Acts 1:1-14 | A Man Can't Just Sit Around

This is Cameron was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Brandford, North Dakota.

It's a real privilege to be here.

It's a real thrill on my part.

Some of you may know my story.

I came to Christ through this church on a Sunday night, January 17th, 1971, at the old Forth and Cottonwood Church, when a missionary from Japan shared the gospel, and I said, I've never heard this before, and bowed my head and trusted in Christ.

The only reason I was at church that night was it was a college supper, 50 cents all you could eat, and I was broke.

And a guy named John Ogser brought me to church that night to hear the gospel.

And the other thing I remember was Jimmy Carner crying on the front row of church that night as the Connors were sitting in their front row as they always sat at that time.

I came to Christ then, but my thanks for this church goes far beyond that.

It's in this church that Mel and I learned hospitality of how to have people into our home.

It's in this church we learned how to study the Bible just by Vic's preaching of what he did.

I'd say I learned how to preach, but you'll be the decider of that or not when I get done today.

But we learned also about marriage here.

We got our premarital council with Vic and Marilyn and a couple of Ben and Sandy Johnson.

And yesterday we celebrated our 45th anniversary.

That applause is really for Mel, what she's had to put up with for the last 45 years.

But it's just a privilege to be here to share the gospel, the word of God with you this morning.

So our Bibles wrote in Acts chapter 1.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

Let's open a word of prayer.

Lord, what a thrill and opportunity to come to the Word of God.

To know it speaks to the hearts of your people.

Lord, with that we invite your spirit to come and do the work that only it can do.

As the Word of God goes forth today, everybody comes with a different circumstance, different situation that they're in.

And you need to speak to each of us.

For doing that, Lord, there are some who are going through some really difficult times.

They're going through trials and circumstances that are just overwhelming.

Being here today is just a task to be here, and they're just glad to be in the fellowship of the saints.

And for them, Lord, there's a way you take the Word of God in your spirit and bring some comfort and strength to their souls.

Lord, there's others that come today and they're coming every week, and they know their life with you is not really in tune.

They know that they've actually taken a step off that path.

They know their eyes are not set on Jesus.

They know they're living for some other reason.

And there's a need for your spirit to bring correction to their soul.

Somehow to convict them in a way to step back on the path of walking with Jesus.

And for many, Lord, it's where they're walking faithfully with you.

They've been walking faithfully with you for years.

They're going through regular life right now.

But it'd be good to just get a pat on the back.

A word of encouragement, a sense that they're doing well.

To know as a faithful steward that you're pleased with what they're doing.

Let your spirit accomplish only what it can do.

Let your spirit do what only the power of the word can do.

Ministering to your people this morning.

It's in Christ's name that we pray.

Amen.

Larry Walters grew up as a kid always wanting to fly a plane.

He'd sit in his backyard and watch the planes go, and that's all he wanted to do is become a pilot.

So when he graduated from high school, he enlisted in the Air Force.

Got in the Air Force, and all of a sudden discovered the one thing he could not do is be a pilot because his vision was not accurate enough.

So he finished his time serving in the Air Force, went back home and settled down, became a truck driver.

But he had a house that sat in the backyard that allowed him to watch planes go over on a regular basis, and he just loved watching those planes and just dreamt that he could someday fly.

So one day he got this idea.

He went down to the Army surplus store, bought a tank of helium, bought 40 weather balloons.

Not these little balloons that you buy for a birthday party.

Weather balloons.

When you blow them, they're four feet wide.

He sat down in his lawn chair, tied it to his Jeep, started filling those balloons up one at a time, packed a lunch.

He figured when he was up there and he wanted to come down, he'd just start popping those balloons and he'd slowly come back to the earth.

Larry got everything ready, all tied down, sat down in that chair, ready to cut that cord.

I think many of us are like Larry.

We have dreams that we have for the Church of Jesus Christ.

We come every Sunday to church and we have a dream of what the church should be like.

We envision this dream that it should be like the Acts 2 church.

We read in that passage where all of a sudden the Holy Spirit comes down upon God's people, and all of a sudden people are being saved, and you get overwhelmed by the number of people that are saved.

And we just read that passage in which that's the church we want to be.

And we dream of being the church that we find in the book of Acts.

Well, we don't talk about among ourselves.

Might find a little disappointment if we did, but we really sit to read the scripture and say, you know, God, why can't our church be like that church in Acts?

Why don't we see people being saved like that?

