or somebody else, a boss, a government, when we are threatened to within an inch of our life, the first thing to do is to turn in prayer to God and recognize that God is the sovereign Lord. Jesus puts it this way in Matthew 10, when He prepares the disciples for the day when this is going to happen and He says, "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul, rather be afraid of the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell, are not two sparrows sold for a penny, yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your father, and even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid, you are worth more than many sparrows. Sovereign Lord, you are the maker of heaven and earth." That's the first thing they do as they turn to the Lord in prayer. And then they do a really interesting thing. They place their present situation in an historical context. You'll notice how the scripture passage continues, "You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David. Why do the nations rage and the people's plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and His anointed one." Who can tell me this morning where that comes from? Psalm 2. And Psalm 2 is a psalm that describes what I like to call the battle or the conflict of the ages. And the conflict and the battle of the ages is first described for us in scripture in Genesis chapter 3 verse 15, "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers, he will crush your head and you will strike his heel." You there is the serpent, and the serpent of course represents the evil one. The woman represents the human race not only, but more especially the believing human race. And the serpent's offspring are those spiritual powers and those human beings in the course of history who are going to side with Satan and build his kingdom in opposition to the kingdom of God. And the woman's offspring represents ultimately the church, centralized as we'll see later in the person of Jesus Christ, and throughout the course of history the Bible says there is going to be conflict between these two forces, the woman and her seed and the serpent and his seed. The woman becomes the centerpiece of the kingdom of God represented in Genesis chapter 4 by the son Abel, and the seed of the serpent becomes the kingdom of darkness represented in that story by Cain who is not a man of faith. And the differences between the two are this, the people of faith know that the problems of the world are not caused by God or anybody else, they are caused by human sin. And the only way back is to repent of that sin, go back to God, bend the knee and receive his forgiveness and his grace. That's what Abel represents when he is murdered by Cain, he is replaced by Seth, and then in Genesis chapter 4, if you want to read this on your own, you see the development of the godly line, the seventh generation of which then becomes Enoch who walked with God. And you have a picture there of how God's people are going to be characterized by that kind of humility, that kind of faith and that kind of obedience. Then on the other side, you've got the seed of the serpent, manifest in Cain who rejected God's offer of salvation because he was proud and arrogant, exiled to wander, he took it upon himself to build his own fortifications, his own city in order to establish what St. Augustine called many years ago the City of Man versus the City of God. And if you want to see what that looks like, study Genesis chapter 4, the genealogy of Cain leads to Lamech who is a man of violence and a man of power. And in that little snapshot, you have the seed of two different kingdoms that from this point on move unvaryingly throughout the course of history. And throughout most of the course of history, they intertwine, they overlap, sometimes the one dominates, sometimes the other, mostly the nations of the world are greater than the kingdom of God, only in the reign of David and Solomon can it be said that the kingdom of God reached its epitome in the Old Testament. But they move both of them throughout the course of human history, in fact they often move in your heart and in my heart and they certainly do that outside of the grace of Jesus. And all through biblical history, those two are intertwined, they are like the wheat and the tares, sometimes you don't know which is which and sometimes the one looks like the other, but the seed is there and when you follow those two lines through scripture, you come to the end of the book of Revelation and there you see the full manifestation of those two kingdoms. And the one is called a what? It is called the great prostitute, the whore of Babylon, that is the fruit of Cain's generation. The other is called, guess what? The church which is the bride of Christ. Now have you ever asked yourself in your Bible study, why is one called a whore or a prostitute and why is the church called the bride? Well, I can tell you it's extremely profound. A bride belongs with her husband and a bride saves herself for her husband and she cannot be bought or moved out of that position because she knows this is where her loyalty lies. A prostitute on the other hand, it's a woman for sale, the high is bitter, and at the end of time, the great whore, the prostitute, the nations of the world who refuse to bow before God and who try to find the riches everywhere else are going to be thrown in the lake of fire and as you know, the bride of Christ, the church, is going to inherit the new creation. Can you see how that is the grand theme of history and that throughout history, you have these two kingdoms living side by side. They're intertwined often in such a way that it is extremely difficult to distinguish the one from the other, which is why Jesus in the parable of the wheat and the tares says, let them grow until it is time for the harvest and I'll tell you this, wherever the gospel goes and wherever the gospel does its work, whatever that seed is that is at the core of the human heart is going to come to fruition and is going to demonstrate by its actions, whether it will bow before God and walk in faith and in obedience and repentance or whether it's going to raise the fist against God, damn him and try to find its life outside of God. Are you hearing me? This runs throughout all of human history and all of the human race. So what are they doing here? Well, they're putting it in the context of the days of David because you see the kingdom of the world in Psalm 2 is represented by the nations who rage and the peoples who plot in vain and the kings of the earth. They take their stand and the rulers together against whom? Against the Lord and his anointed. Who is the anointed? It's King David. Why is King David anointed? Because he's a man after God's own heart. And so what we have here is a description of the ongoing conflict then between King David who is called by God to establish the kingdom of God and by the nations who want to take him down. And