This Is Gonna Be Fun |08.04.24| Actions Speak Louder! pt.8
Danny Moore
well good morning. As I said, my name is Danny Moore and I am not one of the pastors here. You’ve heard twice about our two pastors. I am not one of the pastors here, but I am a part of the staff and I have the special privilege of bringing the word to you today. This is gonna be fun.(…) All right, so we’ve actually developed a new motto here at the church among the staff. We didn’t sit down in a meeting and decide this is gonna be our motto. We didn’t vote on it, nothing like that. But as I’ve been watching us and listening to us as a team talk to one another over the past month or a little bit more, I’ve found this phrase popping up over and over again and in fact, I’ve already said it to you twice.
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This is gonna be fun.(…) That’s the motto. This is gonna be fun. And we say that not because work is play or we’re not taking our work seriously, it’s actually quite the opposite. We are looking at our tasks, we’re looking at our job, and we’re looking at our goal of being transformed by Jesus together for others.(…) And we’re looking at each other and we’re like, that’s challenging.
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And we look at each other and we say, this is gonna be fun because it’s in the challenging things that we grow.
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It’s looking at the difficult road ahead and knowing that beyond that difficult road lies something bigger and greater than if you just stood right where you were.(…) So the achievement of that, this is going to be fun. Have you ever looked at someone and said, we’re gonna laugh about this later?
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It’s kinda like that but without the guilt, okay? So this is gonna be fun.
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And I hope that today is, I know that today is gonna be a little challenging because as I read this scripture and as I was praying over the scripture and as I was preparing for this, I was thinking of so many things,
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so many things that are gonna be challenging,
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but it’s gonna be fun
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because this is where God is taking us as a church. This is where God is pushing us as a community to go beyond the comfort of what’s right around us and to go out and reach for more by the grace of God. So if you wanna join me in that today, I invite you to open up your Bible to Acts chapter six. If you wanna use the Bible that’s under the seat in front of you, it’s gonna be found on page 94.(…) We’re gonna look at this a little bit.(…) Now, this is a section that often gets overlooked or at least not thought about a whole lot. Last week, we heard about Ananias and Sapphira who tried to steal glory, who tried to even steal money from God and from the church by saying, yeah, this is everything, but it wasn’t. And remember what happened? They died.(…) And that’s exciting, right? That’s an exciting story. Now, next week, spoiler alert, and also a little teaser for you, next week in our Bible story, someone’s gonna die. And that’s exciting. We remember the stories where people die. This story, nobody dies, okay? So sorry to make it less exciting for you right off the bat, but this church, this section of scripture is so very, very, very important for us to work as a church. So it might not be exciting, but it is incredibly important.(…) Okay, so let’s dig in.
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This is gonna be fun.
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Now, during those days when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.(…) And the 12 called together the whole community of the disciples and said, it is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables. Therefore, friends, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, while we for our part will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word. What they said pleased the whole community and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit together with Philip, Procarus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas, a proselyte of Antioch.(…) They had these men stand before the apostles who prayed and laid their hands on them. The word of God continued to spread, the number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.(…) This is the word of the Lord.(…) Thanks be to God, amen.(…) All right, so we see right off the bat that there’s a little bit of attention going on, right?
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We can see there’s this whole thing between the Hebraic Jews and the Hellenist Jews. And I’m assuming that there’s honestly quite a few in this room who have no idea what these terms really mean.(…) Well, I’m so glad, I’m so glad that you asked because you may not know this about me, but I’m a huge nerd and I love history. And so I’m gonna speed you through about a thousand years of Jewish history. And it’s okay, because I got pictures, okay? It’s gonna be easy to follow along. So the Jews, you may remember, they left Egypt and headed towards Mount Sinai, right? The mountain of God.
