What In The World Am I Here For? |07.21.24| Actions Speak Louder! pt.6
Acts 4:23-31
Pastor Erik Anderson
We’re continuing our series, “Actions Speak Louder than Words.” We’re walking through Acts, the book of Acts, this summer, seeing how the Holy Spirit was at work. Last week, Pastor Drew preached about Peter and John in front of the Sanhedrin, and we’re picking up where that story left off. Beginning in verse 23, this is what we read.(…) “After they were released, they went to their families and friends and reported what the chief priest and the elders had said to them. When they heard it, they raised their voices together to God and said, “Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth, the sea and everything in them, it is you who said by the Holy Spirit through our ancestor David, your servant, why did the Gentiles rage and the peoples imagine vain things? The kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers have gathered together against the Lord and against his Messiah. For in this city, in fact, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your Holy Servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predustined to take place. And now, Lord, look at their threats. Grant to your servants to speak the word with boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your Holy Servant Jesus. When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
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Well, when I was a preteen, you know, 11, 12 years old, I had an experience that many of you probably had as well. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and my legs would hurt, like my shins would hurt. Sometimes my calves, sometimes up on my glutes and my hamstrings, but I would have pain in my legs in the morning. Sometimes when I woke up and, you know, being 11 or 12 impressionable, you don’t really know what’s going on with your body all the time. And I remember worrying because it would happen a couple of days in a row and then it would go away, then it would come back and I’d be like, do I have cancer? I was like, am I dying? Like I would have this like concern because I didn’t know what was going on my body. Finally, I asked my mom, mom, what’s I’m waking up and I have, I hurt. My legs are hurting. And she goes, oh, those are growing pains. And of course, I’d heard of growing pains, but I didn’t realize that that was actually something you experienced. That as your body grew in puberty and you would grow overnight, you might actually have some skeletal or muscle pain, some discomfort going on. And that’s what it was. As you grow, your muscles are contracting and your bones are growing and it can hurt when that happens. And this tells us something about our lives. In fact, it’s almost a universal law that good things come from discomfort. That when something hurts or something is uncomfortable, oftentimes there’s something good on the other end of that. Another example of this when it comes to our bodies is strength training. And exercise. We know that when we work our bodies hard, it actually hurts our bodies, but that makes them stronger, makes them more able.(…) When you’re strength training and you’re lifting weights, you want to stretch your muscles as far as they will go and you want to push them as hard as they can all the way up until and before injury. You don’t want to injure yourself, but you want to get your muscles to that very last part, right? Right before you get hurt and that’s called positive failure. Actually, failing a rep, failing a lift is called positive failure. And it’s good for our bodies to experience this discomfort. There are muscles actually tear and then reform.
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But to get outside of our bodies a little bit, even in our relationships, discomfort oftentimes brings good things.(…) And marriage is a great example of this. If you are married or have been married or you’re thinking about marriage, this is the truth that we all experience. That good marriages have some tension and discomfort.(…) Good marriages are marriages where the spouses can argue and can disagree and can come to a conclusion together.
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In fact, the best marriages are ones that know how to fight well, how to argue well, how to have these disagreements well. And what we see is over time, if a couple can have these hard conversations over and over and over again, their relationship is actually stronger, not weaker.
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And I think as I was thinking about discomfort and the good that it produces, the most amazing example of this is in childbirth itself.(…) That there’s a lot of pain that comes from birthing a child, but it produces life.
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It’s almost this universal rule.
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Good things come from discomfort.
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As I was thinking about this this week, a story I remembered this time in my life. When I worked at a grain cooperative, I grew up in Kansas, and during the summers in college, I worked at this big grain elevator. And down there, it’s not quite like here. Here, every farm has some silos down there. Not every farm does. And so you’ll have two or three gigantic elevators where every farmer brings their grain. So there are these huge concrete structures, and they have lots of silos, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 silos that are all made out of concrete. And in the elevator, the farmer will drive their truck up there and you’ll dump the truck, whatever grain they’re bringing. It could be wheat, corn, whatever it is. You dump it into this pit.