so if you look at this next slide once again, here is David called of God to establish the kingdom of God. That's why he's a man after God's own heart. That's why he has a passion to build the temple. That's why he has a passion to organize the country in worship so that the nations can come and see the glory of God among the people of Israel. And that's why he fights the nations that want to destroy the people of God. And that's why there is this conflict, this battle of the ages. And that's why David was a man of war, which why in the final analysis he was not allowed to build the temple, but only his son Solomon. You see, the early church confronted by the threats of their religious authorities. They cry out to God. They confess that he is sovereign. And then they place their situation in the context of history. Why do you think they do that? Well, I suspect it's because whenever Christians find themselves in positions of conflict or difficulty, there are multiple temptations. There is the temptation to forever second guess yourself. And some introspection is always healthy. There are temptations to fold and to say, "Well, this battle is too big. I can't win it." And there is always the temptation to say, "How in the world did I ever get myself into this kind of situation? And God, where are you? How come this happens to me, somebody as nice as I am?" Because you see, typically Christians are peace lovers. We just want to walk with the Lord and mind our own business largely, and we want to lead people to Jesus. What really is so bad about that? And so when you find yourself in situations where all of a sudden your boss turns against you for no apparent reason, and all of a sudden your husband becomes a real jerk simply because you love Jesus, or you know, you find yourself in a political situation where you get dragged before courts or human rights commissions because you're standing up for what is right, then you say to yourself, "There's got to be something wrong with this picture." And indeed, sometimes there is. We should never assume that we're always right. But here's what I want you to understand. There is nobody who lived more righteously than Jesus. And what do they do to Jesus? They nailed him to the cross. And the Church here refers to King David and the conflict that he experienced with the nations to let us know that historically, wherever God moves with his Spirit and wherever God anoints his people, there is going to be a conflict with the nations. That is to say, the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, whatever that looks like, are always going to be in conflict with each other. Now that's not a nice message for those of us who are middle children and who like to live in peace and who pride ourselves on the ability to be able to live in peace. But I'm telling you, that's what Scripture says. And I'm telling you, that's what the Church does here. They place it in the historical context of the conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. Has all kinds of implications. We don't have time to spell those out. But you watch once what happens when you start living on fire for Jesus and the reactions that you're going to experience. And sometimes it's our own stupidity. Sometimes it's our own fault. We are not immune to making mistakes like that Christian group in Qatar that Nigel was talking about. But even if you live perfectly, if you radiate Jesus sooner or later, somebody will not like you. So get over yourself. Get used to it. So they address the Lord as sovereign. They place their situation in the context of history. And then they do something even further of interest. They bring it into their own historical context. Listen to verses 27 and 28. "Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen." There are three very interesting things in that verse that I want us to note this morning. And the first is this. You have at work here what I like to call an unholy coalition. "Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus." Now what's wrong with that picture? Think this through. You've got Herod, you've got Pontius Pilate, and you've got Jew, and you've got Gentile. What do they do? Well, they meet together, and then they conspire against your holy servant Jesus. And the word "conspire" means to make secret plans to jointly commit an unlawful act. But I wonder, did you catch the irony? Herod and Pilate were sworn enemies until they became friends after the trial of Jesus. Did you know that? And Jew and Gentile, well, you couldn't find a bigger gap between them because no self-respecting Jew would ever find himself in the company of Gentiles. In fact, later on in the book of Acts, Peter gets himself into one deep pile of manure. Even with the Christian church, because he goes to Cornelius' house. And Lord willing, whenever we get to that passage, we're going to see that he had a blame it on God to get around having to face his own responsibility. Herod and Pilate, Jew and Gentile, they meet together and they conspire. And I call that an unholy coalition. And here's been my experience over the years, the gospel sometimes makes very strange bedfellows. And I have known over the years people who had nothing in common with each other, people who strongly disliked each other, people who always spoke negatively about each other to other people. And when Jesus comes along and he shows himself in the manifestation of transformed and changed lives and a community starts living in the power of God's Holy Spirit, and they begin to worship in spirit and in truth, all of a sudden they become the best of friends and they gather together to conspire against the Lord and his anointed. I will never forget First Church, our pastor, we had two women, elderly ladies. Nobody liked them. They didn't like each other and they were known for their antagonism towards each other. And both of them were great friends with me until they began to understand that I really meant what I said and that I expected a life of faith to produce transformation and change for the glory of God. That's not an unreasonable request. I'm not legalistic about it. I'm not moralistic about it, but that is I think the gospel is it not. God is building his kingdom. And so as history went on, these two ladies not only met together, but they began to conspire together and they began to spread as much unrest as they could throughout the congregation because they couldn't stand to see a whole new generation of new believers coming to faith and threatening the security of their position. Now understand I'm very careful when I talk about this and I would never say in those days that I/we did not make mistakes, but I'll tell you the gospel makes strange bedfellows. Herod and Pilate become the best of friends. Jew and Gentile, you couldn't find people further apart. All of a sudden, they're joined together to oppose Jesus. So that's the second thing in this passage that is really