Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Acts 20:1-12, emphasizing the importance of encouraging one another in the faith. He highlights Paul's commitment to uplift the disciples despite facing persecution, drawing parallels to the story of Bethany Hamilton, who overcame adversity with support from her community. The sermon calls believers to actively encourage each other, engage in worship, and recognize the power of grace in restoring those who have fallen, ultimately fostering a vibrant church community.
Housekeeping and Introduction
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Thank you, Natalie, for that. What an awesome song that was. 100% better than what I could have done. And thank you for that. If you have a child who wants to be dismissed to Children's Church, that's available for this time,
first grade and under. If you have your Bibles, it'll be in Acts chapter 20 this morning. Acts chapter 20. Aren't you thankful for the blood of Jesus this morning that's been shed for us, for the remission of our sins? And I'm thankful for that as well.
Acts chapter 20, verses 1 through 12 is what we'll look at this morning. If you found your way there, we'll stand by the reading of God's Word. And the verses will be on the screen as well for you.
Let's all stand as we read. The Bible says, After the uproar was over, this was the uproar from the last chapter, Paul sent for the disciples, encouraged them, and after saying farewell, departed to go to Macedonia.
And when they had passed through those areas, he offered them many words of encouragement. He came to Greece and stayed there three months.
The Jews plotted against him and was about to set sail for Syria. And so he had decided to go back through Macedonia. He was accompanied by Sophar, the son of Pyrrhus, from Berea, Aristocris, and Secutius, from Thessalonica, Gaius, from Derbe, Timothy, Titicus, and Tyrophus, from the providence of Asia.
These men went ahead and waited for us in Troas. But we sailed away from Philippi after the festival of the Unbeloven Bread. In five days we reached at Troas, and we were there seven days. On the first day of the week, verse 7, we assembled to break bread.
Paul spoke to them, and since he was about to depart the next day, he kept on talking until midnight. Amen, Brother Paul.
There were many lamps in the room upstairs where they were assembled, and a young man named Eutychus was sitting on the windowsill and sank into a deep sleep as Paul kept on talking.
And when he was overcome by sleep, he fell down from the third story and was picked up dead. But Paul went down,
bent over, embraced him, and said, Do not be alarmed, because he is still alive. After going back upstairs, breaking the bread and eating, Paul talked a long time until dawn. Amen.
Then he left. They brought the boy named home alive and were greatly comforted. Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. Thank you for your reading of Scripture. Thank you for the vulnerability and just the realness that Scripture brings to us.
Message Title: Encouraging One Another
Help us today as we exposit your word. In your name we pray. Amen. You can be seated. Today I've entitled the message, Encouraging One Another.
This is one of these one another situations in Scripture where, if you remember back of the last 11 messages that we preached, almost every single scenario that Paul has been in, persecution has happened.
He's went in. They beat him. They've thrown him out. They plotted to kill him. They brought him before the judge. They brought him before different places. And it says, even in this situation, Paul was encouraging those that were disciples.
I mean, if anyone had a chance to give up and go home, it would have been Paul. But Paul saw fit to continue to encourage the disciples, continue to spend time with them, and continue to be a blessing to them. About 20 years ago, in October of 2003,
there was a surfer named Bethany Hamilton. I'm sure you've heard of Bethany Hamilton. I'm sure you've seen a video of Bethany Hamilton. But she was 13 years old, and she was surfing off the coast of Hawaii early in the morning. And suddenly in that morning, she was struck by a shark and lost her left arm.
For many of us, this would have been the kind of moment that would have shattered our dreams. We would have given up life.
We would have given up on whatever dream we would have had. And Bethany's dream was to be a professional surfer. She had sponsors, and she was very prolific in what she was doing.
And was in this moment of months after this accident that was challenged in a moment of what she was going to do. If she was going to physically continue on, spiritually and emotionally, what she was going to do.
She faced pain and doubt and fear. There's a biography that she's written about this. But all along the way, she had a group of people that were around her. That encouraged her. That pushed her forward.
That would not let her walk alone. And would not let her walk away from her dreams. Her family showed up every day. They helped her. They encouraged her. They gave her strength that only they could give. Her friends treated her not with pity, as many would have expected. But challenged her.
And said, you've got to continue on. You've got to shift your balance. You've got to change the way you're doing this. You've got to do things a little different. And ultimately, they pushed her to lean into God's grace. If you've never read the story of Bethany Hamilton, she's a believer. She loves Jesus.
