The Believer's Authority

SERMON: 2012-05-20--ac1290--the-believer-s-authority-part-1 SOURCE DURATION: 00:47:26.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The entire provided segment sequence constitutes a continuous theological exposition and personal reflection on biblical scripture (Peter's healing of the beggar). There is no non-sermon material at either edge. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:29:56.700-00:33:13.120 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- I don't know about you, but I've often thought that if I were to have been in Peter's place, come up to this crippled beggar at the gate called Beautiful and sense the call of God to be instrumental in his healing, I would have handled it rather differently from what Peter did. First of all, I probably would have argued with the Lord a little bit. In fact, probably more than a little bit. I would have said, "You want me to what?" And then I'd say, "Lord, you know, this could turn out really badly. This could like reflect badly on your name, and it might not do me much good either to be truthful." And then if I sensed that I couldn't escape the conviction of the Holy Spirit to become involved in this man's life, I probably would have walked over to him a little bit and bent over and looked around a little bit and said, "Do you mind if I pray for you?" And then if I prayed for his healing, I would make very sure to end my prayer with that famous phrase, "You know it, if it be your will." Isn't that a great one? That always gets you around the issue of faith. And then if I felt that I needed to talk to him some more, then again I would have looked around to make sure that nobody was watching too closely, and I would whisper in his ear and I would say, "Do you feel better yet? Anything like happening here?" You know, if he said, "No," then I'd say, "Well, it must not have been God's will anyway. Goodbye. I'm going on with my journey." Did you notice in the story, Peter does none of those things, does he? The story tells us he looks squarely into this man's eye and then he takes authority over the situation and he commands him to walk. Listen again to how Scripture puts it, "Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, walk." And sure enough, he grabs him by the hand. The Bible says his feet and his ankles became strong, and the story goes on to say that he went walking and jumping and praising God. Not hard after that to preach the Gospel, would you not think? [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:02:42.890; remove through 00:47:26.000] Because [CUT] the people were drawn to the spectacle of this wonder. But here's the question that I want us to ponder together this morning. Why is it that Peter does it this way? That is to say, why does Peter speak into this man's life and gives him the command to walk? And the reason, of course, and I alluded to this two weeks ago, is because Peter understands the believer's authority in Christ, and in the time that we have this morning, I want us to reflect upon that a little bit further, because I think if truth be known, the concept of our authority in Christ is essentially foreign to our thinking. We have no trouble believing that because of Jesus we can come to God the Father. We have no trouble believing that because of Jesus our sins are forgiven. We have maybe no trouble even believing that because of Jesus there is power for our lives to be changed. But to believe that because of Jesus we have authority to exercise His power on earth, that's a bird of a different feather altogether, because that is essentially foreign to our thinking. Let me illustrate. For example, this well-known verse in Mark chapter 11 verse 23, Jesus speaking to the disciples, He says, "I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, 'Go throw yourself into the sea,'" now listen, "and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him." Now let me ask you the obvious question. When's the last time you spoke to a mountain? And if you did, did it move? I mean, most of us, if we start speaking to mountains, there are people around us who will cart us off to the Lunibion. It's not part of our experience. And yet Jesus says this is not a matter for those who are giants in the faith. I mean, the part that troubles me about this verse is that He talks about faith the size of what? A grain of mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, says Jesus in other parables. So what is it that we don't understand? What is it that we have such a hard time appropriating? What are we missing? Well I want to talk about that with you a little bit, and the place to begin, I think, is by asking the question, how did Jesus do His miracles? Did you ever think about that? What gave Jesus the power to cast out demons, to heal the sick, and to raise the dead? Well, the most common answer that all of us give, of course, is what? He was the Son of God. And because He was the Son of God, He had divine power that is not available to the rest of us, and so He could do what we cannot do. Now there's an element of truth to that. Jesus was eternally the begotten Son of the Father. But to say that He did His miracles out of His divinity is to miss two very important spiritual truths. So please bear with me as I try to explain these, because this stretches our thinking into places where we don't commonly go. First of all, the Bible says the Lord Jesus was fully human. That is to say, He laid aside