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And the elevator has this big belt that has these buckets on it. And the buckets pick up out of the pit and they take the grain up to the top. And once it’s at the top, it gets distributed to whatever silo it needs to go to. If you’re a farmer, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If not, that’s the basic how elevators work. But in these big elevators that we were at, a lot of them would have underground because the belt would actually go all the way underground where the pits were. And we had what we called the well. And down there, inevitably, you know, corn, wheat, soybean, this kind of stuff would kind of get dropped down there. Like it’d fall out of the buckets. It’d come out of the elevator shaft, whatever it was. And we’d have all this grain down there. And sometimes it would rain a lot. And there’d be water down there. And if you’re busy during harvest, sometimes the water would be down there for weeks or even months. And it would get fermented and sour and pungent. And it was disgusting. It was disgusting down there. And one summer, I was working at this elevator and it was my last day of work. I was going to go home for two weeks before school started, hang out with my family, and go back to college. And it was my last day. And my boss goes, “Okay, Eric, it’s your last day of work. Your job today is to clean out the well. And after you’re done cleaning out the well, you can go home.” That was what he told me first thing in the morning. And so we had this man lift that we could go up and down the elevator. And the man lift could either hold me or this trash can that he gave me, but not both. And so I had to send the trash can down, then climb down the escape ladder to get down into this knee-deep, slurry stew of fermented, of fermented water. And there was wheat and corn growing in there and it was just disgusting. It was awful. And I had to use a shovel and shovel in all this stuff into the trash can and put into the man lift and send the man lift up and crawl up out of there, go dump it. And I had to do that all day until I was finished. And when I was finished, I got to go home. It’s universal law. Good things come from discomfort. That was an uncomfortable situation, but something really great happened. I got to finish my day and go home. The inverse of this is also true. That comfort oftentimes leads to unhealth.(…) When we don’t move, when we don’t exercise, when we sit too much during our lifetime, our body fails faster than if we move and lift weights. If you eat things that are easy to eat, oftentimes they lead to cardiac disease and diabetes.
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And so if you, in your marriage, if you don’t have hard conversations throughout your marriage, it oftentimes leads to more fights. Because if you’re just, okay, yes, honey, whatever you want, if you are avoiding taking the easy way out of difficult conversations, it oftentimes leads to a worse marriage. If you raise your children and you don’t give them good boundaries and discipline, your children oftentimes grow up and they don’t, they aren’t the best people that they could be. When we take the easy way out, when we take the comfortable way out, oftentimes it leads to dysfunction or unhealth. And in our passage today that we’re looking at from Acts chapter four, we see how the apostles, these first followers of Jesus responded to an uncomfortable situation. Right before this passage that we’re going to read today, Peter and John, two of the apostles, were brought in front of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court, and they were threatened. They were threatened to stop talking about Jesus because the Sanhedrin was annoyed. They were annoyed that Peter and John were going around talking about Jesus, proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah,(…) healing people in Jesus name, but they didn’t really have any way to actually like judge them in any way. So they just threatened them. Hey, you need to stop talking about Jesus or else. This is one of the first instances of persecution in the church, that the apostles were feeling persecution for the first time. And then this is how they respond to these threats beginning in verse 23, after they were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and elders had said to them. You stop talking about Jesus.
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When they, that is the friends heard it, they raise their voices together to God. The first thing they do is pray. They begin to pray to God. That’s their response. They experience this persecution and they begin to pray. And this is how they pray. Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them. They first recognize who God is. They praise him, which is a great way to start prayer. Whenever you pray, it’s a good thing to start with praise. They recognize the goodness of the Lord. They recognize the power of the Lord. And that’s how they begin their prayer.(…) And they move on. It is you who said by the Holy Spirit through our ancestor, David, your servant. Why do the Gentiles rage and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers have gathered together against the Lord and against his Messiah. In their prayer, they quote this is this passage from Psalm 2. So if you actually flip back to Psalm number two, you can read this. It’s a little bit different because they were using a different translation, but you can actually read this song. This Psalm describes the nations raging against the Messiah, the nations raging against God’s anointed one and the Lord sitting on his throne and laughing at the nations.
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So the apostles, when they were praying, they were actually praying scripture. They were quoting scripture and remembering scripture and that scripture was helping them understand what was going on in their lives at that time. Because they continue on to pray to God. And they say, for in this city, in fact, both Herod, who was the king and Pontius Pilate, who was the Roman appointee to take care of that area with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel gathered together against your Holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. The apostles remember scripture. They pray scripture and that scripture helps them understand what’s going on in their world. They looked back this passage, Psalm two, which was written hundreds and hundreds of years before the apostles, before Jesus, and they’re seeing what David was praying then. And David was looking around the world and he was saying, man, the nations, they rage against God, the people, they plot in vain, all the nations of the world, the nations come and the nations go, but the Lord during the whole thing, he sits on his throne. And we read later in Psalm two that he actually scoffs at the nations, that he kind of makes fun of the kings because they think that they’re so powerful.
