Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Acts chapter 7, focusing on Stephen's bold defense before the Sanhedrin, where he recounts Israel's history and their repeated rejection of God's chosen deliverers, including Joseph and Moses. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing Jesus as the ultimate Savior and warns against resisting the Holy Spirit. The sermon challenges listeners to reflect on their own faith and the danger of clinging to traditions while missing true worship.
Welcome and Housekeeping
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If you have a child, they can be dismissed now. First grade and under for Children's Church, they'll be dismissed this time with my wife, and it'll be a great time for them to go. And they're actually working on a couple of songs.
Our little kids are going to be singing next week is you Sunday. They're going to be doing a little old school songs for little kids, and so they're excited about that. They've been practicing on Sunday and Wednesday,
and it's going to be a great time. If you have your Bibles, we're going to go to Acts chapter 7. We've got a daunting task this morning. We've got 53 verses that we're going to cover in about 25 or 30 minutes.
And so I'm not going to read all of them this morning for the sake of time. I'm going to pick about 10 or 12 of them, and we're going to read through them, but you can follow along. The words will be on the screen.
But Acts chapter 7 is where we're going to be at. We just last week talked about Stephen, the first deacon that was the first set of deacons, but specifically Stephen.
And then we see at the end where they come to him, and he preaches the gospel, and they said his face was beheld like an angel. And then we get the meat of his message.
This first 53 verses, he gets up and he preaches Christ. He is a faithful witness, even in the face of rejection. And we'll look at that next week, his death next week.
But today I want us to really think about the boldness that he had when he stands up and preaches and the length of his message.
Right? We oftentimes, I know I only get 25 or 30 minutes normally to preach, but he got up and he preached a long message here. And I'm not going to preach that long, I promise. We've got several things to do today.
So out of respect to God's word, we're going to stand, and we're going to start with verse 2. And then we're going to go to verse 6, and then a couple other verses. I'll read them out as we go.
So let's stand out of honor of God's word, and we'll open in prayer. Verse 2 says, brothers and fathers, he replied, listen,
the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he settled in Haran. We'll jump down to verse 6. God spoke in this way. His descendants would be strangers in a foreign land, and they would enslave and oppress them for 400 years.
Joseph's Story and God's Presence
We'll jump down to verse 9. The patriarchs became jealous of Joseph and sold him into Egypt, but God was with him. It's a wonderful, encouraging verse. God was with him.
Jump down to verse 25, and he assumed that the people would understand that God would give them deliverance through him, but they did not understand. Verse 30, after 40 years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sanai in the flame of a burning bush.
Verse 35, this Moses whom you rejected when they said, who appointed you a ruler and a judge.
This one that God sent as a ruler and a deliverer through the angel who appeared to him in a bush. Verse 39, our ancestors were unwilling to obey him.
Instead, they pushed him aside, and in their hearts, they turned back to Egypt. Verse 42, God turned away and gave them up to worship the stars of heaven.
As it is written in the book of prophets, house of Israel, did you bring me an offering and sacrifice for 40 years in the wilderness?
Verse 48, but the Most High does not dwell in sanctuaries made with hands, as the prophet says, and then we'll read the last three verses of this chapter, 51 through 53. You stiff-faced people with uncircumcised hearts and ears. You will always resist the Holy Spirit. As your ancestors did,
you do also, which is of the prophets of your ancestors, did they not persecute? They even killed those who foretold of the coming of the righteous one, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become. Verse 53, you received the law under the direction of angels and yet have not kept it.
Father, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. I pray that you'll be with this lengthy passage of scripture that we are going to look at today.
Give me the words to say as I bring it into a concise thought. Lord, it's been a tough study.
It's been a tough time for me this week, but I pray that you would help us to understand what you've given us. And oftentimes, when we face rejection, how we can be faithful to you even in our hardest times. And in your name we pray. Amen. You can be seated.
As we look through this, we're going to see some people that are familiar with you. And that's why I didn't read a lot of it because we're familiar with Joseph. We're familiar with Moses and Abraham as we look through this. And we know the stories.
