Acts 4:23-37 Sermon: A Vignette of a Gospel-Saturated Fellowship | March 22, 2026

The story that we land in today, one of the many reasons I love this church family is from the get-go, certain things were put in place as non-negotiables.

And one was actually when we talked about finding a place to park in Franklin, you said, we're going to start a Bible study that may or may not become a church.

And that first phrase truly is who you are.

We want to open God's word with a group of people and see more of Jesus and live out of that.

And that really defines the village chapel more than anything else.

And fortunately, that's exactly where this part of the book of Acts is taking us today.

If you are new to this church family, maybe passing through this particular week in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the wonderful things about the village chapel is their commitment to go through the whole council of God, from Genesis through Revelation, firmly committed to looking for Jesus in every part of the unfolding history of redemption and always making much of Jesus in any part of Scripture that they are working through.

Well, they trust people like me when schedules allow and the need is there to join the community here, but pick up where the text left off.

And I consider that a sacred trust.

You know, a lot of us who get to travel and speak into different environments, sometimes there's this gracious assumption, oh, just teach or preach something that's your go-to, you know, what's fresh.

And uh that that sometimes can function well, but it's a greater honor to say, where does the Lord have you in his word?

And uh and let me listen as I would pray about stepping into that conversation with you.

So for us this morning, we're gonna be looking at Acts chapter 4, verse 23 and following.

Acts 4:23

And it follows the first half of chapter 4 in Acts, which, if you were here last week, you'll remember here is the context.

Spirit of God has been poured out on the young church, even as God promised in his word.

God promised that a time would come, and Jesus redoubled that emphasis by saying, I am going to leave you, but I'm not gonna leave you as orphans.

In fact, I'm gonna leave you in such a fashion that you're gonna be glad that I'm going, because I'm gonna ascend to the Father after resurrection, and I will give you my presence.

And what they came to understand was the person of the Holy Spirit.

Well, these first four chapters, of course, of the book of Acts show what happened in time-space history when indeed Jesus did not stay dead, but was bodily raised, ascended to the right hand of the Father.

And then in chapter two, this outpouring of the Holy Spirit took place.

And the outpouring of the Spirit was remarkable for many reasons.

One, it was God making good on his promise that it was always his intent to be an every nation savior.

Always.

Well, I don't know where that was rooted.

It was certainly not rooted in Scripture, and it's especially not rooted when we think about God's commitment eventually to have a family so big, he chose the he chose the image of stars, sand, and dust when he converted a pagan moon worshiper named Abram, made of Abram a nation, which is the nation Israel, that would prove to be the national womb of the Messiah, Jesus.

So all this has been unfolding through the whole word of God.

God is committed to be a great and gracious Redeemer.

He will have a family from every single people, group, and nation that have ever sucked oxygen, gathering eventually into this renewed world called the new heaven and new earth.

Well, that's important for where we jump in at Acts chapter 4.

Acts 4 · chapter mention

See, knowing the larger story helps us in any particular time in our own life to think about crises, to think about threats, to think about what we don't like about waking up in March 2026.

It's kind of a vulnerable day we wake up into, right?

I mean, we're we're coming in here.

There's a lot of givens.

We're glad to be here.

We love this church.

We know what we're going to get when we come to the village chapel, but but we cannot and we should not disregard that right now, this world is in crisis.

But for some of you, it's not so much what's going on in the Middle East right now as much as what's going on in your heart, your marriage, your family, your health.

But see, the Bible always anticipates brokenness.

And it welcomes we who come to understand globally and personally uh I am not enough.

And there are things I really wonder if I can hope that can be different.

Well, see, that's really a part of what we're going to find in the scripture I'm about to read.

Uh that the church is under threat.

And internationally, it's a time that it's not easy to be a Christian.

Yeah, there's a lot of awesome stuff God promised that is underway.

The very fact that awesome stuff is underway, it should not shock anybody that opposition would emerge.

And opposition indeed emerged.

Early part of chapter 4, Peter and John had been used by our sovereign father to heal a man that had been crippled.

He was 40 years old, and it was undeniable that this man who could not walk is now seen in the streets of Jerusalem as alive.

And of course, because it's all about Jesus, Peter and John are gonna interpret any great act of God in terms of Jesus, because Jesus is the only hero in the Bible.

From truly from Genesis to Revelation, the main hero in the entire Bible is Jesus.

And so there they watch this uh lame man leaping and dancing and praising God, and veritably, what we would call in our world of political ideology, right and left both hate the fact that the name Jesus is attributed to the healing of this man.

And so Peter and John were arrested and they were put in prison and they were threatened.

