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SECTIONS:
Relationship
Whom God loves
What God has
done
Response
Think about
others |
THE LAST place you'd want
to go if you were an evangelist is the desert road down from
Jerusalem to Gaza. Not that no one ever went that way, but who
would stop to talk?
The idea of the evangelist is
catching on, specially in the technical world. Apple evangelists
hold meeting to persuade people to buy Apple computers. Novell
evangelists tout the advantages of Novell computer networks.
3G evangelists try to get businesses into third generation mobile
phones. One big commonality is that they bring large numbers
of people together to hear what they are promoting.
But here is the effective, experienced evangelist, Philip, sent
to the edge of the south coast highway. It's like putting Billy
Graham on the side of Parramatta Road and saying, “Convert
a few truck drivers.”
However, Philip did have an effective ministry — to a single
individual. And, as with the Samaritans, so with this man. Philip
was a pioneer, a groundbreaker. All the Apostolic band stuck
to evangelising Jews — but Philip went to the despised Samaritans.
The Apostles followed Philip to minister to Samaritans, and Philip
reached out to a God-fearing Gentile, someone who could never
ever become a Jew, because he was a eunuch, and eunuchs were
specifically excluded from the Jewish community.
This is very important. It is the beginning of the real spread
of Christianity far beyond the Jews. Ethiopian history records
that Christianity came to their country through this very man.
What seemed a tiny step for the Gospel became a key event in
worldwide Christianity.
Understand this: what we do for Christ and his gospel is never
insignificant. You might win one person, but who knows where
that faithful act will bear fruit?
Never discount what you are doing for Christ and the gospel.
I ministered to a woman going through a really tough patch. She
moved on, and I still heard from her occasionally. She told me
that a workmate was looking miserable. She talked to him, picked
up that he was going through a bad patch of his life, reflected
his feelings, gave him tissues while he cried, and hugged him
when he needed it. She told him, “That’s what my Pastor
did for me in my bad times.”
Where will that ministry reach to? I thought I hadn't done much
to help my friend, but she made something worthwhile of it.
Don’t give up! God is doing something with what you are
doing in Jesus’ name right now.
But the passage also shows many other important truths. It tells
about a real relationship with God. It tells us who it is that
God loves. It tells what God has done for us in Christ. It tells
us how to respond to that message. And it even gives clues as
to how to share the gospel message with other people.
A Relationship with God
Of all the world’s great religions, Christianity alone declares
that a relationship with God is possible and real. When Christian
say that everyone needs to know Jesus, even if they belong to
another religion, this is not arrogance, it is an acknowledgement
that the gospel offers something no one else has.
Philip went because God told him to. He joined the eunuch in
his carriage because God told him to. God speaks to his people.
Next Tuesday is my 56th birthday; last Monday was my 40th birthday
as a Christian. Do you have two birthdays, one for your natural
birth and one for your spiritual birth, when you were born again
through faith in Jesus Christ? Without that, you haven’t
begun to live life as God intended it.
I became a Christian at an Open Air Campaigners caravan in Goulburn
Street, Sydney at around 8:30 pm on 8 July 1962.
I didn’t grow up in a Church–going family. I saw Christianity
as a bit like a meeting of the Historical Society, except with
music.
But about 18 months before I was converted, I had a substitute
Scripture Teacher at school, a retired Methodist Minister named
Dickie Barton. His lessons were all about how different people
responded to Jesus, and how we need to respond to him.
Mr Barton told us about being at the front in World War I. There
was a lull in the fighting, so he took the chance to sit and
read his Bible and pray. Suddenly, it seemed that a voice spoke
sharply to him, “Dickie, get down!” He threw himself
on the ground, not even knowing who had spoken. As he landed,
there was a thump in the wood above him. He got up and looked:
a bullet had gone in right where he had just been sitting. If
he hadn’t moved, his head would have been blown apart.
He asked, “Who told me to get down?” No one had. It
was God’s voice. And that experience propelled Dickie Barton
into the Methodist Ministry after the war. If he hadn’t
responded when God spoke, he'd have died.
You don’t always see angels, but the Spirit of God communicates
with his people.
We had a bad spot here soon after I arrived here. Our finances
were in chaos. We had given away so much to foreign missions
that we were nearly broke. I wanted to tackle the issue, but
the problem was with one or two troublemakers, who knew just
what buttons to push — and how to get away with it! Every
strategy I could think of to get us back on an even keel was
being challenged by those people as anti–missionary, unbiblical
or selfish. I didn't know what to do.
I was driving and praying, very troubled, when the Holy Spirit
laughed said, “Acts 1:8”. That was all. It was as though
God were saying, “You’re taking this all too seriously.
I know what I’m doing. Your answer is Acts 1:8.”
Acts 1: 8 says:
You shall receive
power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you shall be my
witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and to the
farthest ends of the earth.
Here was the exact answer. It
was Biblical, it was pro–missions, and it was a clear pattern:
start where you are with what you’ve got, and spread out
from there as the Spirit leads. So the first priority is where
you are, then spread as you are able. Don’t put it all into
foreign missions and neglect home. And it revealed that the people
causing the trouble were really the ones out of step with the
Holy Spirit. I didn’t have to make any accusation. God’s
Word did it all for me.
God wants a conversational relationship with us. Genesis 2 tells
it: God came down in the cool of the evening to walk with Adam,
and he wasn’t there. God came to initiate fellowship, and
Adam had broken fellowship.
If you want to hear from God, you will hear from him. He doesn’t
force himself on anyone.
Paul tells us that God gave us the Holy Spirit as a seal and
down payment on the glories to come. You don't get a down payment
which is kept secret from you. And one of the main ways that
the Holy Spirit shows himself is by communicating with us.