She was very active in her FCA, in her area there.
Very active in her biblical group that she was a part of. And many times thought about walking away from her faith.
And the story goes that a year after her attack, Bethany got back on her skirt board with one arm and competed in contests. And even went on when waves were higher, where she would have had a greater risk of falling. She continued to get back up. And over time, she won a championship.
Her sponsors returned. And she inspired an entire generation of young people to face adversity head on, to not give up when things get wrong. But ultimately, she reminded people that encouragement doesn't happen in a vacuum.
You've got to be around people. You've got to be around other people. And then be around believers who are going to encourage us when people fall. Believing in people and giving them second chances is all about what the church is about.
The church, as believers, we are about second chances in the grace that God has given us. And that is what Bethany Hamilton's story calls us to.
And also in this story, it calls us to look at each other and say, are we building each other up through the presence of each other, through the preaching of the Word of God, but also through perseverance?
When times get tough, what are we fixing our eyes on and how are we living our life? True encouragement, church,
comes when the church gathers. When the Word is preached, grace begins to come in and meet us in our weakest moments and our weakest needs. We've got to ask ourselves, how are we living in that encouragement?
First thing I want to look at is in verses 1 through 6, the encouragement that Paul shows to the saints. Paul comes in and in these six verses, he gathers the saints together and he, before heading towards suffering, he knows there's a plot happening.
He knows that people are gathering to maybe come after him.
And yet he decides that I'm going to spend maybe the little bit of time that I've got encouraging other people.
And I want us to really evaluate ourselves and put ourselves in the story and say, if we knew that someone was plotting to come after our life, would we spend time encouraging others or would we spend time encouraging ourselves or taking care of our own things?
And oftentimes when hard times happen, we pull back and we isolate ourselves and we begin to think of ourselves and think of our own families instead of leaning in and building others up.
The body of Christ is about building up others. It's about sacrificing for others in a way that they're going to be able to grow stronger in the Lord and we're going to be able to come alongside of them.
The Importance of Encouragement
Encouragement is not optional. I'm a firm believer and I know this through the years of ministry that I've been in, that encouragement is like the spiritual oxygen to our spiritual faith.
Encouragement is what happens when we are struggling and we're hurting and life is going in difficult ways and someone comes alongside of us, whether it's in the body of Christ or a family member, and encourages us and just breathes life back into us.
There's many guys that I talk to often, I text often or send phone calls to, even this week as John's coming in in a couple weeks,
John, he called me on Friday and I had missed the call and I called him back and I said, hey, what's going on? And he said, I haven't talked to you much this week. I was just worried that something was going on.
He realized that in the body of Christ, we must be connected to one another.
We must encourage one another in a way that we're building each other up so that brings life into our body. It brings life into our spiritual mobility as we go through life.
There's a couple of observations we see here in this first couple of verses. The first thing we see is Paul embraced them. He brought them together.
He said, I'm sending for the disciples to bring them to me so that I can encourage them with a physical touch. There's something about physically being around someone.
There is Zoom calls and Skype calls and Google Meets that we have in the world today, but there's something about sitting down one-on-one, one in a group, and just being across from someone, being able to see
their eyes, being able to see how they respond, being able to see their facial expressions, being able to see their body language and their body movement.
Paul knew that and he said, this isn't a letter writing moment where I'm going to send them a letter and try to encourage them. This needs to be a moment where I sit down face-to-face.
You've maybe gotten a letter from your boss before, and that letter was maybe a critique or an email that sort of challenged you, but it's a whole lot different when you sit in the business meeting with the boss,
and they lay out everything that you've been doing wrong or everything that you've been doing right, and it's a little bit more serious, a little bit more personal. This is what Paul was saying.
I'm wanting to come in. I'm wanting to embrace you, but I want to also show you the affection that I've got towards you. We also see in verse 2 that he gave them exhortation. He didn't just flatter them, but he exhorted them.
Biblical Encouragement Explained
This is a biblical encouragement that aims to steady our soul, but challenges in a way that maybe we didn't see the first time. And so he sits down with them. He embraces them.
He brings them in, and then he begins to tell them some things that are going to encourage them along the way. But then I believe this is so important in verses 3 through 6 because he lists his companions that were there with him. He didn't have to do this. He didn't have to.
