Acts 19:1-10
they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began speaking in tongues and prophesying.
Sermon Transcript:
Good morning everybody. Good morning. We’re gonna turn to Acts chapter 19. Uh, great to have you here, and those of you that are out in the prayer Garden, great to have you guys out there worshiping with us this morning. Uh, I was very, oh, well I was very excited last Sunday as we started in here and all the good things, but also a little bit jealous, um, because we had set up our preaching schedule years ago, uh, months ago, and.
Didn’t know this was gonna be our first Sunday in here. And this is deja vu for me to come back and be preaching in this gym. And so I’m excited to be up here this morning. We’re gonna be looking at Acts chapter 19 as we continue in our series in the book of Acts, uh, the Spirit at Work to the Ends of the Earth.
And I’m excited about what we’re gonna be talking about today. Acts chapter 19. I’m gonna read verses one through 10, ask you to follow along silently in your Bibles. And it happened that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul passed through the inland country and came to Ephesus. There he found some disciples and he said to them, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?
And they said, no, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. And he said, into what? Then were you baptized? They said Into John’s baptism. And Paul said, John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him. That is Jesus. On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.
And when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them and they began speaking in tongues and prophesying. There were about 12 men in all, and he entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. But when some became stubborn and continued and unbelief, speaking evil of the way before the congregation, he withdrew from them, took the disciples with him.
Reasoning daily in the Hall of Tyran is discontinued for two years so that all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks. Let’s pray together this morning.
Lord, we come in this beautiful sunny Sunday morning, we come God to celebrate you. Lord, even as we’ve worshiped in our songs, we now wanna worship in our response to your speaking to us from the scriptures. God, as we reflect this morning on what it means to have a church, a life that is making a difference by your grace to your glory, I pray you’d be our teacher, father, that you would draw us to who to want to imbibe these realities in our own lives, even as we seek to live out the gospel in our lives.
So Jesus, glorify yourself in our time Now, I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. Uh, I didn’t mention I’m Pastor Mark. Um, and, uh, We are really happy to have you here. I am locating, I had to ask somebody where my wife was, um, because who’s sitting there with my granddaughter from Michigan? Sophie. Hi, Sophie. Good. Have you, um, uh, because everybody’s, I mean, I haven’t found anybody sitting where they belong.
Um, so everybody’s got their new, their new spots and our new digs for the summer. Alright, we’re gonna look at Acts 19. It was May 20. It was May 30th, 1792. A young preacher, 31 years old was speaking to, uh, a gathering of pastors in England. And as he gathered in this church, basically addressing, uh, leaders of his movement, it was a Baptist movement.
Um, he challenged them with what became a sermon that has become known as the deathless sermon. It was a sermon that had such significance and truth. That people nicknamed it that because it was a sermon that would never die. William Carey was a speaker and he was addressing a bunch of, uh, pastors, most of them older, far more experienced than him, but he was challenging them to take the gospel, the message of Jesus Christ beyond the borders of Great Britain, and to look to various places of the world.
He had just returned from India himself and was deeply burdened for India, but other parts of the world. His message stirred these individuals and it was a deepening, stirring as time went on. So much so that this sermon was viewed as the launching of the modern missionary movement, and William Carey is called the Father of Modern Missions.
The sermon had a phrase, a dual phrase, and he repeated a number of time. Here was the phrase attempt. Great things for God, expect great things from God. As the 18th century incarnation of the Apostle Paul, William Carey demonstrated the same passion for God and his kingdom work that Paul himself illustrates.
Paul would’ve been proud of William Par Carey and his sermon because the apostle Paul had that same passion that we can step out in faith and attempt things led by God, believing that God can and does do amazing things in the lives of churches and notably individuals that lay claim to him and his promises.
No place in the Book of Acts will that be more seen. Then in the church that we’re beginning to talk about this morning, the church at Ephesus, it is a city that was second only to Rome, uh, in prominence in the ancient world. It was a city that Paul was passionate about pouring his life and the gospel into.
As a matter of fact, you remember on his second missionary journey, we talked about the fact that, that Paul, as he was going up through modern Turkey, and if you can picture him going through Turkey, he was heading right for Ephesus, which was at the border of Turkey. And as he was heading there, the spirit of God said no and directed him north.
He ended up going all the way up to Troja and then crossing over to Greece. Almost two years later, at the end of the second missionary journey, he’s been through Greece and he’s coming back and on a boat now. He can’t help himself. He stops at Ephesus and again, at the end of Acts 18 is the short experience he has there.