We've been taught the story since we were kids. But Stephen approaches this topic with unfamiliar eyes almost. He helps us understand some things that maybe we hadn't thought of before.
I came up with a story this week. I found this story.
It's a story about a kid named David. And it was bitterly cold one night. And he was in the city. And a fire broke out in his apartment complex that was run down and didn't always meet up to code. And smoke began to fill the air. And panicked residents rushed to escape.
And in the chaos, this young boy named David found himself trapped in a small bedroom. The flames began to creep closer.
His screams for help were drowned out by the roaring fire. And just as the smoke became unbearable, a firefighter burst through the doors. His face was covered by the oxygen mask. His uniform blackened with soot.
Without hesitation, he scooped up little boy David here into his arms. And carrying him down a pleasing stairwell to safety. The boy was safe.
And as he caught his breath outside of the fresh air, he looked up at his rescuer. And he began to frown in almost panic. And he looked at this rescuer. And he said, where's my dad?
He asked, not realizing that his own father had put on the uniform of a firefighter. And came in and rushed in to save him. It wasn't until later when his mask was removed that David finally recognized. That the one that risked everything to save him was his father.
The story is much like the history of Israel. Right? God sent them deliverers.
He sent them Joseph. And he sent them Moses. And ultimately, he sent them Jesus. And yet they failed to recognize him. Instead of receiving him as their savior, they rejected him and even crucified him. As Stephen stands before the Sanhedrin, the most powerful organization of this day.
I've said it before, but the Sanhedrin, I'll say it again, would be like our Supreme Court. He's standing before these men that have power to issue judgment of guilty or freedom of innocence.
And he stands before them and preaches with power, preaches with boldness. And he starts at the history of Israel. And oftentimes, it deals with the context that we're in.
But sometimes we need to understand some of the content of where we're at. And so the question remains for us today as we jump into the message this morning. Will we recognize our savior as Jesus?
Or will we be like Israel and many others and turn away from the one who has come to save us? As we jump in this morning, the very first couple of verses, Stephen begins to have recollection of God's covenant. Stephen begins to think back and begin in his defense.
Remember, this is the Supreme Court. This is someone who is the most powerful rulers of the land in their history. He shows up and he begins this recollection of what God has done. He begins to show the faithfulness of Israel's repeated failures. As we looked at that first slide up there, recollection.
As we begin to even think about what we learned in Sunday school this morning with the youth, as the children of Israel constantly went through a rebellion, a turning away from God, judgment that was brought there, a repentance back to the Lord.
And then God is faithful and he gives that repentance and he gives that peace that comes.
And so Stephen is bringing them into remembrance of what's going on here. And the first thing we see is in verses 1 through 4. Again, you can study these out for yourself, but for sake of time, we're not going to delve into each one.
God's Call to Abraham
God's call to Abraham. He starts out by calling Abraham out of his homeland into a divine purpose away from everything he's ever known.
Imagine being raised, some of you have been raised in Ronda Clingman your entire life, and maybe you've never even experienced life outside of these little barriers of Ronda Clingman.
And someone coming to you and saying, hey, I need you to uproot your family and move to a place in Arkansas. We're not going to tell you where. We just want you to start heading west.
We're not going to give you a map. We're not going to give you a GPS. We're not going to give you any form to get there. We just want you to start heading west and eventually you'll find your way there. This is what God came to Abraham and said.
I want you to leave everything you've ever known,
your family, your friends, your occupation, everything that you have. I want you to give it up and I want you to leave.
And I'm going to promise you that I'm going to take care of you. And oftentimes when we think of the story of Abraham,
my mind goes to, would I be that obedient to trust in the Lord even in those difficult times? Would I be obedient to say, God, if you want me to go here, I'm going to go there. I don't care the trials.
I don't care the temptations. I don't care the difficulties that are going to happen. I'm just going to obey and trust the Lord even when there's unknowns and question marks all around us.
This is what Abraham did. And God called him and he begins to remind the people this is what God did. But not only did Abraham get a call from God, but Abraham had confidence in God's promises.