Luke did not have to write down these other men that traveled alongside of him, but I think it tells us and it encourages us in this way that it encourages us to be around a team of people.
One person can do something, but a group of people can do a whole lot more together than they can separate. It's why as Southern Baptists we believe in the cooperative program.
It's why we believe in cooperating with an association because we believe that as we cooperate with each other, we can do more together than we can separate. And this is Paul showing us here that we are bringing people along with me. I'm bringing these men along that I'm discipling.
Timothy and Titicus and Trophus and all these other ones, Gaius that we've heard before are traveling with me because I do not want us to walk alone in life. I want us to walk with others as we disciple and bring them along. It starts in our family.
It starts with our family bringing us together. As we looked at last week, the superiority of the word of God and how valuable that should be in our life. Are we doing that and bringing these other people along with us and encouraging them?
I often think of life as a relay race, as one runner who's got a specific job and then hands that baton off to the next runner and that person has a job to do.
And once they've completed their job, they give their baton off to the next person. There's this idea of running this race together where maybe I'm going to do something, but I can't do everything.
And so I've got to give that baton off to someone else and say, hey, I need you to do this work.
And they're going to do part of that work and they're going to say, hey, I can't do these things and so I'm going to have to give it off to somebody else.
And as we go through the ministry of the church, we've got to look and we've got to say, what are we handing off to the next person?
What are we handing off to the next person that's going to give them the encouragement and the courage to step up and do what they need to do? And oftentimes we fail to train the next generation because we are not thinking of how we can encourage them and bring them along with us.
Question I want to ask us this morning is, who have you embraced lately?
Who have you brought together and said, hey, I want to love on you, maybe not physically, but emotionally and spiritually, where you are passing on courage and strength to them to encourage their life in the Lord?
We've got to be in this mode of discipleship is all what this is as we are bringing up others underneath us and others that are around us and saying, hey, I want to encourage you that there is other things for you to do in ministry.
There's other things that you can use your gifts that God has given you in whatever age or stage of life you're in. And this changes over time.
At some time when you're younger, you've got enough energy and strength to go out and run race and do things. But as life gets older, you can't do the things that you used to do when you were 20 to have a witness in here, right?
You don't have the strength or the energy to do the things that we used to do.
And so we've got to be passing those things on to the next generation and saying, okay, what can I do now?
What if I have the strength and the ability to do because maybe my life is in a different stage of life as well? And so Paul understood that and he was encouraging the saints in these first six verses.
And then we get to verses seven and eight and I think he encouraged them through the preaching.
Paul saw that the encouragement of the saints was personal, but now we've got to get to the preaching side of it.
He says that upon the first day of the week, they got together and they worshiped. Oh, this was a beautiful picture of what the church is today as we gather and as we see the early church gathering the very first day on the Lord's day.
I sent out about two or three text messages this morning and just to various pastors and said, I'm praying for you on the Lord's day. Preach the word. Several others had texted me as well, praying for you today. Today, preach the word.
This is understanding that today is the Lord's day and we're gathering on the Lord's day so that we can worship him and we can sing songs and we can open the word as we're gonna look at.
But this is the habit that we bring ourselves into of saying, am I on a habit of just a routine of coming because it's Sunday or am I coming because I know that I need something from the Lord today?
I'm coming because I've got to get the rhythm of worship in my life so that when I step into the workplace tomorrow, I know it was a tough week last week, but I'm gonna step in energized on this
Monday because I was encouraged by a song, I was encouraged by a verse, I was encouraged by a testimony or a word that someone said and now I'm energized and ready to go and I've got the strength to tackle this next week.
This is what worship does. It brings us into this place and the Bible says in verse seven that Paul stood up and he preached to them. This preaching was not entertainment.
This preaching was not something that was flashy and that was gonna get their attention all the time, but it was nourishment for their soul.
The Bible says, and I love Paul for this, he says he got up and he knew that his time was limited and so he preached until midnight.
Oh man, what a great encouragement for a pastor to know we grab her together on a Sunday morning and that I would be able to preach until midnight to us.
This is like every pastor's dream right here. As Paul gets up and he says, I'm gonna preach, I'm not gonna entertain, I'm just gonna nourish and feed the soul of the saints. And so I wonder, would we be ready for that? Would we be ready for someone to stand and say,
hey, let's put the clocks away, let's just dive into the word and let's just see what God has for us today.