You cannot talk anymore about this person, Jesus.

You cannot, because bad things will happen to you and yours if you do.

Enough going on in their world living under the reign of Nero, truly a narcissist and megalomaniac who before long would start using Christians to blame for the burning down of Rome.

But it it in every direction, life is not easy for the group of people we're listening to today.

So Peter and John, they hear the threats, but then they they are released from their prison.

And we pick up our reading at verse 23 of what happened next.

So a threatened church, threatened apostles, political crazy in the world, their version of the missiles flying everywhere, uh, political right, political left, everybody hates these people identifying with Jesus.

So what do they do?

Let me pick up our reading.

Acts 4, verse 23.

Acts 4:23

On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them.

When they heard this, meaning their their people, we'll come back to that in a minute.

When those who heard the report heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God.

Sovereign Lord, they said, You made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them.

You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our Father David.

Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain?

The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his anointed one.

Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in the city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.

They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.

Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.

Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.

After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken.

And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

All the believers were in one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own.

But they shared everything they had.

With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was with them all.

There were no needy persons among them.

For from time to time, those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the cells, and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.

Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the Apostles called Barnabas, which means son of encouragement, sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles' feet.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

Now would you pray for me for a moment?

Father, again, thank you for the privilege of uh marinating in this text for a second time this morning, Lord, because uh it is it has uh convicted me afresh, it has encouraged me afresh, uh Lord, it it is riding my imbalance, it is showing me the gospel lanes that you're always calling us as your people uh to live in, Lord, not as boundaries, but as a true route, a true direction of peace and freedom.

Lord, um, I pray you protect these whom you cherish from anything I would preach or teach today that truly is not anchored in the whole of your scripture.

And and Lord, I know uh we'll be woefully um uh underable to reveal the glory of your son Jesus because that's the work your spirit alone can do.

So come, Spirit, come.

We see you remarkably in this text.

Come, Spirit, come afresh and and and open our hearts to the beauty, the goodness, and the truth of Jesus.

And Lord, help a very fine church, a wonderful church, Lord, getting ready to celebrate a quarter of a century of your faithfulness.

Lord, uh, help them help us together hoist afresh the cells of our heart to your breath, oh God, to the work of your spirit.

Lord, uh, restore many of us to the joy of our salvation.

Restore many of us, Lord Jesus, to our first love for you, because your love has never waned.

Uh, Lord, may the next months and years of of um the village chapel, Lord, just be filled with with the goodness that we are about to read, Lord.

So uh help us, Lord, uh humble us, gladden us.

Thank you, Lord, that we're so close to once again celebrating a real cross, a real resurrection, a real ascension, a real Savior, namely you, Lord Jesus, in whose name we do pray.

Amen.

Well, um, for for we who have the calling to work in Scripture, sometimes we work too hard to try to find a cute little outline or acrostic something to monomically help us hold on to stuff.

We don't have to do this with this text.

That there's nothing that has to be strained.

It's kind of like just get out of the way, walk through these verses, and look very clearly at five things that are clearly here for us that represent.

Here's what a church that is more or freshly defined by the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus, here's what she will look like, here's what she will be about.

Now, the five things I'm gonna share with you through this text, um, or simply that are there, um, are not steps.

They're not a uh pragmatic trajectory.

They are of saying their way of saying, uh if if God would be pleased in your heart and my heart to bring us afresh to uh to renewal, to gospel renewal, uh maybe even little R or big R revival, here are five things that will be represented that uh come forward in this text.

And they're gonna be up on the screen one by one, but um, they uh really do show us uh basically a vignette of a gospel saturated fellowship.

Now, starting with this one, the first thing I want to highlight in verses 23 and 24 is this this community, this uh fellowship, um, God's greatness compelled them to worship.

Now sit in the image of that first before we even look at the verses.

See, it's one thing to know that we're supposed to gather to worship.

And you know what?

That is a covenantal responsibility.

It's good that if you had to drag yourself out of bed here today, it's good if there's a part of you that said, I don't really want to right now, I'd rather sleep.

I got a busy day of watching a lot of basketball, need to kind of prepare myself.

You know, oh, but I will get up because I know Christians are supposed to worship the Lord.

And we are, because we're always worshiping something.

There are no non-worshipers in this room.

Every one of us, every hour, every day, are living by something that, at least in the moment, is ultimate, something that offers the hope of it can be different, or this is worthy of my mind, my imagination, and my body.

So the discipline of worship is an important thing, but that's not really what we're looking at here.

You know, we just read that Peter and John are released and they they go to their people.

And again, I love that image.