Verses five through seven talks about how he didn't give him an inheritance, but he gave them this promise as a possession of descendants.
And as we begin to see this, we begin to see that Abraham believed, even though he never saw the fulfillment of God's promise come true. I want you to imagine for just a moment, someone gives you a promise. Someone gives you this wonderful thing that's going to happen one day.
They never tell you when it's going to happen. It could even be the time where Jesus says that I'm going away to prepare a place for you in the future. I'm going to prepare a mansion or many rooms, however your translation says, and I'm going to prepare that. And one day I'm going to come back to get you.
And we don't know when. We don't know when that's going to happen, but we know that through God's faithfulness that he is going to come back and he is going to provide that provision.
It's almost like someone who's running their race in a triathlon where they've got to hand the baton off to the next person. They don't ever get to see the finish line. Their job is just to hand the baton to the next person in front of them. And oftentimes, this is our life.
We must trust God that he's going to work beyond our lifetime,
that he's going to work in our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren and our great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.
If we are faithful now, that we know that God is going to be faithful to this next generation. And this is what Abraham and his descendants began to experience, is the promises of God being delivered to the generations after them. And as Stephen is standing before the Sanhedrin, he says,
your father Abraham, the direct father of all of us in here, he trusted God and he followed the Lord even when he didn't know what was going to go on.
And you've rejected that man named Abraham. But not only do we see the confidence in his promise, we see Abraham's covenant with God. There was a covenant of circumcision that happened here that marked all the people that set them apart from all the Gentiles into the Jewish nation.
And we're not going to go through the details of that. I just want to ask ourselves this. If someone were to come to you today,
would your life be so set apart for the Lord that they would know that something is different in your life than their life? I was talking to our teenagers this morning. I said, as we were in Sunday school, and I said, imagine you do something wrong.
Well, it was Jeremy and Brody in there. I said, imagine you do something wrong and the principal calls you to the office and they say, it may be Don.
He's the principal there. He sits down and he says, boys, what did you do wrong? Why did you do this?
And you began to debate and tell them all the things you did, why you did the things that were wrong, and you began to justify these things. And I said, imagine if the tables were turned and the principal brought you in and said, why did you do these good things?
Why is your life marked so different than those that are around you?
Why is it that every time someone comes around you, they're so encouraged when they leave you that they just feel energized.
And every teacher that I talk to, when you leave their class, they're energized that you came into their class and they're just excited to teach again. What is so different in your life than these other kids?
Imagine if that would be the reason that we would be called to the principal's office because they're trying to figure out why you are so different and that your life is marked by holiness.
Now this can be expanded to our job and the people that were around, but in that context of those kids, I wanted to understand that we have a covenant with God to be set apart and to be holy for who he has set us out to be.
So not only does he recollect or recall the covenant that God laid with them, but he begins to reason through Israel's rejection. Stephen begins to highlight a pattern here.
He begins to highlight a pattern that the Lord saves you and that things are happening in your life and yet you turn from the Lord. You are rejecting these deliverers that get brought up in your midst.
God brings up this person as a deliverer in the judges and you sin against God and you say that God is nowhere near your life and you reject him and you continue to move on and you get away
Joseph as a Rejected Deliverer
from it and yet God continues to raise up deliverers.
And he brings in this story of Joseph. Joseph, one of the most powerful stories in the Old Testament, when you really study out the story in the life of Joseph and you understand that Joseph, through all the trials, did everything for the Lord. And the Bible never records one time that Joseph sinned.
Now we know that he's imperfect, we know he's a human, but we understand that Joseph was a true picture of Jesus. He's a true picture of Jesus in four simple ways.
In verse nine, it says that the patriarchs became jealous of Joseph and they sold him in Egypt to get rid of him. Joseph was rejected.
Joseph was rejected by the people that loved him the most. His brothers, out of jealousy,
sold him into slavery. It'd be like someone at work or someone at school that is smart and gets all the answers right.
We've got a, my wife was telling me last night of one of our former teenagers who I think a perfect score in an ACT is like 37. Some of our seniors and juniors in here will maybe correct me. He took it just a couple of months ago and he scored a 36.