We dream of being an Acts 2 church.

But we forget.

There's an Acts chapter 1 that precedes that.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

And what Luke wants us to know, if you want to be an Acts 2 church, we have to be an Acts 1 people.

You start asking yourself, what does an Acts 1 person look like?

What does an Acts 1 person do?

What sets an Acts 1 person apart from everybody else in order that they can become the Acts 2 church?

Luke seems to lay out four things for us here to pay attention to.

In verses 1 to 5, he's going to tell us if you're going to be an Acts 1 person, you need to be built on Jesus Christ.

Here's what he says.

I'm reading from the Numerican Standard.

The first set account I had composed, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom he had chosen.

To these he also presented himself alive after his suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days, and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God, and gathering them together.

He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father in Heaven had promised, which he said, You heard from me.

For John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

Two things he wants us to be built on Jesus Christ.

It first begins with the works of Jesus Christ.

He talks about all the miracles he did, demonstrating who he was.

It demonstrated that Jesus Christ was the Messiah and that he was God.

And his death and resurrection said he is God.

Those are the works of Jesus Christ.

But the second thing is it's built upon the words of Jesus Christ.

Our lives are built upon the words that he says.

But pay attention to this too, folks.

It's built upon Jesus Christ.

You know, it's interesting when you hear testimonies today of people.

They love to talk about God.

God did this, God did that, God's doing this.

They talk about all of a sudden they believed in God as though that made them a Christian.

Pay attention closely.

The gospel is not to believe in God.

The gospel is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for your sins and was raised on a third day.

The gospel is believing in Jesus Christ.

The foundation is Jesus Christ.

It's interesting in the early church.

If God was the focus of everything, they would have called us Godians.

But they don't.

They call us what?

Christians.

Why?

Because they talked about Jesus Christ all the time.

Pay attention.

The gospel is not to believe in God.

The gospel is you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for your sins and was raised on the third day.

The gospel is not just the death of Christ, the gospel is the death and the resurrection of Christ.

The gospel is built on Jesus Christ.

And if we want to be in Acts 2 church, we have to build our lives on Jesus Christ and his word.

That becomes an important one, too.

We're somehow supposed to be in the Word of God in such a way that it impacts me on a daily basis.

That somehow the Word of God comes in and filters with my mind and my heart, somehow renews my mind and cleanses my soul.

And that we, who want to be an Acts 2 church, find ourselves building our lives on this book.

That somehow this book that we read through on a daily basis renews us, encourages us, enlightens us, makes us more like Christ.

Why?

Because God speaks to us through his word.

I love when I preach here that rustling of pages.

I'm waiting for the app that comes out.

Then when you use your digital Bible and you turn the pages, it goes.

So you know you're going to the next page.

Well, folks, this is being built on Jesus Christ.

Not just his life and death and resurrection, but his word, his word as well.

Want to be an Acts 2 church?

Need to be an Acts 1 people who what?

Build our lives on Jesus Christ.

He says the second thing.

We find this down in verse 6 to 8, just the first part of verse 8, where we read this.

And so when they come together, they were asking him, saying, Lord, is it at this time you're going to be restoring the kingdom of Israel?

And he said to them, It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by his own authority.

But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.

Second thing he wants us to understand is we need to be empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Why is that so important to tell these disciples at this time?

Well, understand what has just happened.

They have just witnessed the power of Satan.

How'd they witness that?

We just celebrate communion.

The death of Jesus Christ.

He was arrested that night, betrayed, and they watch the power of Satan at work.

And Christ is crucified on that cross.

We find at the same time one of his own disciples betrays him.

That's the power of Satan who entered the heart of Judas.

And they've just witnessed the power of Satan.

It's like, Lord, how can we do anything you want us to do?

We just witnessed the power of Satan.

And not only that, they've just witnessed the power of their own flesh.

They've watched Peter.

Peter, one of their own, deny Christ the first time, the second time, the third time.

And Peter denies Christ three times.

They've just watched the power of the flesh at work.

And all of a sudden they're like, Lord, how can we do anything in this world for you?

Because we just watch the power of Satan, the power of the flesh.

And then the third thing they look at is they look around at themselves, and he says there are going to be witnesses in the world.

How in the world is it going to happen?

There's one, two, there's eleven of us.

What can 11 people do?

And we'll find out later on there's another 120.

What in the world could a small group of people ever do for Jesus Christ?

And that's when you have to realize you need to be empowered by the Holy Spirit.