Or would we be saying, hey preacher, I know you're getting close to that time, it's time to wrap this thing up.
I'm sure they were maybe thinking that, but this was the apostle Paul and he's standing up and he's preaching with power and he's worshiping the Lord with them. The second thing I see is in verse eight, the word of God was preached.
There's this little phrase that's used in verse eight and I just found it so encouraging this week as I studied it.
This little phrase was, there were many lights in the room. There were many lights in the room.
Now I think that every word is put in purpose for the word of God. I think that God ordained every single word.
And I think that as Luke is writing here, he has this ability to paint a picture for us to understand what is going on. Now the light in scripture can be referred to the word of the Lord.
It can be referred to us as individuals, as believers, we are lights in this world.
But I want us to understand this simple phrase as the lights that filled this room so that they could visibly see what was going was also referring to the light that was in their hearts as a picture of truth shining in this dark room.
These were little lights that were coming together to make one great bright light.
These were little lights of little believers that were coming together and in and of themselves, they would be effective for a little bit. But as they came together and as these little lights gathered together in this room, all of a sudden their little light became one massive bright light.
And then Paul was telling them to, you're gonna leave from this place and you're gonna be spreading your light everywhere you go. And this is a picture for us to say, what are we doing with the light that God has given us? There are lighthouses all across the world and I love lighthouses.
I love the thoughts of lighthouses and the church should be that same lighthouse that is projecting light and beams of truth all across the fog of this land.
As we go out, as we step into our world, as we step into the places that God has put us, are we intentionally saying, God, how can my light shine today in my darkness?
How can my light shine today in the people that are hurting, the people that are struggling, the people that are going through a difficult time?
Just yesterday, I was at a festival and I was talking to a lady that's got an addictions counseling ministry in Alexander County and was sharing some things with her and she said, there are so many people that I
come in contact with every single day that are struggling and need help and need encouragement and need just the word of God in their life. And it was so encouraging to me because that is what we're called to do.
We're called to go out in this world and take the sermons, take the songs that we have, take the scripture that we've been given and go out and be a reminder of the light in this dark world.
This world is dark and this world is depressing at times, but as a sailor looks for that lighthouse as he's coming in on his ship and he knows that when he sees that lighthouse, I'm getting close to home.
I'm getting close to reuniting with my family. I'm getting close to being back with the people that I love. It's an encouragement to him to know my journey on this boat has not been for nothing.
And the same thing is for us as we encourage other lights that are around us and we encourage the word around us and encourages us that this is not our home.
We have a heaven one day that we're going to and we now need to encourage others to be bringing them into the light of what we have been given. You see, oftentimes we gather on a Sunday because it's habit, right? Grandma and grandpa were here. Great grandma and grandpa were here.
They told us to come to church. My mom and dad are first generation Christians. They were believers. And so I'm a second generation. And so I was born on a Thursday.
I've told you this before. I was born on a Thursday. And on Sunday morning, that next Sunday, there's a picture of me in my car seat on a bus. My mom's driving the bus.
My dad is going around on this bus, picking up kids all across the community. I was three or four days old sitting in my car seat on a bus. So from the very moment of my existence, really,
until now, every Sunday I've been in church, every Wednesday I've been in church, on Sunday night we've been in church, the church has been part of my life and it's very easy for church to be routine.
It's very easy for life just to be, okay, it's Sunday, it's time to go to church. But is it really something that I'm coming and expecting to receive something from the Lord or is it that I have just continued to be coming because this is what I'm supposed to do?
I'm simply just going to come to sit in the pew and figure out what God has for me or am I saying, Lord, give me something this week that I'm going to be able to go out and encourage those that are around me.
I believe that very specifically, God has given us his word to impact people all across this world. And are we coming expecting God to do that?
Or are we coming just expecting God just to do the same old, same old and never be changed as we leave the pews? The third thing we looked at is we look at this young man named Eutychus. Now Eutychus is one of my favorite scriptures,
one of my favorite stories. And so sort of going to transition the message to some of our younger people that are here this morning. And if you're not young, you can still apply this to yourself.
Eutychus: A Warning for Believers
But Eutychus is, I believe, every believer who's ever grown tired and weary in the church. This is every believer who's grown distracted. This is every believer who has grown spiritually drowsy.
And this story that we look at here of Eutychus is a tragic story. It's a young man.