One point shy of a perfect score and he's going back in a couple of weeks to retake it because he said, I want to try to get a perfect score.
Now other people will look at that and they're going to ridicule him and they're going to make fun of him for trying to just be a smart guy or trying to advance in his life and they're going to
reject him and they're going to get mocked by him and his peers aren't going to celebrate that. Sometimes they're going to make fun of him and this was the life of Joseph.
He came and he was chosen by the Lord and he told them of what was going to happen and they rejected him and sold him into slavery. In verses 10 through 13, we see that Joseph was raised up.
God used the suffering to take place in his life, to raise him to a place that he would have never been before. He used the hardships that was in his life to give him a greater purpose than he would ever experience.
Oftentimes, as I've heard it said, when our story intercedes with God's story, it creates a much greater story.
And this is what happened in Joseph's life. His story was beginning to intercede with what God had planned for him. He didn't understand why his brothers rejected him.
He didn't understand why he had these visions from the Lord and he didn't understand why he was going through these hardships of being thrown into jail and being a slave and going through all these things.
But what he did know is that God brought me to this place for a reason. And Joseph was raised up.
Joseph understood that his hardships were going to bring about a greater purpose in all that was going to happen.
And then we see in verses 13 and 14, I want to read this. The second time, Joseph revealed himself to his brothers and Joseph's family became known to Pharaoh. And Joseph invited all of his families and relatives, 75 people in all, to come in. We see that Joseph was revealed.
Eventually, the brothers recognized that they had rejected Jesus, that they had rejected the one that they sold into slavery.
Just as Joseph's brothers did not recognize him at first, the people that were around here, many of those that were here failed to recognize Jesus as their Messiah. I heard it when I was in Israel just a couple of years ago and looking forward to the time I get to go back.
But our guide told us, he said, every patriarch of all of Israel came and was rejected the first time.
And the first time they were rejected and they had to come a second time before they were finally accepted. And he said, I want you to think about this in the concept of Jesus, right? Jesus came into Israel and he was rejected by those that he loved and cared for.
And he had to be crucified and put away. And one day he's coming back and on that second time is when they'll finally understand and return back to the Lord for what he's done. I don't want us this morning to fail to realize who Jesus is.
Who Jesus is when he came into this world to die for our sins as we get closer to Easter, as we get in this mindset of Palm Sunday next week and as we get to the point where we
get to think about what Jesus did for us, as we get to reflect on what he has done in dying for our sins.
I don't want us to get to the point where we ever fail to realize who he is and what he's done for us. And maybe you're here this morning and that's never been a time in your life.
I want you to know that the Lord is here and the Lord is near to you. And then it continues by saying that Joseph was laid to rest.
In verses 15 and 16, we see that he was taken to this promised land and God fulfilled his promise, but it was after he was gone. And sometimes the promises that God gives us will be fulfilled after we're gone.
But we must stay faithful and trusting that the Lord is still good and the Lord is still faithful in all that he says and does.
Moses: Another Rejected Leader
And then we see number three here, 17, I told you I'm gonna move fast, 17 to 35, Stephen's respect for Moses.
He begins to shift the thought to Moses, another rejected deliverer, Moses who came and led them out of the promised land after they've been in slavery for 400 years, after they were beaten and oppressed by Pharaoh. He begins to say, Moses, the one that you love, right?
The Bible says that he was beautiful in the sight of God. This is someone who, as we see, was chosen by God. He was prepared for leadership.
One of my favorite times of the year is when the Olympics happen. You see these men and women who have trained their entire life, some 30 and 40 years, have been training their entire life to step out on a stage for just a moment of time and do some extraordinary gymnastics
or Paul Voltaire. Paul Voltaire or in the wintertime, some of the winter X games that happen and you begin to see these guys who have trained their whole life for this one moment in time. That's a singular moment where they get to stand up on the stage and get that gold, silver, bronze medal.
Some get it multiple times, but most, if you look at it, only get that chance once in a lifetime.
And Moses here was chosen by God to be the singular person to lead the children out of Israel, to be this person that was going to be trained for 40 years on the backside of a desert.