His divinity in order to become human, like you and I. Philippians chapter 2, famous passage, says concerning Jesus that being in the very nature of God, He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped or to be taken by force, but He made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man. He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. He humbled Himself. He laid aside His claim to divine power and to divine treatment. Theologically, this is known as the kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ. So even though He remains the Son of God, He is as human as you and I. I mean, I remember as a kid wondering, "Did Jesus go to the bathroom?" Profound theological question, I know. But the reality is, we make Him out to be something other than we are. He got tired, He got weary, He got discouraged by times, He was fully human. And the second thing that we need to remember about the person of Lord Jesus in terms of how He does His miracles is that He Himself says that His authority and power to act is derived from His relationship with His Father. I tell you the truth, John 5.19, the Son can do nothing by Himself. He can only do what He sees His Father doing because whatever the Father does, the Son also does. So here's what Jesus is saying, "I am human. I have laid aside my divine power. I have a relationship with God the Father and He is the one who empowers me to do what needs to be done." And just to drive that point home, listen to how Peter describes it in the previous chapter in Acts chapter 2 verse 22. Listen to this verse, "Men of Israel, listen to this, Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs which God did among you through Him as you yourselves know." Did you catch that? Jesus was a man, fully human, did amazing things. How did He do them? Well, the Pharisees thought He did them by the power of the devil because nobody could deny the fact that He was working many miracles. Peter says Jesus did it by the power of God. And so Jesus as the Son of Man in His humanity employing the divine power of God was able to accomplish what He did. And now you say, "Well, why is that important?" Well, that's very important because if He does what He does as the Son of God, then none of us can ever do the greater works that He said we would do. But if He did them as a human being and if He did it by the power of God, then that opens up whole other vistas for your life and for my life because then you see Jesus recaptures for us what we have lost in the fall when Adam and Eve sinned and rebelled against God. Go back there with me for a moment and think this through. When God first created Adam and Eve, what was the mission, what was the mandate that He entrusted to them? Well, He said, "I want you to have dominion over all the works of My hands." Here it is, Genesis 1 verse 26. Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness. Let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth," there you have it, "over all the creatures that move along the ground." And then we have verse 28. The Bible says, "Concerning Adam and Eve, God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Let them have dominion in other translations.'" So here's the picture, God is the creator, owns the whole universe, created the earth and everything that is on it, why? Because He wanted to share His glory with Adam and Eve. And Adam and Eve as His son and His daughter were given dominion over all creation. I can't even begin to imagine what that looked like, but I imagine they had some incredible powers that you and I often strive for and don't know how to have. They had dominion. He named all the animals. He had a mission to fill the earth with their offspring. He had a mission to subdue all of the earth and to build the kingdom of God. And so because of His relationship with God, God shared His authority with Adam and with Eve. And therein of course lies the tragedy of the fall. The tragedy of the fall is that man literally falls from a high position to a lower position. Scripture puts it this way in this verse that we know so well in Genesis chapter 3, "Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life that will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken for dust you are, and to dust you will return." Some of you have heard me tell the story of the little kid. He goes to his mom, and he says, "Mom, is it true that we are made of dust?" And she says, "Yes, it is true, son. That's what the Bible teaches." And he said, "Mom, is it true that after we die we return to dust?" And she said, "Yes, son, that's true. That's what the Bible teaches." Well, he said, "I just looked under my bed and somebody's either coming or going. To dust you are, and to dust you will return." And all of us know the reality that life is not what in our hearts we would envision it to be. Isn't it true that in our heart of hearts we know there ought to be more to life than often we experience? Because in rejecting God's authority, and this is Adam and Eve's big miscalculation, they thought they would become like God, having in themselves the knowledge of right and wrong. They discovered that they were had, and like the girl who comes into great riches because she marries a great man, she makes the mistake of thinking it is now hers, divorces the man, and discovers all of a sudden she's out on the street with nothing. Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden, and instead of ruling over creation, creation now rules over them. And every time we hear news, as we did again this weekend of another earthquake, every time we stand at the grave side of somebody else that we bury, every time when we fight illness, as some of us are in the middle of fighting now, and every time when we sense life coming apart at the seams, we are reminded that we have lost our dominion, and we have lost our authority in power, and death is the ultimate enemy. Now all of that having been said, that doesn't mean that we have lost our dominion entirely, because there are vestiges, aren't there? There are remnants of that dominion that Adam and Eve had, and every time when we can harness nature so that it serves us instead of fighting us, and every time we manage by hard work or technology or other clever skills to overcome our circumstances, or every time we strive to excel in our personal lives, or in our family life, or in the field of sports as we have been seeing with the Olympics these past two weeks, you get there a vestige of the power that remains, the human desire to soar and to be the best. I often think of that when I look at these athletes and I hear their stories, the broken bones they've gone through, the injuries they have sustained, the years and the finances they have poured out just for the privilege of that one run down the hill or that one run down the track in order to prove that they are the best in the world, you see there, you see there are the remnants of the human passion that says we were made to fly, we were made to soar, we were made to have dominion. And every last one of us, if we aren't entirely dead, wherever the flame is still burning, there is at least the longing and the passion that says, "I was made for more than being a helpless victim, somehow there's got to be more to life than what I'm experiencing." Now in a fallen world, that vestige of dominion, that image of God that remains, is of course turned around, it becomes idolatrous, God doesn't get the glory, the life is not derived from God, it becomes all about us and about all our own strength. And if we can't bring our own strength to the table then what happens in the human race is we turn to the principalities and the powers, the wicked spirits of the universe who come along as they did to Jesus and who offer us the whole world if we will but bow down and worship them. And that's how the serpent in the garden becomes the dragon of the book of Revelation. He captures the hearts, the minds, the souls of men and women throughout history, particularly those who have been oppressed and those who have been broken and he comes along and he says, "I will be your father, I will be your mother, God's not there for you, I will give you power," and don't ever think that that is an idol promise because the Bible says he is the God of this world and he has considerable ability to give power, that's why in the third temptation that Jesus faces in the wilderness, Satan comes to Jesus when he is hungry, when he is weak, when the father hasn't come through with his food and with his vindication and Satan after showing him all the kingdoms of the world in their glory he says to Jesus, "If you will bow down and worship me, all this I will give to you." Now I don't know if he would have but I know he would have had the power because I know there are many men and women who sell their souls to the devil for that one moment of glory and that one moment of power, that one cry in the heart that says, "I want to fly, I want to succeed," and you know of course the answer Jesus gives him, "Away from me, Satan, for it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'" Jesus understood in a way that Adam and Eve did not, that the kingdom, the glory, the authority and the power all belongs to God and God gives it to those who are in humble dependency and trust and faith relationship with him and so Jesus says, "I don't care if I'm hungry. I don't care if nothing seems to come my way," because that's what temptation is. Temptation is, God's not there for you, take matters into your own hands, get the help, get the comfort from wherever you can get it from because God obviously doesn't love you or if he does, he has a funny way of showing it to you but Jesus understood that all authority and power comes from God and he chose to stand on that even when all the evidence in the world pointed the other way and that's why Philippians chapter 2 and that glorious passage goes on to say in the verses 9, 10 and 11, "Because he was obedient even unto death, therefore," I love this verse, "therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." And everything that Adam lost and a lot more has now been given to Jesus as the son of me again, sitting at the right hand of God the Father with all authority and power in all of the universe given to him. And everything we fight for, everything we long for, every striving to regain dominion, please understand this with me, every striving of the human heart has been fulfilled in Jesus. Not because he strived for it, not because he had the power to make it happen, but because he humbled himself before God the Father even unto death knowing that God would do the exaltation. And that's why when Jesus returned to heaven on the day of ascension I think all the angels in heaven stood there. You know you see these Olympics and the victory parade? Well that is peanuts. Peanuts. And I don't minimize it, and I don't minimize the accomplishments, but