You go to their people, uh, it's it's probably uh some of their closest brothers and sisters in Jesus at this point in the community.

It certainly represents that they know that uh that all of us need to be in vital community with other believers.

I know a lot of us are carrying a lot of real and understandable baggage when we say the word church.

Let's don't use the word church right now as much as saying, if I belong to Jesus, I belong to his people.

And he really intends me to be a part in every season of life with those that identify with Jesus and love him and want to see more of his churches planted in places in the world and really uh not retreating but moving forward.

This is what we see here.

Peter and John, they go and they report threat, but the first thing that happens is everybody there raises their voices.

They are compelled to worship.

The apostle Paul uses a similar image in 2 Corinthians 5 when he talks about why he chose to do what he did as an apostle, as a converted man.

He said, compelled by the love of Christ, compelled by love from Christ, compelled by love for Christ, uh, we don't live as though we are our own.

We've been bought, we've been purchased.

And what we do, we live by being compelled by the love of Christ.

It's a similar compulsion going on here.

I mean, I just love how this language plays out.

Look at these two verses, 23 and 24.

They go back to their own people, and when the community heard this report, they raised their voices together in prayer.

Sovereign Lord.

Now, see, this is the next thing we want to say in terms of what it means to be really compelled to worship.

First words out of their mouth uh are indicative of a people that are really coming to understand the God of the Bible.

Sovereign Lord in a moment when life maybe feels more random.

Again, let's put ourselves in their place.

Uh, will the church survive um Nero?

Will the church survive religious people?

Will the church survive political liberalism or conservativism?

Which, again, we're both life in this culture.

And their first response is sovereign Lord.

See, there's some when worship is compelling, it's because of the bigness of our God.

When worship becomes something that you find in yourself, I will in a fresh way recenter myself on this one, sovereign Lord, they cry out.

Sovereign Lord.

And look at their theology further shaping this moment, this prayer gathering that no one said reach for a guitar.

They could not not worship.

That's what it means to be compelled to worship.

And here's what's said about this sovereign Lord.

You made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them.

How about that coming out of the gate when we are in times like we are this morning?

Once again, I you know, I'm feeling vulnerable this morning.

I yet I'm not ashamed of it.

It's a vulnerable season in the world.

Vulnerability means you've got a pulse.

It means that, Lord, right now there's a lot of stuff going on, and I will go somewhere with that.

Sovereign Lord.

So here's what we're to them.

Lord, uh, you're not just someone that gave us Jesus.

You made everything.

Lord, you you made the earth and everything on it.

You made the sea and everything in it.

So, so here is a community uh that this community has always been.

I can't again, I can't read this.

I'm not here to flatter um uh village chap.

I'm to say, um, fortunately, this church is has wanted to major on the essential things, and this is one of them.

Sovereign Lord, you are God, we are not.

Don't let us forget.

And and and you you created the world of Eden even before you needed to reveal yourself as a redeemer.

See, when things feel real fragile and out of control, how we think about God, who God actually is, brings us to the point of what we will see in an unfolding fashion here.

So, indeed, number one to five, God's greatness compelled them to worship, but number two, flowing right out of the words we just read, God's word shaped their worldview.

Truly, these words, you made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them.

That's a worldview, friends.

Worldview is our cosmology, it's how we think about stuff.

It's do I live by metaphor or by the reality of I inhabit a body, I inhabit a world.

Uh, there's stuff all around me, above me, below me.

Where does it come from?

Well, this God alone worthy of our worship, they are acknowledging as uh as creator, as sustainer, uh, and and and as one who has, through his word, um clearly uh early on has put in motion a story that will always take us to Jesus.

That's why, as this church is praying, they are praying scripture right back to the Lord, which by the way, we cannot do any better than praying the Bible.

If you're ever in doubt about what to pray, open the Bible and pray it back to the Lord.

And a good place to start is the book of Psalms.

And you see, that's what's going on right here.

Notice what they pray.

What really is fueling what their worship actually smells with.

Lord, you're not only creator, sustainer of everything, and and and you, not Caesar as Lord, and and you, oh God, and not the threats are what should grab our attention afresh.

And you spoke, Lord, again, through the word.

Look at this is from Psalm 2.

They're praying a part of Psalm 2, verse 25.

You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David.

Why do the nation Rage and the people's plot in vain.

The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his anointed one.

Now pause there for a moment.

Two or three things that are remarkable when we talk about being a you know a people having the Bible shape or worldview, here's here's here's this is this is such a beautiful expression of that.

They knew the history of Psalm 2.

See, that's one of the great things about the Bible.

Two-thirds of it are written in narrative form, and we live by story.