He didn't understand why he came to rescue these Israelites and he saw his brothers being persecuted and he killed the Egyptian and now his own brothers have rejected him and he goes to the backside of the desert and
he sits back there with God and he says, God, I thought you were training me up to be this next person. Why am I going through this hardship? Why am I going through these things?
And he just began to tend sheep and do what God wanted him to do for 40 years. And then finally,
God came and we look at here verses 23 through 29. Moses was cast out. I got a little bit ahead of myself. Israelites rejected his leadership and they forced him into the wilderness.
Oftentimes, we look at ourselves and if you're like me and you're human, you'll ask yourself,
why am I doing some of the times of the things that I'm doing? I don't feel like I'm meeting God's expectations. I was talking to a young guy this week and he said, I feel miserable. Every day I go into work, he's a school teacher, I said, I go in
and I give my life to my kids and I feel like they just spit in my face. I feel like they don't care about me. I try to make their life better. I try to love on them.
I try to care for them and I just feel like every day I come home, I'm just depleted of all energy.
He said, would you pray for me that God would give me a place that I feel like I'm accepted where God would give me somewhere where I feel like I can make an impact? And I feel like that was Moses in this situation. He feels cast out.
He feels like he's not meeting their expectations and he says, God, you chose me. You've done these things and now I'm on the backside of a desert and I'm suffering and things are bad and I'm out in the wilderness.
God's Encounter with Moses
It leads us to God meeting Moses in the wilderness. This burning bush experience. This burning bush that reaffirms what God is calling in Moses' life. As we see this in verses 30-35, we begin to see God working intimately in this way.
As I studied this out, my mind went to one simple thought. Moses met God in the wilderness of his life
and it's oftentimes when we are in the wilderness of our life, God comes and speaks the clearest and the loudest but the problem is oftentimes we're not listening.
Oftentimes God is coming and Moses could have been distracted and he saw this burning bush and he realized,
no, the job that I've got to take care of these sheep are more important. I don't care that a bush is on fire. I've got to keep taking care of these sheep and he could have easily ignored the sign that was happening here.
But instead, he saw this bush and he said, there's something different over here. I'm going to go and see what's going on. I'm going to go and see what the Lord is doing. And in that moment, he chose to listen to the voice of the Lord.
But very easily, he could have ignored it. And I feel oftentimes when we are going through our hardest times, our hardest trials, the Lord is speaking to us. The Lord is there and he's near to the broken heart of the Bible says. And yet we are ignoring the voice of the Lord.
We must get to the point where when we are in our wilderness moments, we just do like Moses does and we trust that the Lord is there for us. So he talks about these three people,
Moses and Abraham and Joseph, who they would have loved. At this point, I see some of you spanning.
I'm hot in here too. Okay, some of you are still cold and I understand it's just the beauty of being in church. But as we see through this, right, he talks about these three guys he loves. They love Moses. They love Joseph. They love Abraham.
Man, these are their forefathers. They are loving these things.
Well, then he begins to flip the script a little bit and he begins to preach directly at them. He says, you people have rebelled against Moses.
In verses 36 through 43, he begins to, begin to say, listen, there's been signs and there's been wonders and you have continually and consistently rejected Moses' leadership.
Moses is coming in and these people that are coming in have come to work and become to deliver you and yet you've rejected them and turned them away. They were desired Egypt more than their deliverance. We see this in the story of Moses.
They were in the desert and they didn't have any food and they didn't have any water and they looked at Moses and they said, can we just go back and be slaves? Can we just go back and be under the bondage of Egypt?
This God out here, he's not working for us and their hearts were so turned over to these false gods that they begin to desire rebellion.
It'd be like an inmate who's in his last days of prison and he says, you know what? I'm about to be free. Just continue my sentence.
I don't want to go and be free. I don't want to be with my family. I don't want to go and have the freedom to go to Walmart. I don't know if that's a lot of freedom.
I don't know if I want the freedom to go to the movies or go to these places.