it's nothing compared to the reception that Jesus got when he was crowned Lord of Law. As a human being he is seated at God's right hand and he is the fulfillment of every human longing and every human dream. You with me? Because this gets rather critical. Because you see the believer's authority derives from our union with Christ. When we understand that we cannot regain paradise lost no matter how smart, clever, or rich we are, but that only Jesus succeeded in regaining the inheritance when by faith you and I are joined to Jesus, then the authority that Jesus received from God the Father he shares with all of his children, especially those whom he calls then and anoints with the Holy Spirit which is the right of every New Testament believer. You see this already in the Old Testament. Prophet, priests, and kings you have Moses acting on behalf of God and God backing him up. You may remember Moses at the Red Sea, Pharaoh behind him, Protestants on either side. We're in big trouble Lord, what do we do? He stands there crying out to God, what does God say to him? A viscer paraphrase, why bellyache to me? Use your staff, you've got the authority. Make the waters part. And sure enough that's precisely what happened. You see it in the gospels when Jesus takes his disciples and he trains them and he sends them out into ministry. We read together in Luke chapter 9 when Jesus had called the twelve that is his disciples together, he now sends them out so they become apostles. The word disciple means learner, apostle means set out one. He gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases and he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. And then when they came back all excited and all thrilled, Jesus further expanded on that mission with these words, "I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy and nothing will harm you." Snakes and scorpions here is of course a reference to demonic power, it is the power of darkness that is always trying to oppose the kingdom of God and to extend the kingdom of the evil one. And so it's in that context then that here in Acts chapter 3 when Peter fresh from Pentecost anointed by the power of the Holy Spirit comes along and he says, "In Jesus' name walk." Because Peter understands in ways that we often do not that in union with Christ, empowered now by the same Spirit that empowered Jesus, he has the right and the authority to speak into this situation as God's ambassador and Satan's power must let go as God establishes his kingdom. "All authority," said Jesus, "in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go in my name and make disciples of all nations." Think of it this way, let's say you had a power failure in the city, the traffic lights are out and to avoid congestion at a busy intersection there stands the policeman and he holds his arm up and lo and behold he stops this whole row of traffic. And then when it's your turn to go he goes like this, if he's got this nice whistle he will blow his whistle and the traffic moves. And there is an important distinction here between power and authority. Let's suppose that you insist on driving your car through the intersection and over that next one, is there any way that he's got the power to hold you back? You can picture him standing there pushing against you, well short of using his gun and whatever else that he's got the chances are that he can't do that. And yet when he puts his arm up you stop if you know it's good for you and you listen to his commands. Why? Because he's in uniform and he's got a badge and he represents the law of the land. We recognize his authority, the gun at his side is the power to enforce his authority. And so Peter as an apostle now has the authority from Jesus to act in his name. And when he acts in his name God backs him up with his power and with his authority and things really happen. And you know the implications of that are huge and I think we'll come back to that next time because there's lots here to ponder. But in preparation for that I want you to do some thinking. What mountains do you come up against in your life? And where do you find things stirring in your heart that you know need to move in order for God's kingdom to come about? Then ask him to help you understand what this authority business is that we're talking about. What does it look like to say in the name of Jesus walk? We know what it looks like to pray Lord make this mountain move. But what does it mean to exercise authority in this fear of my calling and in this fear of my responsibility? And Lord is there a way that you want to use me to move mountains for the coming of your kingdom? The nation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne. And unto the land praise and glory, wisdom and thanks, honor and power and strength, be to our God forever and ever. Be to our God forever and ever. Be to our God forever and ever. Amen. And we the redeemed shall be strong in purpose and unity, declaring aloud praise and glory, wisdom and thanks, honor and power and strength. Be to our God forever and ever. Be to our God forever and ever. Amen. Praise and glory, wisdom and thanks, honor and power and strength. Be to our God forever and ever. Be to our God forever and ever. Be to our God forever and ever. Amen. Be to our God forever and ever. Be to our God forever and ever. Be to our God forever and ever. Amen. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:47:26.000; resume after this marked segment]