He’s returned all the way to Antioch at Jerusalem and then Antioch and now is going on his third missionary journey, and he has one place that he’s targeting. It is Ephesus. He just zooms across Modern day. Turkey actually does not take the trade route, but he actually goes through the mountains because it would faster the, he would not be held up in towns.
He was just moving at his own pace, going across, going to Ephesus, and as he arrives at Ephesus, we have the account here in Acts chapter 19 verses one through 10. And what we learn in this passage is the reality of attempting something great and expecting something great from the hand of God. Any child of God should have a desire to have their life make a difference for God’s glory.
No believer here is too old or too young to be expecting and attempting with God. So this morning I’d like to take this passage and highlight three things that are involved in God using us to build something to His glory, whether it’s as a church, as a movement, as an individual. And we’re gonna look at three things in the third.
The first will be, will spend the longest time on, but we’ll get through all three. Number one, there will be significant challenges. The context will present challenges. Ephesus is a perfect example of that. This is a a prominent city, and as we’re entering into a number of. Of, uh, passages in the, in the Book of Acts.
I want to tell, tell you about Ephesus briefly. Uh, Ephesus was, as I mentioned, this prominent city. It was seated at the far end of Turkey, sort of butting out into the, the Mediterranean sea facing towards, towards Italy, ultimately to Greece and then to to Rome. And it was the end of the Silk Road. And there all the goods of the, of the Far East were brought.
And this city on its harbor was a center of, of commerce. And all the riches would be sent to the other parts of the empire, a wealthy city, a powerful city, an educated city. It was a place that was full of the arts. It had, as this slide depicts, a 25,000 amphitheater for theatrical productions. Marin and I have had the privilege of being in Ephesus is the place that I’ve ever been, that I want to go back to the most.
Uh, just an amazing, um, Visual and with many, many, uh, still existent, uh, visuals of the ancient city of esis. But it had this 25,000, uh, theater. There also is, uh, it was famous for its learning. It had all kinds of schools for children’s six to 16, but then it also had graduate degrees and it had postgraduate.
There were four postgraduate schools. These particular schools were a medical school, a theatrical school, a Phil, a philosophical school, a school of rhetoric, which basically we would today say that you majored in communication and an architectural school. Many of the people were wealthy and powerful that settled in Ephesus.
The city had whole sections of high-rise apartments, as we would think of them. This is a depiction actually. You can see they have unearthed a lot of these, and this is just sort of cleaning it up, but they actually have these pictures on the floor, on the walls, and these were multi high-rise. I mean, these were nice places.
This is 2000 years ago. They lived in affluence and influence. The city had a beautiful port, and this is just a depiction of the city. Over to the, the left corner is just the beginning of the port that opens into the Mediterranean Sea. This city built around a large hill, hundreds of thousands of residents.
There’s the, um, the theater in the middle, the sports complexes, a couple of them. There’s giant marketplaces. Um, it is just a, a city that was, Powerful, influential, and also extraordinarily sensual. Literally, at every corner, uh, of every intersection, there is a large house that is a brothel legalized. Uh, prostitution was everywhere, but the most famous and most glorified in part of the city was their ownership of the edifice.
That was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, which was the Temple of Artemis, or also called the Temple of Diana. This picture depicts it, and it actually was up on a slope like it is pictured there outside the city. Those columns that you see that are holding up the, the large roof structure, were 66 feet high.
They’re 130 of them. This ceiling. If you go to the point of this roof is 34 feet tall, so it was twice that height, just the posts, the columns, uh, held up this great structure. The temple was one and a half football fields. It was 450 feet long. It was a big place. It was the center of religious faith, uh, throughout the entire region of the Eastern Mediterranean for both the Greek and Roman world.
And it had, as part of its religious experiences, 1000 temple prostitutes that practice there as a part of the experience, sensuality, their own form of spiritism were there in, uh, a sense of paganism. Um, and, and here this was a city, and we’ll see when Paul runs into. People coming to Christ and renouncing their worship of Diana, the trouble it would cause.
So how do you even get started? I mean, what could Paul Paul possibly do? The task is overwhelming, but there were other parts that were challenging versus one through seven of our text talks about this group of Ephesian Christians that he comes across. And actually there are individuals as, as you read, and Joe, pastor Joe talked about this a little last week.