It's amazing what God can do with small things.

But somehow we think, well, we do big things.

We talk at churches of why we can't do things.

We don't have enough money, enough resources, enough people, enough volunteers, enough leaders.

We don't have enough of anything.

There's 120 people.

Outcome, they're going to reach the world for Christ.

You have to understand how small things become great things.

Now, the reason I ended up at Grand Forks here was I was going to major in cartography at the University of North Dakota.

Instead of doing that, I start out actually in wildlife management, which was actually a biology major.

And my final course in that major, because I didn't graduate in that major, was a systematic botany.

I had Dr.

Facy for this course.

And we'd go on field trips.

We'd go on field trips to get specimens for our portfolio of specimens of plants and all.

And on one of these trips, we ended up going to Itasca State Park.

We got to Itasca State Park.

Now keep up in mind, I grew up in Washington, D.C., you know, city kid and all.

We're at this park and we're finally walking around.

And we come to this spot that there's this little, I don't even call it a stream.

But there's this little piece of water and it's sort of trickling along there.

And they've got these signs, headwaters of the Mississippi.

And we're standing there, and it's about six feet wide, and about, you know, I don't know, two, three inches deep, and we all did the same thing.

Hey, hey, hey, I just walked across the Mississippi.

Hey, hey, hey, I did it again.

That home, that night I got home, I called my dad.

Hey dad, guess what I did today?

What'd you do, Mike?

I walked across Mississippi.

Now keep in mind, I grew up in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., what's the Mississippi look like?

The Mississippi, down in New Orleans, is not six feet wide, two inches deep.

No, no, no, no.

It's 200 feet deep, 5,280 feet wide.

That's the Mississippi.

And I just walked across the head washing.

How does this little stream, this little stream, this very, very little stream become the mighty Mississippi?

Somehow God understands small things.

Can do great things when empowered by the Holy Spirit.

But when we think that we're small, we also think that we can be forgotten.

That somehow the Spirit of God is going to be on all those other churches out there and people and somehow forget us.

Mel and I were in Langdon, North Dakota, planting a church there.

We had a woman in our church named Marilyn.

Marilyn had the gift of evangelism.

I mean, we had a wana, and every kid in her awana group came to Christ that year.

She'd have a women's Bible study.

Every woman in her Bible study would come to Christ.

She had the gift of evangelism, and her hero of the faith was Billy Graham.

So Marilyn was diagnosed with breast cancer.

She came down to Grand Forks and they identified it as cancer and everything, and she decided to get a second opinion.

So she went to Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

She's down in Mayo Clinic, and when she was in Grand Forks, I would come and visit her.

I mean, I could drive the hundred miles, but Rochester's a little far to do a pastoral visit.

And so we prayed for Marilyn every day.

And one day I get a call from Marilyn, and she's talking about her circumstances and all, and she said, You know, Mike, Neil and I were standing in the hallway of the hospital, and we looked down the hallway, and I said to my husband, Neil, doesn't that look like Billy Graham down there?

Marilyn, it's not Billy Graham.

He got a little closer.

Neil, I think that's Billy Graham.

Honey, that's not Billy Graham.

Comes right up to him.

She looks at him and says, Are you Billy Graham?

Yeah.

I couldn't do the Southern accent, but yes, I am.

Billy Graham.

He asks her how she's doing.

She tells him about her cancer.

You know what Billy Graham did?

He prayed for her right there.

Folks, I may be a good pastor, but I'm no Billy Graham.

God embraced the water.

In a small town.

You need to be empowered.

Empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Folks, pause and look at your life.

Do you really sense the power of the Spirit working in you?

Are you just somehow muddling along with everyday life?

And not concerned that you're filled with the Spirit.

Are churches not what we want them to be?

Because we're choosing not to be empowered by the Spirit?

Of which we're commanded to be filled by the Spirit?

And God seems to understand that we want to see Him work.

We need to be empowered by the Holy Spirit.

And not just built on Jesus Christ.

As it were engaged in sharing the gospel.

Notice what he says here in verse 8.

After saying, But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.

He says this.

And you shall be my witnesses, both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest parts of the earth.

We are to be witnesses.

That means we have to be engaged in sharing the gospel.

A witness does not just stand silent.

A witness brings forth a word.

And we as believers in Jesus Christ need to be engaged in sharing the gospel with other people.

And we all understand engagement, how it works.

When my oldest daughter wanted to learn how to drive, she wanted to learn how to drive a stick shift.