I believe it's probably one of the teenagers in the church that just sort of got drenched in grace but didn't fully understand everything and just sort of fell and didn't understand what was going on. And so Eutychus, as we look at his life, we see three specific things.
And I've put these in phrases that maybe help us understand them as we go through it. The first one is Eutychus was sitting in the right place, but he slipped the wrong way. Eutychus was in the right place. He knew that his job was to be where the preaching was at.
But as the preaching was going on, he slipped and fell the wrong way. He was in the church, but he was positioned dangerously in the wrong place.
And as he was looking at his life, as he was going through this, it says that he was a certain young man who sat on a window. He was close enough to hear what was going on. He was there sitting, understanding, Paul, I understand you're preaching to me.
I understand you're giving me the word, but I'm so close to the edge that I may fall off the edge.
And all of a sudden, as we look at Eutychus' life, we can begin to look at our lives and we can say, where are we at? Are we close enough to hear, but yet are we hanging around the things that God says is not good for us, is not healthy for us?
And are we on the edge spiritually? A good way to put this is, are we half in and half out? Eutychus was on the edge of the windowsill, hearing the word of God, but yet so close to where he could fall off the other way. Oftentimes in our life, we like to balance life.
We like to balance what's going on. We want to understand that we are going to be spiritually at church on Sunday, but Monday through Saturday, we're going to be as far away from church as possible. It's like a child that's running around and playing around a pool, and the mom has said,
hey, young Hudson, don't run around the pool because you could fall in.
Now, while he's on the concrete and he's running, he is completely safe and fine, but it's the moment he takes that one wrong step close enough to the edge to where he falls in, and danger can occur.
There's a story that my wife brings up often. We were swimming at a church member's house one day, and she has sort of a larger pool that is the shallow end, and then it goes sort of narrow for the deeper end.
And so we had moved some of the furniture around, and we're sitting there, and we were moving it back as we were leaving, and as I'm walking in the narrower end, I forgot that the pool opened up into the deep end.
And so I'm pulling this chair back to where it needs to be, and I take the step like I'm stepping on concrete, and there was no concrete there. There was water there.
And I stepped, and luckily, I'm thankful I don't have any video cameras. I'm thankful that no one else was there because when I stepped and went in that water, I split my swim trunks in half
because this foot didn't leave the concrete. And so my body went down, and Allison's dying laughing.
I mean, I think she may have messed herself as she was laughing so hard because I'm sitting there, one foot still on the concrete, one foot all the way in, and it just reminded me as I was preaching this, how often is that situation in our life?
We're one foot in church, and we're trying to do what God wants us to do, but the other foot is so far into the world and so far into what our own selfish desires are that we're split so much that we're no good in any one of those two areas.
We're not good in any earthly means because we're trying to uphold these spiritual needs, and we're so focused on our own personal appearance and what God has for us here that we're no good here in our own backyard
for what God wants us to do. Are we sitting on the edge of our face? Are we close enough to look and say, I want to be apart, but I'm going to keep my distance? Are we saying, God, I don't care what people think. I don't care the persecution that's going to happen. I'm going to be all in.
I'm going to be where God wants me to be.
I'm going to not care about the things of the world. I'm going to care about the things that God wants us to do. So we see he was at the right place and he slipped the wrong way. We see the second thing here is he fell asleep when he should have stayed awake.
Now this young man named Eutychus, I mean, you can imagine as Paul was waxing eloquently for multiple hours, we don't know how long, but we know that they assembled on the first day of the week, which would have
been that morning. They would have came together and broke bread and he decided that, hey, I'm going to preach until midnight.
And so very well, this could have been a 12 hour, 13 hour service that Paul was just preaching and telling them about what they should do and how they should live their life. And I believe that this young man named Eutychus here was complacent in the presence of truth.
And it led him to the spiritual collapse that he was going on in his life. Paul's preaching was there and Eutychus was not alert to what was going on. The problem was not the preaching.
The problem was Eutychus not been alert of what God was trying to tell him and what God was trying to lead him in. And I believe many of times this is us where we fall asleep spiritually,
maybe not from rebellion, but from just dullness and monotonous of knowing we're going to come and we're going to sing a couple of songs and we're going to preach and then we're going to go home.
But how often is it that we live in the message and we live in the scripture and we take this scripture and we say, God, I'm going to read it every day this week and I want you to
reinvigorate what has been said in my life so that I'm not drifting away as I've preached so often about the slow drift that can happen as we know that we're in the right place.