A Apollos was in a similar state, although he may have actually, he had already embraced Christ, but he didn’t know about the the baptism of Christ. But here, these individuals, they had been baptized in the baptism of John the Baptist, which actually he had died 22 years before this. So they’ve been living this way for 22 years at least.
They were baptized in repentance, which simply means they had embraced his mes of repentance. And John the Baptist message was this. There’s one coming after me that’s the Messiah. He’s the guy, he’s the one we’re waiting for, but they hadn’t met him. They hadn’t heard of him. And so Paul says, what were you baptized into?
Well, the baptism of John, the baptism of repentance. And he says, well, I know the guy. The guy is Jesus. Jesus is the Christ. He’s the Messiah. He’s the one you’re waiting for. They embraced that message and embraced Christ, and the result was they had the same authenticating sign of belief in Christ that had taken place of all the other groups in Acts, which is a way of authenticating that the gospel was going forth to all people and authenticating the ministry of the Apostles.
We saw it at the day of Pentecost in Acts two, when the Spirit came upon them and they spoke in other languages and, and, and tongues the Jews. Then in Acts 10 and 11, where the, the Samaritans spoke. In tongues and and believed on Christ. In latter chapters, we’ve seen Gentiles that embraced Christ and again, authenticating the new work of Christ and the church.
And now we have a fourth group. This group, a group of apparently Jews that 22 years had embraced the message of repentance, didn’t know about Jesus, and now they do. And you have this hodgepodge of, of believers around. And this challenge for Paul is he’s, he’s trying to teach and lead and, and start a new movement.
There’s all kinds of different people that are involved. The third thing that made it challenging is the enemy bringing challenges. When Paul was in Ephesus, he wrote a letter to the church of Corinth. And when he wrote this letter in one Corinthians 16, here’s what he wrote in verse eight and nine, but I’ll stay in Ephesus until Pentecost for a wide door for effective work has opened to me.
And there are many. Adversaries. He says, the, the door’s wide open here. But there are many adversaries as we look at our passage there in, in verses one through seven, we find that first he, he started to minister to the Jews and then he gets thrown out of the synagogue. After three months, he starts the Hall of Tyran, which was a local, uh, teacher and, and is doing his teaching and dis discourses there.
And this leads him into all kinds of opposition. There’s gonna be opposition from the religious mucky mucks of the town. There’s gonna be opposition from the business community, from the political establishment, all empowered and prodded by the spiritual powers of darkness. And those darkness will actually show up in, in actual demons attacking Paul.
We’ll see it. All these chapters, lots of challenges, lots of opposition. And yet Paul says, There’s a door here. There’s a door that’s open to ministry, and you say, where all these adversaries, all this opposition that Paul saw a door in the midst of those challenges. The fourth thing, his own personal deficiencies, present challenges as they do for you and me.
He’s writing again in Second Corinthians chapter one. He’s just left Ephesus at this time, and he’s writing about his experience there. And here’s what he says in second Corinthians one, eight. We do not want you to be unaware. Brothers of the affliction we experienced in Asia for we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.
Instead, indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. Paul says, I I want you to know how, how it felt ministering in Ephesus. We were exhausted. We felt the burden. We were way down at times with the opposition of the spiritual warfare. Honestly. He says, there were times when we actually thought it was just is gonna kill us.
It was so challenging, so hard.
We hear all this. We say, what? What chance does this guy have? I mean, he’s just a lone guy going into this, this, this giant metropolitan city that is so steeped in a contrary, pagan view of life reminds me of the scene in the the Princess Bride where. Uh, Wesley, uh, the hero of the story. You know, he’s been tortured by the nasty prince and he’s left for dead, and they think he is dead.
And he’s brought to Miracle Max. And, and Miracle Max does his magic with him. And he, he’s alive and, and Miracle. Max says, what are you gonna do? He says, well, I’m gonna attack the castle and I’m gonna, I’m gonna rescue Buttercup, which was his beloved. And so Miracle Max gets him ready. And so Wesley’s leaving, if you remember, he is leaving and Miracle Max is there, and he is waving at him and he says, have fun storming the castle.
And then his wife turns a miracle, max. And, and she says to him, do you think he’ll make it? And Miracle Max’s statement is this, it’ll take a miracle. That’s Paul, right? That’s Paul. It’ll take a miracle. I mean, how in the world is he gonna make a difference in this city?