So I had a friend who had a pickup who brought it to our house, and we were living in Bismarck at that time on a hill about like this.

And being the dad that I am, who is very forgetful and doesn't pay attention to the world around him at times, I decided to teach her how to drive on that hill.

And so we got in the pickup, and uh I'm trying to teach her how to do this.

And you guys know how it works, if you've got that clutch.

The only way that car, that pickup's gonna go anywhere, is if you engage the clutch in such a way that it connects with the um transmission, then you can go somewhere.

And so all of a sudden we're sitting there on the hill, and she's got the you know the the clutch in, and uh she's got her foot on the brake, and I tell her, okay, here's what you do take your foot off the brake, step on the gas, and let the clutch out.

I did make sure there are no cars behind us.

So she does that immediately, she pops that clutch so quick, the car, the pickup just jumps up and down like this, and it just stalls right out.

And we're just sitting there, and part of me's like, we're still on the hill.

Okay?

So we do it again, get a second time, and it's like the same thing happens.

She releases that clutch, bang, and we stop.

Then I realize, what if I put the emergency brake on?

So we pull the emergency brake on, and I tell her, now, now let the clutch out, Trish, let the truck, just let it out until you've you can feel it.

You know what I'm talking about.

When you've just it's starting to just catch a little bit.

She's got it there.

Said, put your foot on the gas, she put her foot on the gas.

I said, Step on the gas.

So the engine's now revving a little bit, and I slowly, slowly release the emergency brake as she slowly, and we actually start going up the hill.

And we actually get to the top of the hill, and we're all celebrating and everything because she finally did it.

But the only way it happened was she engaged, she engaged the transmission.

You know, it was sort of like coming to church.

We get up a conference here on evangelism here.

And I feel like what we would do as a bunch of believers, we all get in here and we come with our cars, and we'd all keep the clutches in, so we could all rev our engines.

And we all sit here in the church and go, let's rev our engine.

We're all excited about evangelism, and we're all running our engines, rubbing our engines as loud as we can.

But as soon as we leave here, we never engage the clutch and we never do anything.

It's almost like we haul them in.

Have you watched all the motorcycles that are hauled through here, going to Sturgis?

We lived in Bismarck.

I found out there were truckloads of motorcycles hauled from around the country of guys who did not ride their motorcycles to Sturgis.

They had them shipped here.

It's like we as Christians, it's like we have our cars being shipped to church, say, let's rev our engines, say we're going to do evangelism.

We don't do anything when we get out of here.

Oh no, we'll take it on it back in the garage.

Cover it up, oh, let's polish it.

And we're not engaged.

He says, listen, folks, we want to be that Acts 2 church.

We've got to engage.

We've got to engage in evangelism.

We've got to share the gospel with people.

And it's not by your life, it's by your words.

And I want you to think, when is the last time you shared your testimony with anybody?

When's the last time you told somebody of how you came to Christ?

When's the last time you raised a spiritual question with somebody about the gospel or Jesus Christ or to engage in a conversation?

When's the last time you engaged?

Somebody with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Because that is what is important to be an Acts 1 person if we want to be an Acts 2 church.

There's a final one he has here.

In verses 12 to 14.

Here's what we read.

Jesus has ascended to heaven.

The angel speaks to him and says, What are you doing, looking up?

Tell the men of Galilee that Jesus will return them, verse 12.

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Alabet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey away.

When they had entered, they went up to the upper room where they were staying.

That is, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon the zealot, and Judas the son of James.

These all with one mind were continually devoting themselves to prayer, along with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus with his brothers.

And the final one, folks, is that we pray together as believers.

You know, one of the um I call it one of the lost practices of the American church is corporate prayer, of God's people gathering corporately for prayer.

We all pray individually.

Part of that is created by our English language.

When we read through the epistles and we read the word you, because in our English, you can be singular or plural, unless you're from Texas, then you say you all or y'all.

But we just say you, and I can say you, and I can be talking to a person, or I can say you, and I mean talking to all of you.

And we read our New Testament, like good old Americans we are, highly individualist, and we read every you singular.

It's me.

Unbeknownst to us, Paul wrote in the plural most of the time, not singular.

And when he's given commands in those letters, it's not usually you individually, it's y'all.

Y'all need to do this.

And somehow corporate prayer becomes something important.

I was blown away.

Last year I was invited to speak to a Korean fellowship.

The Korean church is known for their prayer.