Whom God loves
This Ethiopian was an outcast from Israel. He believed in God,
but couldn’t belong to God under the Jewish law. He had
been castrated, and that cut him off from the community of Israel.
There was a good reason for this law. The pagan nations around
Israel practiced all kinds of self–mutilation. The priests
of Cybele often castrated themselves as part of their ecstatic
worship. You can read about it in Apuleius’ The Golden
Ass.
A eunuch was almost certainly a devotee of paganism in Moses’
day.
The only problem was, what do you do with someone who grew up
a pagan and wanted to change his ways? The Jews had no policy
for this. But God still loved that man and desired a relationship
with him.
If God hadn’t loved him personally, would he have sent Philip
to that place? Would he have specified that Philip should get
onto that particular chariot? And what was the eunuch reading?
Isaiah 53:
He was led like
a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before the shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.
It’s one of the greatest
messianic passages in the whole Old Testament. A clear declaration
of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb, the one who died so that you
and I could have life.
What God has done
Philip was able to spring directly from this passage to the story
of Jesus. Who didn’t attract the world to himself? Jesus.
Who didn’t defend himself before Pilate? Jesus. On whom
was the iniquity of us all laid? You guessed it: Jesus. It was
he who was wounded for our transgressions. It was Jesus who was
bruised for our iniquities. It was he who bore our sorrows and
has brought healing into the world through the stripes he received.
There is only one Man in all of history who has fulfilled that
prophecy: Jesus. And he did it for you and for me!
In the film, The Apostle, the Apostle, in his final sermon,
picks up a sleeping baby from the arms of its mother. He holds
the child gently, speaks about its innocence and its vulnerability.
He holds up its hand, and asks, “How could anyone wound
such a child? How could anyone cause its hands and its feet to
be nailed to a cross and its side to be pierced with a spear?”
Then he goes on to describe how heart-wrenching it was for God
to let people do that to his beloved Son — but he made the
sacrifice so that you and I could be saved.
That's the kind of love God has for us.
I want to ask you, before we leave this section, do you know
that love in your own experience? Or have you only heard about
it from someone else?
A Muslim once told me, “Jesus couldn’t have died on
a cross. He was too good a man, and a great prophet. Why do Christians
insist that he died in that way? You blaspheme against God!”
I replied, “If a prophet came saying we must not worship
idols, you would say that he spoke the truth, wouldn’t you?”
She agreed that that was the case. “But if that prophet
secretly worshipped idols himself, you would say he was a false
prophet, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course!!” she answered.
“Jesus declared that God’s love is greater than death.
He said, ‘Greater love has no man than this, that he lay
down his life for his friend.’ If he declared that, but
refused to live it out even to his own death on a cross, wouldn’t
that make him a false prophet?”
She agreed.
Christ
died, the Just for the unjust, to bring us to God.
How to respond.
The eunuch knew what to do. He had heard the word and believed
it. If he hadn’t believed it, he wouldn’t have wanted
to start doing it at once. He saw some water, he asked to be
baptised , and Philip agreed.
As a Baptist, I don’t agree that a person who isn’t
baptised can’t be saved. It isn’t about “faith
plus”, because “faith plus” is really “faith
minus”. If you say that baptism is essential for salvation,
you say that faith isn’t really enough.
But listen: most people who claim to believe but refuse to be
baptised haven‘t really believed with their entire being.
They have a head–belief, but are still holding back from
true faith, because faith is something we do with out entire
being. We are baptised by immersion, because we are saying, “I
am now a follower of Jesus, boots and all. I’m in it over
my head and beyond my depths.”
Listen again — all the Christians here, too — the great
lack of the church today, and the reason we don’t have revival,
is that we began with entire faith, then took some back. It got
too scarey to be in it all the way, so we drew back. Until we
repent and give our entire heart to Jesus, we will not have revival,
and the church will die in Australia.
This passage is a call to faith. That Ethiopian didn’t know
what kind of reception he might get at home. But he put Jesus
first, and it paid off for eternity!
Let’s all stop and think. What holds us back? What stops
you from going into the water, just like that Ethiopian eunuch
did? What are you afraid of? Or maybe you went down into the
water once, and you were on fire for the Lord as you came back:
God had accepted the offering and sent down his holy fire on
it. But today you are passing the water again, and you wonder,
“Will I go down once again? Or will I just pass it by?”
Maybe you fear that someone will challenge you about something
you did, or that you will have to bear a load that seems too
heavy, or that you will have to mend a relationship.
How did you start? You went to God and repented because of Jesus.
You went to God and you entered the waters. You said, “Drench
my soul with your Holy Spirit! Wash all my sins away in the blood
of the Lamb! Put the old life to death through the blood of Jesus
and raise me to a fresh, new life in Him!”
Do it again! Do it for the first time! Just do it!
Think about sharing with others...
Today you have heard the gospel message. Philip heard the Spirit’s
voice and obeyed. Today, did you hear through the preached word,
or even through God’s direct intervention? What God says,
do.
Philip saw where the man was at. The eunuch wasn’t interested
in the creation accounts in Genesis, but in the Suffering Servant
of Isaiah. Philip began there. What need has God’s word
spoken to in you today?
Like Philip, today we are ready for you, if you are ready to
go further. We will facilitate the move you are making. We don’t
try to impose our version of what should happen. Lile Philip,
we let the Spirit do his own work.
Appeal
Now, as the Holy Spirit is doing his work among us, how do you
respond?
He speaks to you, reminds you of what Jesus did on the cross.
Will you turn Jesus away? Would you leave him again, to die like
a tramp on the street? I pray you will not!
AMEN |