There is a supernatural plan and partnership that is available to Paul and you. Verse eight and nine describes it. It describes part of it. Verse eight and nine, we read this and he entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. But when some became stubborn and continued and unbelief speaking evil of the way before the congregation, he withdrew from them and took the disciples with him.
Reasoning daily in the, in the school of Tyran Tyran. First of all, he discerned God’s plan. It’s the plan that he used in every major, uh, city he went to. First of all, he would look for a synagogue. He’d speak to the Jews who had the most similar worldview as him. They also believed in one God, a mon, a monotheistic creator.
God was superintendent the universe. They believed there were laws that God had given and they were summarized in the 10 Commandments. They believed that there needed to be some covering for sin. They believed somewhere in the way there was one coming that would be their rescuer. There would be their Messiah.
The problem was most of them didn’t believe it was Jesus Christ. So Paul had to convince them about the reality of Christ from the Old Testament scriptures. He lasted three, three months in their synagogue preaching until finally people began to stir up trouble. And he moved to apparently a Jewish, uh, uh, uh, one of the members of Ephesus.
Uh, a prominent teacher had embraced Christ and he gives Paul access to teach at his school. There’s a lot of, um, extra biblical. Information that argues that when Paul did that was in the early afternoons because in the ancient world it was a little like, um, Spanish, uh, cultures and central and South American cultures.
They had a siesta. It was hot during the middle of the day and they would tend in the early afternoon hours, everything would close down. They started work very early. Um, and basically Paul taught when everybody would’ve been taken their siesta and he had every day these opportunity to teach and reason there.
In this school of Tyran, he followed God’s pattern. This is what he did first. Go to those with a similar worldview, then go to those with a different worldview. And as we’ve mentioned, other weeks, different teaching methodology with both significant different in the way they approach things. Always leading to the gospel in Christ.
But it ultimately though, we used a plan, it was not the plan. That enabled Paul to reach the city of Ephesus and the world in the way he did. Paul accused us by writing again what happened here in Ephesus, and basically he was successful by depending on God’s sovereign power. When he wrote to the Corinthians, and I’m going back to the passage in in Second Corinthians one, I just read a moment ago, but I want you to hear the sequel to it.
Paul says this in that passage, second Corinthians one, eight, for we were so utterly beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death, but that was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril and he will deliver us on him.
We have set our hope. That he will deliver us again. Paul says this. Yeah, there were adversaries everywhere. Yeah, it was. It was. It was so overwhelming at times. We just felt exhausted and weak, almost to the point of death. But he said all of that happened to remind us it wasn’t gonna be our plan. It wasn’t gonna be our leadership skills, it wasn’t gonna be our Pope ministry.
It ultimately was going to be in the midst of our weakness, that we would be compelled to rely on God’s sovereign power.
You could look around today and you could think of the most important, the ministry that you think is doing the greatest work. For Jesus Christ. You could look at seminaries, you know of, you could look at churches in our area that are preaching the gospel and making a difference to the glory of Christ.
You could look at ministries in Camden like Seeds of Hope or uh, urban Promise,
and if you had a chance to dig a little bit and spade your way into their history, I’ll tell you what you find. You will find a miracle working God that they depended on. There is no work of God. There is no church that is going forward. There is no individual that is ultimately being used by God that has not seen the stories that God is writing in and through their lives.
A few weeks ago I was on a. A car trip with some of our pastors, and particularly a couple of the younger guys, uh, and one of our interns were there and we’re just talking about the, um, the history of our church. And I realized that they didn’t know some of us go way back. As somebody pointed out to me this morning, was so nice to see me back in the gym speaking because the last time they saw me standing on this platform, I had dark hair and a dark mustache I really could have done without it.
But, uh, but going back to those stories I was telling them, remember when we were meeting in. Lenae High School, and we had started, we were meeting in a basement of Bruce and Peg Shell in a finished basement in Marton. And then we finally started having services in Lenae High School and, and, uh, rattling around in the little, well, first in the auditorium and it was so big compared to our 35 people.
We went to the library and then we grew, outgrew the section of the library, and then we went to the cafeteria and we, we then braved the auditorium again, although it was way bigger than we were. And all in that journey, we, I started after about a year and a half, I went around and was just looking for property.
And at this time we had $250 in the bank as a church. We were definitely handout and I, I saw a property on Church Road and I called the realtor and he was a. He turned out to be a guy that, uh, in Morristown, he is 40 years in the business, a guy named Don, a great guy, Jewish fellow. And, and he, I told him what we were looking for and he said, you don’t want that property, you know, it’s got, it’s got water issues.