I just want to be confined to my little box and be stuck here. And they come in and say, no, no, no, you're going to get freedom. I'm good with it. And oftentimes, we as Christians are the same way.
We may not say that, but we will live for our old self. We'll live in our old sin.
We'll live in our old paths and we'll do the things that make us feel good rather than do the things that God wants us to do. And we are no different than the people here that chose to worship an idol, chose to worship and despise the true worship.
Instead of worshiping God, they turned to idols. They turned to these things that were temporary, what they call golden calves.
And oftentimes, they would say that these golden calves in scripture were going to be the ones that worked and did things.
Traditions vs. God's Presence
I think oftentimes, we as people are easy to set up golden calves in our life.
We're easy to set up little things that gravitate our attention, that bring us to this point where we neglect to look at what God has done for us and we neglect the true worship of what the Lord has for us. We neglect the rebellion.
We begin to rebel so much that we forget what God has done for us. Which leads us to the verses 44 and 50 through 50, the people's rejection of true worship. Stephen exposes their hypocrisy. They honored the temple.
They honored this man-made building, this man-made place as a place of true worship and they rejected the God who dwelt there.
He begins to look through and he says that the temporal, the tabernacle was temporary. God moved in among his people and we know that the tabernacle was about to be destroyed, but it was temporary in this moment.
Solomon had built it and he understood that God didn't dwell in buildings made with hand, but yet they were so consumed with the things that they had built that they forgot the man that led them to build it. It'd be like this.
It'd be like a father giving his child a picture of himself.
Right now, I've been sharing some images of Ghibli Studios and sent some to Caleb and some of you are like, what is it that even? It's just like a cartoon drawing of yourself.
It'd be like me going up to my son Brody and saying, Brody, here's a picture of me.
I want you to, when things are tough, when times are hard, just look at this picture and understand that I love you and I care for you and I'm there for you.
And we'd be sitting there at the dinner table and we're eating and he'd pull that picture out and as I'm sitting right beside him,
he'd pull that picture out and say, man, I'm so glad dad loves me. I'm so glad dad cares about me.
We'd go ride in the car. We're riding down the road and he's in the passenger seat and I'm in the driver's seat and he'd pull the picture out and he'd say, man, I'm so glad dad loves me. Forgetting that I'm right there beside him. The actual human person is right there.
He covets this picture more than he does me. And this is what was happening to the children of Israel.
They had a picture of God and yet God had came into this world and lived with them and lived among them and healed them and delivered them from all types of oppression that was going on and yet they
were saying, I really love this image of Jesus over here versus Jesus himself who was standing right there in front of them.
All of a sudden, we begin to ask ourselves, are we treasuring traditions more than the presence of God? Are we treasuring the things of this world or the things that we've been told that were good versus what God truly has for us?
And then it brings us to this climactic point where Stephen gets to this point where he really can't help himself anymore in verses 51 through 53 and he concludes with this resistance of the Holy Spirit. The people resisting what the Spirit is doing.
It would be an indictment on these people who are standing here in front of them. It would be like if you've ever watched a crime show or some type of drama where they break out the smoking gun.
They break out the thing that is going to upset the whole case. The whole case has been set upon. They say that this is what happens and he says that your hearts are just as hard as your ancestors.
Rejecting the Holy Spirit
He says, your hearts are so hardened that you have resisted the Holy Spirit. I wrote down three things this morning as I was just studying and thinking about some things. They had stubborn hearts, they had a rebellious history, and they rejected the law.
These people were so stubborn in their hearts. It says that you resisted the Holy Spirit.
It'd be like someone who was drowning in the pool and someone threw a life jacket in and said, I'm here to save you. I want to rescue you.
And they said, no, I can figure it out myself. I'm just going to keep drowning. I don't need your help. This is what the people were doing here. They were resisting the Holy Spirit so much that they could not even accept the salvation of the Lord. They had a rebellious history.
They were persecuted and they persecuted every prophet that God had sent them.
They were even killing the righteous one, Jesus, as he says here in verse 52 as we read. You have killed the foretold coming of Christ. And they rejected the law.