Korean churches in America as well as in Korea meet every morning for an hour of prayer.

Every morning.

And then they meet two hours on Sunday morning for prayer.

So I'm invited to this fellowship, and on that night, it was English-speaking night, so I get to preach.

And so we come to our first meeting and we're getting ready to start, and I'm sitting with their team, leadership team, and they shared a few things, and they said to me, Um, we're gonna pray.

I said, Okay, so I bowed my head to pray with them.

And all of a sudden, what I hear is seven people praying simultaneously in Korean.

Of course, I open up my eyes to look around and see what's going on.

They're all praying simultaneously, simultaneously, all seven of them.

I thought, wow, this is interesting.

So we get into the worship time together.

Now there's 50 of us.

They come to a time of prayer.

They have a leader leading in prayer.

And I still remember, he stands up, he did say that in English, so I can understand.

The first thing they prayed for was North Korea.

And he said to them, We're gonna pray for North Korea.

So I'm there and I bow my head, and the next thing I realize, 50 people now are praying simultaneously in Korean for North Korea.

Now, folks, here's what I want, get your wrap your head around this.

They pray an hour every morning in the Korean church.

Not like we pray.

We take 15, 20-minute sharing prayer requests, and then each person prays one person at a time so we can hear them.

They've got 50 people praying simultaneously for one hour corporately.

The Korean church has exploded with the gospel over the last 50 years.

And that church is known for corporate prayer.

And when I talk to our students, it's like that's what they talk about is corporate prayer.

And somehow for the early church, the fact of gathering for prayer was part of being that Acts 1 church.

Larry Walters, as he was there getting ready to take off, he finally cut that rope.

And instead of floating up like he thought he was going to, he shot up like a cannon.

He got to 11,000 feet and started floating around.

Realized that maybe he shouldn't start shooting any of those things, balloons, because he wasn't sure how to get back down on the earth.

Fourteen hours later, he's passing through the air zone of Los Angeles airspace.

A pilot calls to the tower.

This is flight 232.

There's a man in a lawn chair with a gun in his lap and balloons flying at 11,000 feet.

So they finally send up a helicopter, trying to figure out how to get this guy down.

And the helicopter comes, and as soon as the helicopter gets close to those balloons, it blows them away.

And then it makes matters worse.

Apparently, out in California, the winds change in California as the evening starts coming and the winds go out from the instead of coming in, they start blowing you out.

So now he's being blown out across the ocean.

Helicopter's blowing him out farther away.

Now they finally drop a rope down to him.

They get him back to Earth.

When they get him down to the ground, the police are there immediately to arrest him.

He gets arrested.

Some news person says, Mr.

Walters, why did you do that?

And his answer was, a man can't just sit around.

You know what, folks?

We can't just sit around, can we?

Wanna be an Acts 2 church?

You can't sit around.

We need to be Acts 1 people.

You want to be in Acts 2 Church?

You, I'm speaking individually now.

You need to be an Acts 1 people person.

You want to be an Acts 2 Church?

I'm speaking to all of you now, so y'all need to be an Acts 1 person.

What does that mean?

You need to look and see, are you building your life on Jesus Christ?

Are you?

Two, are you empowered by the Holy Spirit?

Three, are you engaged in sharing the gospel?

And if the church does gather for corporate prayer, do you ever come?

And folks, if you do pray, I'll say this as kindly as I can.

God's concerned about your aunt and uncle's health.

But there's more important things.

To pray for boldness for us to speak.

Pray for doors to be open for the gospel.

And God doesn't want anybody to go to hell.

Pray for people to come to Christ.

As you pray together.

Wanna be an Acts 2 church, folks?

Need to be an Acts 1 people.

Let's close in prayer.

Lord, how good to be reminded, not of what we dream to be.

Oh, we all dream to be a church where people are being saved regularly.

We all dream of how the gospel goes out from us and people are saved, and the church grows, not just to be bigger, but because people actually are coming to Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.

But God, we're reminded today to do that.

We need to be Acts 1 people.

So God, let your Spirit work in each of us.

Convicting us where we may be weak as an Acts 1 people, whether it's with the Word of God and building on Jesus Christ, whether we're more empowered by our flesh and our own desires than empowered by your spirit.

So that we talk about evangelism, but we're not engaged in evangelism.

And God, if we spend most of our time in individual prayer but not coming in corporate prayer, whatever it may be, God, let us become that Acts 2 church by becoming an Acts 1 person.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.