Over the last couple weeks, we've been asking ourselves to this question. What does it mean to be part of a movement of eternal consequence? We've been going through portions of the book of Acts as we talk about this, because Acts is the roadmap for the movement of Jesus. It's the story of the first movement of Jesus and how it took this tiny group of people bundled together in this room, kind of huddled up and scared, and when was able to just move across this world in the space of a generation, and to begin changing everything.
The first week we talked about what patient and patient waiting looks like, and the difference between the manifest presence of God and the omniscient presence of God. And put that in your pocket, we're going to come back to that later on today. We also, secondly, we talked about are you willing for your boundaries to be expanded? We told the story of Pentecost and what that looked like.
The next week we jumped into the story of Nius and Saphyrus, and also a man named Barnabas, and we talked about the trouble that graciousness can get us into. And last week we began the story of Stephen, and what the martyrdom of Stephen looked like, and how lesser is always better and bigger than greater. And so we're going to jump in today. We're going to pick back up and act chapter 8 with the story of this movement of Jesus.
If you want to pop out your Bibles or you can read on the screen behind me, or read on the screen in front of me. I'm so used to this in person. We're going to read the story of Acts, and the story of a man named Philip. We actually met him last week as part of these seven people that were in charge of a feeding ministry inside the early church.
This was Acts chapter 8 verses 4 through 8 tells us, but the believers who were scattered preached the good news about Jesus wherever they went. Philip, for example, went to the city of Samaria and told the people there about the Messiah. And crowds eagerly listened to Philip because they were eager to hear his message and see the miraculous signs he did. Many evil spirits were cast out screaming as they left their victims, and many who had been paralyzed or lame were healed.
And so there was a great joy in that city. I love this story. It does so many cool things. But to kind of get us going last week, we read the story about Stephen and these first men.
And Philip is actually the second guy named on that list. And let's put ourselves in the story. We heard about Stephen. We heard the amazing things he can do.
And then we saw how he was killed for his faith. And then we hear about this scattering because of this persecution. And the next person we meet says, God, I'm Philip. We might think, wow, okay, Jeff, what's going to happen to this guy now?
Like what really crummy story you're going to tell us in the day and we can relax. It's not. He was the second person on the list. But nothing bad happens to Philip in our story today.
But we can talk about what's going on and really true. What this is, is this a story about reconciliation and harvest? It's a story about reconciliation in big ways, but also in little ways. Remember last week we talked about how the issue that got these seven guys together in this feeding ministry where there were Jewish Christians and there were Hellenist Jews who had become Christians and just the awkward social situation that they had found themselves in at the time.
And there's really two different groups of people who were constantly warring thinking that they were better than each other. But the thing going on in that culture is with the one thing that all Jewish people could say, whether they were from Judea and lived there in Hebrew or Hebrew speaking Christian or where they were Hellenist, a Greek speaking. Remember all the Christians right now were just Jewish. The one thing that they could band together and say was, at least I'm not a Samaritan.
I think back to the story in the Gospels of Jesus and the woman at the well in John chapter 4. The story of the good Samaritan and that parable that Jesus said, at least I'm not a Samaritan. If we talk about Samaritans in Philip, this story we find him in Samaria preaching to the Samaritans. Samaritans in this culture, in this world, at best they are tolerated.
It's really what's going on. It's kind of the idea with the Jews and Samaritans because there were cousins of sorts of sorts. But it was really, it was like saying, hey listen, you just keep to yourself. We keep to ourselves.
You stay on your side of the viding line. We'll stay on our side of the viding line. And we just won't mess with things. We're going to keep physical distance between each other.
And that's why the story of Jesus and this woman at the well in John chapter 4 was just so transformative. Because Jesus sat next to her and was like, hey, you give me some water. He interacted with her. He treated her like a person.
These are all these things that Jews and Samaritans just absolutely did not do with each other. If we go back and act chapter 1, though, when Jesus told disciples, you're about to take my message to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and the ends of the earth. And you've got to think at that point in time, some of those people were probably groaning in Samaria. I've got to go to Samaria.
You know, really? And here we see the Samaritan loop happening. Because part of the necessary movement of revival is a flattening of assumptions about who belongs and who doesn't belong. You know, we talked about this a little bit last week of the problem of these widows not having their food and just some subtle frustration points that Hebrew speaking Jews had against Greek speaking Jews and the cultural differentiation that's there.