They boasted in the law. They boasted in keeping up their standards and keeping up their morality that they had failed to keep up with Christ. They had failed to keep their life in line with Christ. Oftentimes, I am reminded that we can oftentimes
reject the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes in our life and he's trying to work in our life and he's trying to give us guidance and wisdom and we reject and say, no, no, I can figure this out myself. And oftentimes, we're that same way.
Things come in. Things try to help us. People try to help us and we reject that because we think we can figure it ourself. As Terry comes, I want to close with one illustration from 1840.
1840, a Hungarian physician named, I'm going to butcher his name, Ignaz Semvez, he made a groundbreaking discovery.
Now, get this. Every mom in here, get this. This was the groundbreaking discovery. You ready? He discovered that if you wash your hands, you can prevent the spread of deadly infection. Who would have thought, right?
Washing your hands can keep people safe. Every mother, that's the thing that they say. They say, wash your hands before you eat, right? We don't want to get ourselves sick. And at the time, many mothers were dying from what they called childbed fever in hospitals.
Semwise noticed that doctors were going from the autopsy of dead bodies to delivering babies, rooms beside each other and never washed their hands in between this. He implemented a simple solution.
Wash your hands with some type of chlorine solution before. And the results were astonishing. The death rates plummeted, babies and mothers who once had little hope of survival were now thriving.
You would have thought that they would have lifted him up and gave him a plaque and a medal and a Nobel Peace Prize but instead of halting him as a hero, he was rejected. His fellow doctors ridiculed him refusing to believe that they were responsible for spreading diseases.
His ideas were dismissed as nonsense and eventually he was forced out of his position and his medical license was revoked because they were so against changing what they were doing. Years later after his death his discovery was proven correct.
It revolutionized medicine and it saved countless lives but for years the truth was rejected and people suffered because of it.
Just like his colleagues rejected his life-saving message, the Sanhedrin in this story rejected Stephen's message of salvation.
The truth was right there in front of them but yet they were so blinded by their own pride and they were so blinded by what they thought was right that they were willing to reject salvation
Questions for Reflection
in order for themselves to be right. Stephen's sermon calls us to ask a couple of questions. Are we rejecting Jesus like Israel was rejecting Joseph and Moses?
Is the Holy Spirit leading your life in a way that you need to change some things you're doing and yet you're resisting the Spirit? You're resisting any type of change because you think that you're doing it the right way. I'm often reminded as I
am around my dad and around other people that I think I do things the right way and they have to come and show me that I'm doing things the wrong way. And it's a good reminder for me.
It's a good reminder that I'm told those things because oftentimes we can be so stuck in our own head that we can't even see the things that we're doing wrong. Are we resisting the Spirit leading and changing our life?
And ultimately the third and last question that I'll ask is are we clinging to religious traditions while missing true worship that the Lord has for us?
All through the book of Acts they were abandoning traditions that the forefathers had set up for them in order to get closer to the Lord and closer to the Spirit that the Lord was leading them.
They weren't resisting change they were welcoming change they were welcoming things to be different they were welcoming things to be better because they were so tired of what the old people the old people the old church the old
religion the old temple was doing and they were ready for the Spirit to come in the Spirit to move in a mighty way.
Stephen's message cost him his life as we're going to find out next week but yet his testimony speaks today.
We have a warning and we will either be like the Sanhedrin who rejects it or we will be like the saints who hear it with ears of truth
and accept this message of we must be closer to Jesus.
We must not reject those that are around us that are leading us and guiding us to be closer to him. Let us stand and let us pray. Lord we love you. Lord we thank you today. I know I went through a lot of scripture. I went through a lot of passage here.
and I pray God that you would just continue to have your will and way.
Lord these messages and acts have changed my mind, they changed my heart, they changed the things that I even do as a father as I look at my life and I pray God that you would help us as
a church to re-examine and re-evaluate and say what are we doing for the cause of Christ?
What are we doing to grow closer to you and ultimately bring people closer to you?
I pray God that you have your will and way in the service, in the invitation and as the business conference comes in just a moment you'd have your will and way in that. In your name we pray, amen.
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