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And the apostles understand that they’re still going through something like this. There are powerful people in their world who are now persecuting them and we’re persecuting Jesus. And we know that oftentimes, even in present day, that this is still true, that the nation’s still rage and they toil and they plot in vain. And even just a couple of weeks ago, there was an assassination attempt on the Republican nominee for president. I mean, we live in a very fickle world where powerful people can go away very quickly.(…) We live in a world where there’s still this power dynamic, but it’s the Lord who sits on the throne. And that’s what the apostles were recognizing, that it is the Lord who is enthroned. It is the Lord who is ruler overall. And they were reflecting on these nations and these powers trying to rage against them.
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And so, so far in this prayer, they haven’t actually asked God for anything, which is pretty typical of prayer.
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As we pray, we can praise, we can remember scripture, we can reflect on our own lives by using scripture. This is all the right way to pray. And finally, they get to what they’re asking for God. And this is what they ask him for. And now, Lord, look at their threats and grant to your servants to speak your word with all boldness.
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Now, do you notice what the apostles don’t do here? They don’t say, Lord, listen to their threats and make those people go away. So we’re not threatened anymore.
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The apostles don’t say, Lord, listen to their threats and make their threats empty so they can’t actually hurt us. That’s not what they pray for. The apostles, when they pray to the Lord, they don’t ask God to take the persecution away. They actually just asked for boldness. They asked for boldness to continue the thing that was getting them persecuted in the first place. They asked for power from the Holy Spirit that they may continue to preach the good news of Jesus Christ. And then they continue and they say, while you stretch out your hand to heal and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your Holy servant, Jesus. The apostles pray that God would continue to do his work of transforming people, of bringing heaven to earth, which is why Jesus came here.(…) The first thing that he preached was, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The kingdom of heaven is here. It’s right now. And he went around and he forgave sins and he healed bodies and he freed people from their sickness and slavery. This is what Jesus did. It was heaven invading earth.
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And so the apostles are asking God to continue that work, to continue to have this new creation, this new work going on in the world while they continue to pray for boldness.(…) And God’s response is this, when they had prayed, the place in which they gathered together was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness. God answered their prayers.(…) He didn’t take away the threat. He didn’t take away the persecution. He didn’t take away the discomfort.
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Instead, he gave them power to continue forward with boldness, to continue forward with power to see all the good things that new creation can bring, to continue to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth, to continue to heal and give hope and give peace and give joy to those people around them. This was God’s response to fill them with the Holy Spirit, to empower them for boldness because the apostles understood something, that God was at work. He was on a mission. He was doing something. They looked back into the Old Testament from Psalm 2 and they see, oh, God is at work here. The nations are raging, but God is enthroned. He’s raising up his Messiah, his anointed one. And ultimately we know that that’s Jesus. Here in the New Testament, now the apostles are looking around and they’re seeing, hey, God is still at work. He’s still doing his work. And we get to be part of that. We get to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins, and we get to see God heal people. We get to be the vessels that God uses to heal and transform the lives around us. And we look back now, 2000 years later, and we say, God is still at work.
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We can look at what the apostles did and we say, you know what? We still have that same job. We still have that same task. First of all, to experience God’s love, experience God’s transformative power, be filled with the Holy Spirit, and then continue to do his work because God is at work and his work is to bring heaven to earth. And even more specifically, to bring heaven into the hearts and minds of every single person. That’s what he wants.(…) We call this new creation. We call this being a new creature, a new person in Jesus Christ. God wants to fill each and every person with his Holy Spirit so they can be a new person, filled with the fruit of the Spirit and transformed by Jesus.
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That’s why you’re here. That’s why you exist.
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You are here to be transformed by Jesus.
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That’s your purpose in life, is to be renewed, to know God and to make him known,(…) to delight in God and to be transformed into a new life, to have a full, good, abundant life in Jesus Christ. That’s what God wants you to experience. He wants you to experience fullness in him. And apparently, as we see in the apostles, that full life might include persecution.(…) That full life, that good, full, abundant life, definitely includes discomfort.(…) It definitely includes some bad things that happened to us. That’s why Jesus did his work at all.(…) In his life and death and resurrection, it was all for you to be transformed.