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So we don’t know exactly where that was, but it was somewhere on the Sinai Peninsula. That helps us narrow it down. But they move there, but they’re not gonna stay there because their goal is to get to the promised land, right? So they take a very indirect path for 40 years and they find their way to the promised land and then they leave the conquering of the Holy Land and they take it unto themselves and they build their own nation there as God led them and called them to do, okay? So they’re dwelling in this place for quite a long time. Lots of judges, lots of rulers, but no real leadership until a king comes up, king Saul unites Israel and then David is anointed and takes over for Saul, right? And then David’s son Solomon takes over and he falls away. And he goes, he falls away so far that God calls them to repentance, but they don’t all agree. So what happens is that they ended up splitting. You have the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom, all right? And this is where the Bible gets really, really confusing, but we’re not gonna get into the details. We’re just doing an overview. So you have the Northern Kingdom called Israel, the Southern Kingdom called Judah, and they don’t hang out with each other except for once a year at the Jerusalem 500.(…) I’m just kidding, that doesn’t happen. But they pretty much keep to themselves and they have some civil wars in between. Mostly they just stick to the North and they stick to the South. They have their separate ways. Well, the North has horrible, horrible leadership, okay? Both of the bad kings you hear about are from the North. So God sends in the Assyrians from the North to come down and wipe out Israel, take them away into captivity.
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And then, so now Jews are going from the Northern Kingdom up towards Nineveh and the Assyrian nation up towards the North there, kind of getting sent back and forth. This is when the Samaritans come into being because they’re a mixed race of the Jews and the Assyrians.(…) Yada, yada, yada. Moving on.
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Babylon ends up conquering Assyria because Assyria is also horrible. So they get wiped out. So no, Babylon, if you’re a Jew, you’re living anywhere from Nineveh to Babylon to the Northern part of Jerusalem, okay? Moving on. The Southern Kingdom also loses its way. God says, enough, we’re done. Babylon comes in, takes over the Southern Kingdom. So all these arrows are where Jews might be traveling as far as Susa up towards Nineveh, which actually isn’t there anymore because it gets blown up. But now they’re trying to go around these different places.
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And what actually happens is that people even try to run away to Egypt as well from Babylon. So they could be over in Egypt. Next comes, Babylon is overthrown by the Persians, right? So this is a back of the Persian Kingdom. If you’re a Jew, you could be living anywhere in this place because you’ve been taken captive to wherever they want you to go.(…) But eventually they’re allowed to return back to Jerusalem if they want to, they start to rebuild the temple, they start to rebuild the place, and then along comes a guy named Alexander the Great. You might’ve heard of him. He was pretty great.
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He also built a very great kingdom, all right? And he went all the way from Greece, Macedonia,(…) all the way to India, even into Egypt, up north towards the Caspian Sea, and he did not care where you lived, what God you worshiped. He only wanted his taxes paid. So if you paid taxes, you could live anywhere in there. So Jews took advantage of that opportunity and they went all over the place. And as we know, eventually the Romans came in and conquered Alexander the Great’s empire, and this is a map of the Roman Empire by the birth of Jesus. And you see all those dots on there, those are the cities we’ve been talking about. You got Memphis, Jerusalem, Susa, Babylon, and even as far as Athens in Greece, okay? So there’s briefly 1,000 years of people migrating all over the place, living wherever. Now, we talked about it a few weeks ago when people gathered back in Jerusalem for the Feast of Pentecost, right? The Bible tells us they came from all over, from Ephesus and Antioch and Syria, Arabia, from Alexandria. They came from all over the known world at that time into one place, the Spirit of God moved mightily in the apostles. They preached and people were heard the truth and were converted to Christianity.(…) The church began.
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But what happened because they’ve been spending hundreds of years living under a largely Greek and then a Roman culture. People have lived away from Jerusalem. They’ve begun to live in a Greek or Roman style
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and they’re called the Hellenists, okay? So you have the Hebrews who have stayed tight in Jerusalem, keeping to all the ways of the Hebrews and they have the people from pretty much everywhere else who have adapted to the culture of that way while still holding true to Yahweh and the Torah. But they’re called the Hellenists. So everybody has come into this brand new church(…) with their own set of baggage,(…) with their own habits, their own preferences, their own way of life and they’re trying to figure out this new thing called the church,
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all right?
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Was that fun? That was fun, all right. So we’re gonna move on now. Now really a lot of that is gonna come into play next week when someone dies. So remember that, that all plays into why that person dies. You’re welcome, Drew. I just did a ton of legwork for him.(…) You all have a week to reflect on that and let it soak in and then you’ll really understand what happens next week. But for now we’re gonna move on, okay?(…) You say yes please, move on. Okay, here we go.
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So,(…) I don’t even know where I’m in my notes. Where’d I go? There, all right.