But as the waves of the world come in, we drift from the place where we knew and now we're three miles downstream and we're not where we're supposed to be. This is a young man named Eutychus.
He's where he's supposed to be but now he's drifted from the dullness and the passiveness that's going on. I love fires.
You could say I'm a pyromaniac. You could say that. As a kid, anything I could burn, I would burn.
Anytime we would get a chance to burn things, I would.
I guess I have passed this trade on to my oldest son because oftentimes he will find things and he will burn them and I'm like, what are you doing?
And I just remember this is me as a kid and he's emulating the things of the father and I can remember very vividly, Allie had sent me a picture one day and at the Parsons where we lived at our old church for a couple of years,
she sent me a picture of a tulip paper roll that was rolling down the hill that was on fire.
And he had caught this tulip paper roll outside on fire and he couldn't figure out how to get it not on fire anymore so he thought, well, maybe if I roll it down a hill, it'll stop being on fire.
And so there's this tulip paper roll rolling down this massive hill on fire. Oftentimes this is our life, right?
We start a fire, fire starts in our life and the fire doesn't often go out because of the fire being drenched or the fire being drowned out by water.
If you start a fire at night and you've got a wood stove at your house, the fire goes out because you neglected that fire overnight.
And you've got to get up the next morning and you've got to take your time and you've got to restart that fire or take a candle that's left over and put more wood on it and begin to bring that fire back to life because it had been neglected overnight.
Oftentimes the Lord's fire in our life stops happening because we stop stirring the coals of the spiritual heart inside of us and our hearts begin to grow cold.
And we need to ask ourselves, are we satisfied with where we're at or do our hearts and lives need to be restirred and brought back to life so that God's word will now penetrate our hearts and we will be brought back into this spiritual fire that we once had?
When's the last time you were truly moved by the word of God?
The word of God was preached, the word of God was brought through worship and you were moved to a way where you just had to put your hand up and you just had to say glory to God. This is so amazing. I'm thankful for what God has done in my life.
There's a song, as I said it last week, that I've been listening to almost every day.
Every time the kids are in the car, I turn on the song that has just been so overwhelming, the all-sufficient merit of God and how God works in our life and it's not because of what I've done
but because the Lord has done and there'll be times where I'll be driving on the road and I literally have to pull over the car because I'm just overwhelmed by the emotion and the glory of God. Now, I'm thankful my Tesla drives but I don't have to worry about driving.
They'll just drive it so I'm crying and I'm just worshiping the Lord because of how great it is but when's the last time that was in our life?
Our life was so moved and so overwhelmed by the word of God, the worship of God that we just had to step aside and say, God, I want you to take over in this moment. So we see that he was in the right place, slipped the wrong way.
We see that he fell asleep and he should have stayed awake and we see the last thing here.
Grace and Restoration
Eutychus fell and he fell hard but grace caught him.
I think it's a reminder to us that even when we fall, God has the power to restore. God has the power to step into our lives to step into our circumstances and we see that God can redeem things that we see are unredeemable. Paul here went down,
says that he fell on him and embraced him and brought him back to life, brought him back into the grace of God. Paul embraced the heart of Christ here.
He stooped down from heaven, he stooped down from the world that he created and stepped into our lives and brought us salvation.
And Paul in that same way is stepping down from his sermon here in the middle of the night and he didn't step down and he didn't rebuke him. I think it's awesome to look at it. He looks at him and he says this statement,
his life is in him. A picture of resurrection power, both physical and spiritual,
that's at work through grace because grace is so much more powerful than what we can ever imagine. You know, see, if this was me and my son would have fallen out the window, even if he had fallen down, I would have went out there and I would have rebuked him, right?
My son just lost a couple of weeks ago. He's jumping up on the stage and he's doing things that wouldn't be appropriate in church and so we took him out and we rebuked him and we disciplined him. Paul, we don't see Paul doing that.
Paul says that he goes down and he sees him and he with mercy restores him.
It's almost like a shepherd who sees a fallen lamb or a goat that got out or a cow that has gotten out of the pasture.
The farmer doesn't come over and kill the cow immediately because he got out of the pasture.
No, the cow, the father, the shepherd understands that he's just doing what he knows to do and there's an opening in the gate and so he leaves and so I've got to lovingly bring him back into the fold.