And so, so he says, but I just literally this morning had a piece of ground come across my desk and, uh, it was this property and he said, uh, can I meet you there? I said, sure. Um, what he didn’t know was this property when I was in late high school, it was in the summer. I worked two summers driving a tractor while there were migrant workers here.
Uh, so it’s kind of fun to even show up on this property. Uh, they were doing, they were loading tomatoes and stuff, and we were taking ’em to Campbell’s. But, so I came and we met here and, uh, he said, okay, there’s 22 acres of ground. And he said, um, they’re 5,000 an acre. And, um, I didn’t mention to him our financial position.
And, and so he said, now I have not put this on the market. There’s no sign yet. But he said, I’m, I’m gonna have to. And he said, and you need to know that I have some realtor friends. And we have all agreed, this is the most valuable piece of ground in Burlington County by far. Um, a few years later, I had, um, the mayor of Mount Laurel come, just stop by.
I knew him. And he told me that, uh, he said, I just wanna swing by. Have you ever thought about what your property’s worth? He said, I said, no. And he, I, I said, yeah, I guess I’ve wondered. And he said, how much did it cost? And I said, 5,000 acre. And he said, uh, do you wanna know what it’s worth? And I said, yeah.
He said, it’s worth, every acre is worth between a hundred and 125. And that was years ago. But anyway, so here we are. Here’s why I’m telling this story. Not so you’ll know what a great realtor I am. Um, the bottom line is, Uh, I went and talked to a Christian investor and I said, here’s our situation and would you like to get the property?
We only need about seven acres. Um, six or seven. I don’t remember what it was. And you would get the rest and I think it’d be a good investment. And, um, but here’s the thing. We only have about 200 cuz I wanted to keep a little buffer in our bank. Uh, you, we only have about $200 to put towards the sale, so you would have to carry it for us initially.
So, you know, going back and forth, this is in process and I’m in contact with, uh, Don, the realtor and he’s telling me, I just need you to know there are two large doctors groups that want to buy the property and they want to put in medical separate groups. And I, my assumption was they had more than 250 to put towards it.
So on a Friday morning, Things had come together. I had no idea where anything was. I went to Don’s office and I had a check, um, and was able to actually give him the check and sign the pro the thing. Um, and ha actually had the document from the investor to sign it and to present. And Don called me about an hour later and he said, I just wanted you to know, uh, a half hour after you came by, one of the doctors groups showed up and we’ve just spent the last little while with them jacking up the value.
They’re, they’re willing to pay anything, and we were paying the asking price, and that’s really all we had. And then he said, but for whatever reason, um, the owner wants you to have it, and so it’s yours. And so we got the most valuable piece of property in Mount Laurel with 250 bucks in the bank.
There are many stories that every work of God that is existing today can point back to and say, God’s fingerprints are all over this thing. God’s fingerprints. We’re all over Ephesus because they have to be. It has to be God. It has to be God that moves and works in our lives and our church and in our individual lives.
Dawson Troutman wrote a book, uh, actually, I’m sorry, Dawson Troutman, the founder of the Navigators, preached a sermon. It was 1948. Dawson Troutman had gone over and he was speaking to a group of pastors in Germany. In post Nazi Germany, right? It ended 1945. Hitler had killed himself. The war was over. And now these guys are picking up the pieces in a country that is utterly devastated.
And Dawson Troutman is going in to challenge them, to believe God, to do something great in their lives and through their lives and in their church in Germany. And he was there for three days, but he describes the first day, he had nine hours with them the first day. And he said, you know, he’s just sharing his passion.
And he kept doing all this. And then finally, he, he, he, he kept hearing somebody raise a question and he said it wasn’t all in one, uh, in a row. It would just be a question and he’d respond to it. And then another question, he’d respond to it and another question, he’d respond to it. And, and so all these questions were coming his way.
And there were questions like this. Like, uh, in America you have literature, you have books. We don’t even have Bibles right now, enough for our people. We have no printing presses. We have no resources. And he said, he said, I, I just, he said the Apostles didn’t have any books. They didn’t have New Testament.
They just went out and were interpreting the Old Testament on their own as, as ignorant men. They said, we don’t have any money. We have no money, nothing. He said the apostles didn’t have any money. And again, he said it was during different sections of the day, so it wasn’t like one after another. Another one was talking about we, we don’t have vehicles.