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So the Jews are gathered in Jerusalem. The church has started, they’re still meeting in the temple but they’re starting a new thing called the church. And we have a habit of looking back at this and thinking, oh that church at the beginning it was perfect. It was absolutely perfect, right? Because we hear stories about people selling what they have and giving it and sharing everything. But you know what, here’s the truth.(…) The church was not perfect. You know why?(…) Because there were people in it.
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And there’s only one thing that people can do perfectly.(…) And that’s be imperfect.
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We can make mistakes like no one else because we’re people. And even the people in biblical times were still just people. So we see here it says, now during those days when the disciples were increasing in number,(…) the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their riddles were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.
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So we see that what’s been happening is that people’s preferences, their blind spots are taking place. Or at least it’s perceived that way. We don’t know for sure that it is happening that way but people feel like that’s happening, okay? So everybody always brings in their own baggage and their own preferences into the mix in every church all over the world because we’re people.
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And there’s only one thing people can do perfectly and that’s be imperfect.(…) And it’s still the case today. But so we move on.
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As it is written, there is no one who is righteous, not even one. Paul reminds the church in Rome of this as well. And we remember this ourselves, that it’s not our works that save us, it’s the grace of God because if it was up to us, we would fall short every single time, right? And it’s still true. But they still take the cry up to the apostles and the apostles. The 12 all called together the whole community of the disciples and said, it’s not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.
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Therefore friends, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task. Great grammar there, Paul, Peter. And while we for our part will devote ourselves to prayer and to the serving of the word. All right, so the disciples, it sounds kind of harsh, but they’re not saying it’s not important. They’re saying it’s not important for us right now. This is our job, this is our calling to pray and to preach. That’s the role of a pastor, right?(…) They say, but this is important. So let’s get together as the church and church rise up among you leaders who can make this happen because it’s not that it’s not important. It’s that it’s not the apostles job. Jesus told them to pray and to preach and to baptize. And so the job is handed down, not down, but over really to someone else to rise up and make it happen. It’s a community responsibility. The church is a community. The church isn’t a building. It wasn’t the temple back then. It’s not this building right now. The church is you and you and you and you and me.
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We are the church. It’s the responsibility of the church to serve,(…) right? To reach out and serve.
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And so people are raised up and they are prayed over and responsibility is given. And this is awesome.
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Next one. What they said pleased the whole community. Wow,
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that’d be nice.
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One decision that pleases the whole community. Doc, God, you know God was at work. You know God was at work. And they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit together with Philip, Procarus, Nicanor, Timon, not Pumba, but Timon, Permanus, and Nicholas, the proselyte of Antioch. This word proselyte, when I read that, I was like, dang, that sounds cool. You know what a proselyte is? I looked it up. It’s someone who changed their mind is a proselyte. So when you have been living one way of life and you have been convinced that there is a better way of life and you turn and do that way of life, that’s a proselyte. So every person in this room is a proselyte. We were living one way. Maybe when we were young, maybe when we were older, it doesn’t matter. You’re living for yourself and you said, I’m gonna live for Jesus, right? I’m gonna trust in Jesus. So everybody in this room is a proselyte. Congratulations, you now have a cool new title, the proselyte. They had these men stand before the apostles who prayed and laid their hands on them. This is a common way of,
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it’s very important if you’re gonna be a part of the church to be in prayer, right, to be dedicated to prayer. And we’re actually, it’s incredible timing that we’re starting our 21 days of prayer right now because nothing ever happens in the church. If we look through the whole book of Acts, nothing ever happens without prayer.(…) So if we wanna be the church, if we wanna be stepping up as the church, we ought to be in prayer
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because prayer is seeking God, not ourselves.
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I got a long to-do list of 500 things that I ought to be getting done today. And that’s focusing on me and my accomplishments. But taking time to stop and pray, Martin Luther had a great quote. I was like, I have so many things today, so many things to do today, I must spend the first two hours in prayer
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because it’s in praying and turning ourselves over to Christ that we find true fulfillment, true direction, and true joy.
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But the apostles prayed over them and encouraged them. And then we see this, the word of God continued to spread. The number of disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.
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If the church wants to grow,
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then the church needs to rise up in action.