But honestly, really, truly, if anything, the conflict of the first century church was a conflict about who is in and who is out. And for our story to be happening in Samaria today, just completely magnifies that idea of who is in and who is out. But we also have to kind of get real and have to be honest with each other because of this. Because any conversation about Samaria and about Samaritans is a conversation about race.
It's a conversation about belonging. It's a conversation about worth. It's a conversation about purity. It's a conversation about who is in and who is out.
And in 2020, if any follower of Jesus is praying for revival, is praying for awakening, is praying for a movement of eternal consequence, we have to understand the Bible that scripture that Jesus speaks about. Human beliefs on who is in and who is out. Because the first century Jewish disdain for the Samaritans was religiously justified. They thought they had the right to treat them like second class, and since I treat them like dirt, to treat them like people who have no worth.
Like go back and think of the story of the good Samaritan. You can see this worked out in the way these religious leaders would not touch this person who was unclean, but the Samaritan was willing to completely lay down inside everything to take care of someone who hated him. Jesus breaking all of these rules in John 4, it showed that the gospel that it has a social dynamic. And the social dynamic of the gospel is supposed to be drastically different.
The healing presence of Jesus Christ, it changes our emotional emotional, and it changes our cultural dynamics. It flattens things out. It makes things equal. And so, any tension that we as Christ followers have over issues of race, we need to have that on this conversation.
Because the gospel shows us that there is no room inside the movement of Jesus for racism. It's simply antithetical to the things and the words that Jesus says. And to just pop this into the Samaritan, say any conversation that has a Samaritan in it is a conversation about race. And about who is in and who is out.
But like I said earlier, the healing presence of Jesus Christ, it changes our emotional constructs. It changes our social constructs. It changes our cultural constructs. It flattens them out.
It makes things equal. And we have to understand the role of reconciliation, of realizing theirs. There's wrong. There's things that have been done here.
And me as a follower of Jesus and us as the gathered people of Jesus, we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is no space for in or out, about belonging, not belonging, about worth, about not worth inside the Kingdom of God. It's just not there. And we see Philip here being sent out to this place in Samaria to do the things that nobody else thought they could do. This is why it matters so much in our own hearts and our own space.
In the brief of the prophecy of Hosea from chapter 10, some of you might know about Hosea, but Hosea was an Old Testament prophet who was told by God to go and marry a temple prostitute of an idolatry worshiping system. And that his relationship with her was to be a metaphor for the relationship between God and his people. It's a beautiful book. I want to read just one verse from Hosea chapter 10 to verse 12.
This is what it says. I say, plant the good seeds of righteousness and you will harvest out a crop of love. So plow up the hard ground of your hearts for now is the time to seek the Lord that he may come and shower righteousness upon you. This is to plow up the hard ground of the hearts.
Now this is what Philip is doing. This is what Philip is seeing. This is what Philip is experiencing. And this is just one of the amazing stories that's told to us about the power of the scattering.
But ultimately what's going on is their breaking ground. We have to redefine the Holy Spirit. We have to be willing to redefine the boundaries that we have put up for things. We have to let the Holy Spirit come in and plow up the hard and broken places of our hearts in order for him to come in to fertilize, to plant, to water, and for the harvest to spring up, not just out of our hearts, but in the world and the community around us.
You know, reconciliation by the power of the Holy Spirit is a dynamic about boundaries and it's a dynamic about inclusion. But here's the thing. And if you're uncomfortable with these conversations, you're uncomfortable with this talk, you're thinking, Chad, what's going on? Or you might be saying, hallelujah praise you as I love that we're talking about this.
Regardless on which side of this you're falling on and are just divisive, cataclysmic, argumentive world right now in 2020. Here's the thing. The way the Holy Spirit does this is very different from the way the world does this. The Holy Spirit does not do this in any way, shape, or form, in the way that we as humans would seek to do this on our own.
And it's different from the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the gospel reconciliation is a different thing that we are only capable of when we invite the Holy Spirit to come and break up this hard ground. It takes a different story. The next part of this that jumps into is a conversation about harvesting. It's a conversation about the fact that all these amazing things were happening here in Samaria, these people who did Jewish, and their whole issue with the Samaritans was the fact that they felt that they were half-breed Jews who did not worship well.
And that was the reason they excluded them. So here you have Philip coming in here and preaching powerfully and boldly. And it says, crowds are listening to him because they were eager to hear this message and to see the miraculous signs they did. They went with this with their senses, with their eyes and their ears and what scripture says, let us have ears to hear and eyes to see like this is happening right there among them.
Now once ground has been broken, the presence of the Spirit can move in and the occupation of the Spirit will talk about the manifest presence of God. It is drastically different from what we can do on our own. And this is what we're fighting here in this passage. This is a unity.