I've got to lovingly bring him back where he needs to be and oftentimes this is what we need to do. Grace picks us up, not with rebuke, but with mercy and he says, I want to bring you back into the fellowship of the saints.
I want to bring you back into the fold and say there's encouragement and there's hope and there's healing and we must be that same person and oftentimes it's us that gets to be that Paul that reaches down and says, I know you messed up.
I know you did something that you shouldn't have done but oh, I'm thankful that grace has come along many times in my life.
I'm thankful that I've messed up and God saw fit to forgive me of my wrongdoing and I want to show you how you can live in that grace. I want to show you how you can live in that mercy and this is what Paul did.
He steps down and he stoops down and he begins to preach this loving, compassion, mercy that oftentimes we have forgotten that still works.
It worked in the moment of salvation and we were thankful for when it worked in salvation but we forgot that forgiveness still happens.
Our 10th and 15th and 100th time of sinning and forgiveness is still there and mercy is still there and we get to understand this grace and mercy that happens all throughout our lives and we get to show that to other people.
What a blessing that is and I didn't put this in my notes or even my sermon but Paul after this gets up and preaches for another six or eight hours until the sun comes back up.
Another just, I'm going to keep preaching, I'm going to keep doing what God has called me to do and I believe this is the power of what preaching can do, a community, a revival that breaks out in Toraz because Paul spends this time loving on these people and preaching to them.
It's a reminder to us if we want revival to break out in us, we've got to be serious about the word of God. We've got to be serious about the worship of God and about what he has done in our lives.
As Natalie comes and plays as we close out our sermon this morning, I want us to understand that this passage ends with great comfort.
Verse 12 of this passage ends by saying, they brought the boy home, he was alive, and there was great comfort in that house. I want us to understand the gospel encouragement does this very thing.
Reviving Joy Through Grace
It restores life, it revives the hearts, and it renews our joy that we often have lost.
The joy that we once had as a young person, the joy that we once had as God worked in our lives that oftentimes is lost and the Bible says that it can be brought back.
Whether you're Paul this morning, the one that's going to be the encourager to the ones who have been hurt, whether you're Eutychus this morning who was in the right place at the wrong time and he fell and needed that encouragement, we get to see the grace of God work in our community.
If we'll just begin to say, I want to be the person that floods the flame of the fire. I want to get behind and I want to be the person that's waving the flag of the fan of the flame and I want to make the fire bigger.
I want to make it better. I want it to grow bigger and better than it's ever been. Or we can look back and say, well, that fire's just too much.
I don't know if that fire should be so big. If I were doing it, that fire would be a little bit smaller. It would have been in a different place. Or we can just get behind the fire and we can say, God bless it. God work in it.
God work in how it's going to be done. I want to encourage the revival.
I want to encourage what was once lifeless to be brought to life. I want to encourage the roots that run deep of grace to be brought back to life and revitalized in our lives.
This is what we see in this moment where revival breaks out in Macedonia and revival breaks out in Torres because the grace of God was displayed in a way that the world looked and said,
how can that person still serve the Lord? How can that person be brought into a good fellowship with believers?
And if that's what grace looks like, I want to be a part of it. And church, that's what we have to get back to of this grace of the Lord that begins to run deeper than we can ever imagine. So three final things.
Are we going to be like Paul this morning? Are we going to strengthen and encourage other people?
Are we going to be like the church here that gathers around the word and says, we want to be the little lights.
We want to be the individual lights that go out into this world, in this dark and dying world, and we want to be the little lights that go out and share the gospel. Or are we going to be like Eutychus that was once fallen but was raised back in grace?
And maybe we've lived in our sin a little too long and we now need to be raised back into that grace and raised back into that forgiveness and be brought back into this community of believers that God has called us to be.
Whatever it may be this morning, each of us may be different. You respond as you see fit as we close the service in prayer. Lord, we love you. We thank you. We thank you for your greatness and your goodness. The mercy that you've sown us.
Lord, you are so good to us so often. We are so undeserving of this grace. But yet, as Paul showed, he didn't rebuke him. He just simply loved him,
embraced him, and brought him back into the fold. Lord, often that needs to be us. We're the ones that have followed and we need to be brought back into the fold.
Closing Prayer and Reflection
And I pray that you'd help us. Be vigilant. Be aware of the darkness around us and how we can use our lives to bring people back into the grace of God. We love you. In your name we pray. Amen.
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