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The more the church draws into itself and closes off the outside,
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the church doesn’t go anywhere, right? But when the church rises up and goes out, sets a mind to serve and to be active, you know what happens? Even the opposition, the priests, the Jewish priests,
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became obedient to the faith. When the church gets out, gets active, goes beyond the walls and loves and serves their neighbor, people are like, oh wow, they’re doing something.
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They have something, I want that something. And then you can start conversations.
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Then you can start to grow and be the church.
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So this is where it gets fun.
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Actions speak louder than words.
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It was a marvelous thing that as we were,
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this was set on the calendar two months ago, three months ago, without any awareness of what would actually be happening today.(…) We have our 21 Days of Prayer starting out. We’ve also have a leadership team at this church. We have members of this church who have said, yes, Lord, I am going to step up and dedicate myself to prayer and reflection with 11 other people to kind of be the guiding course for New Life Lutheran Church in Sterling. We have 12 members, and actually right now we only have 11 members, there’s one space open. We are praying and hoping for one person
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to feel the call of God in their heart, to step up and say, I want to be a part of something bigger. I want to be a part of this church
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impacting this community here and abroad. And we’re gonna look at kind of the broad things that this church is doing. But if you’re feeling that tug on your heart, I encourage you don’t wait any longer.(…) You need to right after the service is done, maybe even before, I don’t know, but come talk to Eric or come talk to Drew and say, hey, I’m interested in that. I want to pray more about that. I want to look into that more because it’s only when the church steps up
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that God meets us on the way,(…) right? There’s a great song from my childhood, a band called Petra. Anybody heard Petra before? We got a few, yeah, all right. We got a few rockers in the room. Okay, great. So they had a line from a song called Beyond Belief. They say, “The waters never part until your feet get wet.”
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The waters never part until our feet get wet. God meets us on the road. God does not call you to somewhere that he is not already.
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He’s not gonna have you go somewhere where he isn’t. He’s not gonna leave you alone. If he’s calling to you, he’s calling you to do something, he’s there waiting for you. You don’t need to be afraid.
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He’s going to be there waiting for you. He’s there right now.
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So we see believers stepping up to be the church, to be the hands and feet of Christ.
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We see that when people step out in faith, the church grows and draws in more people and it even draws in people who are hostile to the church. The priests became obedient to the faith. Now, what’s really wonderful,(…) we also have,
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I’m gonna skip that for now. Oop, I went too far.
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Okay,(…) I have more pictures. I have more maps, because I love maps, I really do. I wanted to make this bigger, but then you wouldn’t be able to read it. So this is as big as I got it. But when this church began, New Life Lutheran Church, that is, not the church, of course, but when this congregation got together,
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it was several families who saw the course of their churches that they had grown up in, starting to step away from biblical truth.
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And they said, “We’re not gonna go the way of comfort. “We’re not gonna go the way that’s easy. “We’re not gonna give into the pressure of society. “We’re going to stand by Jesus in the Bible.”(…) And so they left comfort.
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And they came together and they formed New Life Lutheran Church.
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And they met in a small building over there while they built this beautiful building here. And I bet if you asked, every single one of those members who were part of the founding, they would tell you two things. One, it was really hard. Two, it was really fun.
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It was both.
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And so we started out as one building in Sterling(…) with just families mostly from Sterling. And now today, here’s a map of people who regularly attend New Life, who are a part of the ministries here. All those dots are somewhere else. As high as Forston, out to Amboy,
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Tampico, Prophets Town, Rock Falls, Dixon, Polo. We got people that God is calling into an active life with him through New Life. It’s not the New Life is great, it’s that God is great. And God is doing great things through people who are stepping up into his calling. And that’s not all. Here’s a map of the United States. We’re the Blue Dot right up there by Lake Michigan.
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We’ve had a youth pastor come from Erie.
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And he was here for a while and then he was called away to love and serve.(…) We had a pastor who was from Minnesota who God called here. God has been working this thing for years. He doesn’t put anybody anywhere by mistake. We’ve had people who go to Arizona and to Florida for the summer or for the winter and then they come back.