We have no cars. They’re all destroyed. We can’t even get out and visit our people if, if we’re fortunate, we pull and one of us is able to borrow a bicycle and go out. They just went after one thing, after another thing, after another thing, after another thing they say. And he keeps saying the early church didn’t have that.
They didn’t have that. And then they said, you don’t know what it’s like to try to minister in a country that has now been taken over by another country. And basically they were under the, the, uh, Warsaw Act and all the requirements, the, of the allies and, and the control of, and, and, and everything was limited of what they could do, where they could go, how much they could travel, everything.
And Paul said the early church was living under Rome. And, and, and, and dos at the end finally said, he said, guys, it’s just dawning on me what you are saying and what the scripture is saying. God puts you in the same place. The early church was put, they had no resources except God. They had no power except the spirits power.
And he says, isn’t this where we’re supposed to be? He made this statement then as he’s the, the, the, the talk is called the need of the hour, as he summarized his experience there and he said, let me tell you what I believe the need of the hour is. I believe it is an army of soldiers dedicated to Jesus Christ, who believed not only that he’s God, but that he can fulfill every promise he ever made and that there isn’t anything too hard for him.
Attempt, expect. Attempt, expect. So what happened here in Ephesus? Well, it’s summarized in verse 10. This continued for two years so that all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks. There is spiritual impact. The term Asia here is talking about prominently the whole nation, the whole contemporary nation of Turkey, which was over 2 million people and a little bit east of there, 2 million people.
Somehow the word is spreading. The Church of Colossi was started out of the church at Ephesus. The seven churches that are mentioned in the book of Revelation are all in this region. All were started out of this little movement in Ephesus.
This is the message of the book of Acts that the church went forward in the power of the Spirit. Hey, many of you today are consumed with the challenges, seeing the obstacles to a life and influence towards Christ being exalted in you, in your marriage, in your family, in your neighborhood, in your job.
Paul’s experience here in Ephesus and what God did there challenges us to have a fresh vision of a glorious God. This was not a powerful man doing powerful things. This was a man that says, I, I felt I was gonna die. I was so weak. But he said it helped me to say, I need to rely on God, that my insufficiency is the megaphone, that I need a sufficient power that is only found in God.
I mentioned this sermon that I heard recently a few weeks ago, and I just wanna swing back to it by Tim Keller. One of the last things he spoke before he went to heaven, and in it he was presenting the challenges and adversities that come into our lives. And he said, they come like an email and you know, we get ’em and they, they hit us and we read ’em, and, and we don’t, you don’t know when they’re coming.
Y you don’t know how it’s gonna come. You just get an email. It’s in your box. So you read the message and it’s hard. And he says, affixed to every me email of adversity are two attachments. One is from the enemy, and that attachment will invariably be a message of discouragement, of hopelessness, of darkness and despair.
It will point out your failures, it’ll point out your hopelessness. It will point out the the magnitude of the tidal wave of the challenges. But he said there will always be another attachment, and that’ll be the attachment from God. It’ll be God’s voice saying there’s hope here. There is the prompting encouraging us to put our faith in God’s forgiveness when we feel it’s all because of our screw up, to put our trust in His power to claim his promises.
It’s the second attachment. It enables us to attempt and expect it is the first attachment that debilitates us.
It is not your weakness. It’s his greatness. It always has been. And you have never been a part of a Christian ministry anywhere that is doing something for God that has not chosen to listen to the attachment from God and say, aye. We as broken, needy people, broken, needy spouses, broken, needy parents.
See this as an opportunity to rely on God.
We’re gonna close our time this morning coming to the Lord’s supper. Jesus instituted the remembrance of himself as a place to remember him. To lean onto him, into him to realize that he died for our sins. And by doing that, we are offered forgiveness eternally. But also in the day-to-day stuff, when we feel like so screwed up to trust that such love for us assures of of his purposes and presence in our lives.
He points us to the cross and the risen Christ as the ultimate message of the second attachment that enables us to go on in faith, relying on this magnificent God.
Lord, we come to you this morning as we gather at your son’s table.
There’s needs in this room. There’s people that are really feeling they’re inadequacy. Man, Ephesus looks so big. Godlessness looks so powerful. The pain of loved ones seems so insurmountable and unchangeable
that God, you’ve allowed them all
that we can be reminded of our desperateness for you. So God, we come to this table, glorying in a Christ who has saved us, who offers us forgiveness, but also offers himself to lead and empower our lives for his purposes.
Lord Jesus, we love you for it. Amen.