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And part of this full, good, abundant life is joining Jesus in the hard work to bring heaven to earth, to be like the apostles, to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, to be the hands and feet of Jesus that bring healing and hope and joy and peace and love and safety to everyone, to proclaim the truth that Jesus is Lord of all and in Jesus your sins are forgiven and you are a child of God,
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and to be the hands and feet of Jesus.
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In our world, our nation, even our neighbors, are going to have issues with that.
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Now, the apostles and others around the world, even to this day, experience intense persecution. There are places in the world right now where it is illegal for someone to follow Jesus. It is illegal for someone to claim the name of Jesus and to claim that he is Lord. It is illegal to, in the name of Jesus, give hope and healing and joy and peace and to proclaim the good news of Jesus. It’s illegal to do those things. That’s intense persecution.(…) We, because of where we live, we have this great privilege to not be persecuted.
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But what we do have is we have some awkwardness. We have some discomfort. And there are people on the Internet or on television who are going to say mean things about Christians.(…) But we don’t have to experience the intensity of the persecution like the apostles or others. So we praise the Lord for that. We thank him for that. But we will experience difficulty.(…) And in our lives, for most of us, most of that difficulty is going to come from within. It’s going to be the difficulty of actually dying to ourselves, dying to what we want, our plans for our life, the values that we want to live by. It’s dying to that and aligning ourselves to Jesus Christ. That’s hard work.
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That’s hard work to give up our desires for Jesus, to give up our desires for the kingdom of God. And so we will experience difficulty. We will experience awkwardness. We will experience discomfort. It is going to happen. And sometimes it’s going to be with our friends and family and neighbors, and they don’t want to hear about Jesus or that kind of stuff. That’s going to happen. But that’s why this is hard work, is because it’s uncomfortable, because there’s discomfort, because it’s difficult.
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And so what do we do in response to this hard work? What do we do in response to a full life being one of hard work to bring heaven to earth with Jesus?(…) I think what we do is we ask for boldness.
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We do what the apostles did. They don’t ask for the difficulty to be gone. But instead, they ask for boldness and for transformation.
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It’s a boldness to trust and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, that sins are forgiven and that people are loved by God.
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It’s hard work, the boldness to do the hard work of bringing healing and hope and peace and joy to our neighbors, even when they think it’s weird that we do that because of Jesus.
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But there are some things that are worth being uncomfortable for.
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There are things in life that are worth the difficulty that comes along with it. Our marriages,(…) friendships, raising children,
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these are the kinds of things that are worth the difficulty in the kingdom of heaven is just like them.
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It’s hard work following Jesus. It’s difficult work. It’s uncomfortable.
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But the kingdom is one of those things that it’s worth being uncomfortable for,(…) because we’re responsible.
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We are responsible for our families, for our friends, for our neighbors,(…) for our coworkers.
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And so we ask God for the boldness to lead our families in the way that we need to.(…) We ask God for the boldness to lead in our workplaces in the way that we need to.
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Because imagine this.(…) This is what I want you to imagine.
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Imagine the people in your life,(…) your kids,(…) your coworkers,(…) your grandkids, whatever it might be. Imagine the people in your life experiencing good, full, abundant lives.
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That’s the promise of the gospel,
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is that your loved ones, your friends, your coworkers, each get to experience a full, good, abundant life in Jesus Christ. Imagine your family transformed by Jesus. Imagine your coworkers transformed by Jesus, your friends transformed by Jesus.
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Imagine their relationships renewed and changed.(…) Imagine all the unpleasantness and bitterness washed away and replaced instead with honesty and goodness and truth.
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Imagine your workplace, if everyone in your workplace was made new by Jesus,
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if grumbling and complaining and bitterness was no more,(…) but instead your workplace was full of love and joy and peace and patience and goodness. Imagine your family where obligation and guilt is replaced by joy and goodness and peace. Imagine your friends.
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Imagine your friends knowing where to go to find help in their relationships, to find help in how they’re raising their kids, to find help in what to do at work, seeking the Lord together,(…) dying to ourselves and being made new by Jesus Christ every single day. This is the work of Jesus. This is the work of Jesus in their lives.(…) And this is your purpose, too, to experience the joy of transformed lives all around you.(…) And to have a hand in giving a full life to your friends and family and neighbors.
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Amen.