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We got this weird guy from Kansas who keeps dropping ink on his arms. And he’s helping to lead a lot of things. He’s a great guy. We got this nut job from the north of Idaho, that’s me, growing up in the pine trees and the lakes. And God called me here. And the only way God was getting me to grow up was to bring me out here and isolate me because I wasn’t gonna grow up back there. But he made me grow up here and this church helped me find who God created me to be. We’ve got people from all over. Tennessee, we’ve done mission trips to Pennsylvania, to North Dakota, down in Texas. God has been active through New Life. The church is growing. The church is spreading. In fact, we’re growing on a global scale. We’ve got missionaries in Brazil. We had a foreign exchange student come from Brazil, stay here and loved New Life so much he still watches online back home. We’ve had missionaries in Germany. We’ve had missionaries in Romania. We’ve got a missionary in Vietnam. The word of God is spreading because people are stepping up and saying, “Yes, Lord, I wanna be a part “of what you’re doing.”
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Our actions speak louder than our words.
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The person across from you will never hear(…) that you love them until they see that you care.
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Does that make sense?
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You can say every Bible verse in the world. You can throw every correction and condemnation in the matter that you want to, but they’re never gonna believe you love them.
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They’re never gonna accept that God loves them until they see that you care about them.(…) Your actions are louder than your words. It is the responsibility of the whole church
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to come together and show the love of Christ through simple, everyday acts of love.
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Right now, there’s somebody who might just be only three people away from you whose heart is broken today.
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And I don’t know why. I don’t know what it is, but I guarantee you, in your role right now, there’s someone(…) whose heart is broken,
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who desperately said I wasn’t gonna cry.(…) Who desperately needs to know that they are loved
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and that they’re important and that they’re beautiful, just the way God made them.
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And their emotional wellbeing is not your responsibility, but it is your opportunity
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to be the hands and feet of Jesus right now.(…) Here’s a really fascinating thing that happened to me maybe just a year ago. I had three conversations, I think, in one week.
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Someone came to me and said, this church doesn’t care about old people.
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This church doesn’t care about old people. Someone else came to me and said, this church doesn’t care about young people.
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Someone else came to me and said, there’s nothing in this church for the people in the middle.
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I said, holy cow, apparently this church doesn’t care about anybody.
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And I know that’s not true. I absolutely know that’s not true.
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Now, do people get forgotten?(…) Yeah.
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We get busy in ourselves and in our things and in our clicks.
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We forget the person next to us. Forget the person just one row away.
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I know that this church community loves people.(…) I know that this church community loves God.
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But if the people are gonna know that,
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beyond these doors,
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church, we gotta step up.
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Even inside these doors, people are struggling to know it. And if we can’t get it right inside these doors, how are we gonna get it right outside these doors?
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Now, I didn’t set out for this sermon to be a slap on the wrist or a chastisement or you’re terrible people. You’re not terrible people. You are wonderful people.(…) I’ve gotten to talk with just about everybody in this room and you’re wonderful people. You’re good, godly people. And you want good things for other people.
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But wanting it and wishing it
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isn’t the same as doing it.
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So you might be asking yourself, how can I do it?
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How can I do it? Well, it’s very first important to remember that this isn’t an issue of salvation.
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You are saved by the blood of Jesus alone.
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If you put your hope in Jesus, you are saved.
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All right, so it’s not an issue of salvation. But this is an opportunity for the church to be the church.(…) Church to rise up because when the church steps out, its boundaries increase. More people find out that they are loved by God, that they are called to forgiveness.
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And they bring in their baggage and we serve new people and we do new things and we reach out further and further. So that’s the calling of the church today.
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That is the very uncomfortable calling of the church is that we got more work to do still.
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And if God is putting in your heart right now something to do, you might be asking yourself, I don’t know what to do. Great, I’m so glad you asked that question. Because today we have Discover New Life.(…) If you go out these doors, hang a right, go to the very bright blue room, you’re gonna get to talk with Pastor Eric, Pastor Drew,(…) and they have a way to help you discover what God is calling you to do, whether it’s here in this building or out somewhere else in another congregation.
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This has got to work. All of this happening on the same day.(…) Isn’t that crazy?
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It was not planned by us.
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But if you’re interested in that,(…) I really want you to take some time and think about that and keep this in mind. I don’t care what your ability is. The very best ability is availability.
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Being willing to say, here I am Lord,
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send me.
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Are you ready?
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This is gonna be fun.
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Amen.