It's about people being an older translation that says of one accord, of one purpose, of one mind. They're gathered around Philip because he's teaching a gospel dynamic, a dynamic that is drastically different from the ones and the ways that the world will teach. And it broke through both supernatural boundaries and it broke through physical boundaries. And this actually looks like the teaching ministry of Jesus Christ right here.
Like this story reads like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And here in Samaria, the place that God's presence had left, it's in the Old Testament. God left, God abandoned this whole land. Here is Philip doing the things that no one thought could happen.
And Philip brings in the full authority of Jesus Christ in this place. You know, with his His call to these evil spirits, he's showing supernatural authority just like Jesus did. He's healing people with their sicknesses. He's showing physical authority just like Jesus had.
You know what I think about harvesting? You know, God's people are always sent out. In the Old Testament, the Samaria, the whole northern kingdom is a perfect example of this. You know, because of sin, they were cast out.
They were sent out into exile. And those that were left were there and they became the Samaritans. And the Assyrians moved in other nations and they mixed it. Intermarriages and different gods were brought in and all sorts of stuff happened.
But ultimately because of sin, they were sent out. They're exiled. But because now in the New Testament, God is still sending His people out. But He's now sending them out in mission alongside of His Spirit with the full authority and power of Jesus Christ and bringing that into the world that scattered people of the persecution in Jerusalem, the scattered start spreading.
And in 2020, in quarantine, in COVID, in corona land, or whatever you want to call it, my new favorite, C-1-9er, we feel scattered. We feel discombobulated. We feel where we are being sent. What is it right now as we worship together digitally?
We have the ability to be sent out and to send out this message in ways that we're not going to... You were close to possible six or eight months ago. God's people are always sent out, but in the New Testament we find that we are sent out with the power and the authority of Jesus Christ and sent out into His harvest. Now this changes the way that we view how we are placed in the world.
Now we think about that dynamic of reconciliation, of harvest and how it changes things. It also changes the way that we treat the places that we live. Are we willing to be part of the transforming of our communities by Jesus Christ? Or are we going to be the ones who avoid transformation and block of movement of the Spirit here?
What are my favorite passes, Jeremiah 29-7, it says, pray for the peace and the prosperity of where I am sending you. And that's our call to be God. We're praying for these things to happen, and we're going to work to do these things happen, but they can't happen if we don't allow Jesus to transform us first. Will we let the power and authority of Jesus change the dynamic of how we see His purpose, of how we see His place, and of how we understand and call some people as belonging, but also is not belonging.
To close this out, just want to talk about the very last verse in this passage, it says, and there was great joy in the city. No joy is a unique thing. Yes, it's about an experience of gladness. But it's also in Scripture.
This idea of joy is very specific. It's about happiness. It isn't about just when life is well. Joy is a very explicit idea.
And joy comes because of two things. Number one, joy comes because someone is in the center of God's will. Or joy comes because they're experiencing a movement of the Holy Spirit. Joy comes when there's the manifest presence of God.
And here in this broken place where no one thought anyone could ever do anything, it is now being remade and remade because of the manifest presence of God in that space. Now that should be a deep desire in our hearts, and we realize that in order for us to get to that place, we have to allow the Holy Spirit to plow up that hard and that broken ground in our heart, for us to redefine our boundaries, for us to say, hey, God, if we want you to break boundaries and stretch boundaries for us, we are also willing to tear down the ones in our hearts that are stopping you from coming in here in this space. So we're going to close out with this song that Madeline introduced me to a few weeks ago. This is actually for one of our worship Wednesday streams.
We don't pop on Wednesdays on Facebook at 3.30. Madeline and I are Madeline and I are madeline by herself. We have this time of worship and it's kind of casual, it's just there. But she introduced me to this song a few weeks back about a group that's called United Pursuit.
It's a simple, simple song. It's called Garden. It's all about remaking. So that's our prayer for today is that for us to be remade, us to remade for a purpose of harvest.
And for us to realize that if we want to see the harvest of God, but we are not willing for Him to remake us, then we are going to be creating a boundary that stops God from moving in. So Holy Spirit, Father, wherever we are, whenever we're watching this, if it's 10.30 on the live or if it's throughout the week or if it's two years from now, we're going to my prayer right now in just many, many, many ways. It's got us for you to break out the hard spaces of our heart God. God for us to see and experience you in new ways.
God teaches to be reconcilers so that we can be harvesters. Lord, thank you for your love. Amen.