worth noting. They conspired against your holy servant, Jesus. And the word servant there is child. It means Jesus is the reflection of the Father. And one of the strangest things for us to get our heads around when you read the gospels is that Jesus, who did so much good in redeeming people and changing their lives, making the lame to walk and the blind to see and the deaf to hear, that people could hate him so and ultimately so nail him to the tray. We'll talk more about that later because what happens when Jesus shows up is that the Spirit of God does not bow to the human desire to be at the center of the world and to be at the center of the universe. And for that reason, for any and all of us, and let's be clear on this, in those places where we will not bend the knee, in those places where we want to live for our own passions, for our own desires, for our own glory, for our own kingdom instead of God's kingdom, in that place Jesus will always be our enemy. Do we understand that please? He is the Lord, not you and not me. So often we're like a bunch of babies that want to control the household and that want to control the kingdom of God too. That's how the world got to the mess that it's seeing. And don't ever think, don't ever think that when Jesus builds his new and eternal kingdom, that through those gates is going to come anything that is unclean, impure, self-centered or corrupted by the power of sin. And so I have found over the years, you know we live in a world that's incredibly tolerant. I mean if you want to wear your dress down to your feet or if you want to hike your skirt up to your waist, if you want to cover your head or not cover your head, if you want to believe this or if you want to believe that, we're so tolerant aren't we? But there's one thing we're not tolerant of and that's Jesus. Because when Jesus shows up, he reveals what's inside our hearts. He calls us to repentance and he says will you leave everything and follow me? Now he promises us the whole world and he wants to bless us beyond anything that we can understand. But see to get there, to be dressed in his robes of righteousness in biblical language means we have to put off the old and we have to put on the new. And so the kingdoms of the world, Heret and Pilate, Jew and Gentile, the religious leaders of their day, they were all at odds with Jesus. Because if Jesus was Lord, they were not and they would have to bend the knee. And that is offensive if God does not give you saving grace. So it's an unholy coalition. They gather together to kill Jesus and the spirit of Jesus, which is always a spirit that brings life. And then I want to end with this this morning. Third thing to notice is that God is still in control because the verse ends 27 with these words, "If they did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen." And for the disciples, one of the most disconcerting moments prior to the resurrection of Jesus was his arrest, his trial, and his death. It absolutely threw them for a loop because as the two travelers on the way to Emmaus said, "But we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel." But it wasn't until after the resurrection that they began to understand the wisdom of God that the death of Jesus was critical. It was necessary to accomplish salvation. And it didn't happen just because a bunch of wicked men conspired and they tried to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. No, it all happened under the watchful view of God. That's why Peter in Acts chapter two puts it this way. He says concerning Jesus, "This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge, and you with the help of wicked men put him to death by nailing him to the cross." Didn't make God the author of sin? It simply meant that God used the wickedness of people to accomplish his redemptive purposes and you and I are here today calling ourselves by the name Christian because Jesus was faithful even unto death and was raised by God the Father on the third day. And what's my point? It's important to understand that when you and I in those moments of life where we find ourselves at odds sometime with the kings of the earth and the nations of the world, whatever they look like, a crabby boss, an unsaved husband, a dishonest employer, a corrupt government, take it anywhere where you want to go with it. When we find ourselves in that situation, we're often aghast, we're often surprised, we often wonder, "God, where are you?" And as I said, it always ought to lead to self-reflection. Are we wise? Can we do different things? Should we be better at what we do? But I'll tell you at the end of the day, there are situations that overcome you and me that ultimately still bear the fingerprints of God and God uses them to flush out in us what needs to be flushed out and He uses them to flush out in others what needs to be flushed out so that at the end of days, the kingdom of God can shine brightly and the kingdom of darkness can be demonstrated for what it is. And the challenge then that we face in each of those situations is what are we going to do? And when we pick this up next time, Lord willing, we're going to look again at their prayer and they're not asking for negative situations and circumstances to go away because they know to some degree that's going to be our lot in life if we're going to follow Jesus. What do they do instead? They pray and as we'll see, they'll pray for boldness and they pray for God to confirm His word with signs and wonders and then God meets them and they go out from that room filled with boldness and they turn the world upside down because they know Jesus is with them even to the end of the age. That's the boldness I crave for me and that's the boldness that I crave by the power of God's Holy Spirit for each one of us as well. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:41:09.180; remove through 00:45:06.000] Our helper he amid the flood Of mortal wills prevailing For still our ancient foe The sea to work us both His craft and power our grave And our way through the waves On earth is not his equal Did we in our own strength confide Our striding would be losing Were not the right men on our side The end of God's own choosing Thus that's who that may be Christ Jesus it is He Lord, saddle o'er this name From age to age the same And he must win the battle And though this world with devil's pill Should threaten to undo us We will not fear for God has willed His truth to triumph to us The prince of darkness bring We tremble not forget His grace we can endure For though his due is sure One little word shall fail him And word above all earthly powers No thanks to man above I hear The spirit and the gifts are ours Through him who with us I hear Let good and kin prayers go This mortal life also The body they make ill God's truth the might of sin His kingdom is forever [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:45:06.000; resume after this marked segment]