So when we really know the story, the big story of the whole Bible, but the individual story is playing out, we can begin to say, that God is worth my worship.

That God alone is God.

And so they knew this about Psalm 2, which is where this prayer is coming from.

Let me give you a little background about Psalm 2.

Uh, as mentioned here, uh, King David is described authorship of Psalm 2, but also notice that the Holy Spirit is the one who authored Psalm 2 through King David.

It's a high view of scripture here.

And at some point in our journey, we we we do need to deal with can I trust the Bible?

Where did it come from?

And you know, the Bible's own testimony is that it is a gift of God Himself to a very needy people.

And so God, uh upon uh the writing of Psalm 2, here's a couple of things going on then.

David was a king, but David was not any ordinary king.

David knew from the very time he was anointed to be king that he was very temporary, that he would just be a pointer towards the ultimate king that in God's timing would come.

Great to have a king that says, I am not the point, I'm a pointer.

Right?

That's a leader you can trust.

I will occupy this position, this calling, this anointing, whatever it might be, with due humility.

And King David, as he wrote Psalm 2, he knew I am positioned, I'm the least likely to have been a king of Israel, but but God anointed me, established me, but he set me in a position that will eventually show that one will come who alone is the ruler of the kings of the earth, who alone will have what it takes to save God's every nation and possible to count family, who alone one day will take on the calling to make all things new.

David did not know his name, but he does now.

That king is Jesus.

But look at the look at the way Psalm 2 is written.

Nations are raging, people are running around in the earth, and what you have described here is a world that is at war with God Himself.

From every direction, every ideology, every every every corner of the earth, uh, God writes Psalm 2 through David as a way of saying, this will mark all of history until the true king comes and does his work and eventually brings the fullness of his work.

Rage, fighting, tension, war.

You know, we should not be shocked at the world we live in.

We should lament it deeply.

Because it's not the world God intended for us to know.

And it's not the world that God is going to leave us in.

Nations are raging.

Once again, this is under, let's just see how this group of young believers uh they know they know the scripture, and they they know now that Jesus is the one that was uh spoken of early in David's kingship.

Verse 27, we see the third of five things that we want to highlight from this text that are that that would be marks or just indicative of when the Spirit of God is freshly running through your heart, my heart, or or a community of believers we're walking with, along with being compelled to worship this God, not any God, along with really loving the Bible, not worshiping the Bible, that would be the oletry.

We're seeing Jesus everywhere in the Bible.

Third, notice in this scripture, number three of five, God's Son, Jesus, focused their very experience of suffering.

Verse 27.

Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.

They did what your power and will had decided beforehand.

Now consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.

This is truly uh convicting and it's truly beautiful.

And oh, for faith for you and for me to live into this image here.

You know, when you feel really vulnerable and threatened and weak, what the many times do your prayers look like?

What do many times do my prayers look like?

Lord, save me, protect me, don't let harm come to those I love and cherish.

You know, and those aren't bad prayers, by the way, because uh we even talked about Jesus as a good shepherd earlier today, and the Lord cares for our needs more than anyone.

But this is not where this church went in light of real threats and real opposition.

It's not Lord protect us, it's Lord embolden us all the more to identify with Jesus.

Lord, here's what's going on, Lord.

Uh, Psalm 2, we apply it in our context because your word is relevant to every generation of your people.

And right now, uh here's what it looks like.

Every corner of our life and culture, it seems to be just really uh willing to sign on for anything, then Jesus.

So we can either pray, Lord, get us out of here quick, or Lord, just supernaturally hide us in the cleft of your protection, or Lord, would you grant us to more fully see Jesus' beauty, to feast on his goodness, to know that his truth is not a bunch of claimed verses, but it is a narrative that claims us in all of history.

Lord, enable us in a time of fear and concern to speak with great boldness.

Now, what would that look like?

Verse 30.

We're gonna see uh now moving into this uh picture of trying out for power, but it's gonna be power not to leap over tall buildings in a single bound.

That would be Superman.

It's gonna be power to serve the community.

Lord, enable us to identify with Jesus, your Christ, your anointed one, who is our righteousness, holiness, and redemption, the one who right now is more sovereign over the kings of the earth than any of these people rattling the saber.

Lord, enable us, and here's what we want you to do, Lord, verse 30.

God's spirit, number four or five, empowering their witness.

Um enable your servants to speak a word boldness, stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.

Tim Keller years ago used to talk about how we need to see the miracles of the Bible or these dramatic breakings in of God's spirit, opening blind eyes, healing bodies, breaking demonic power.

He said, it would be better for us not to call those miracles, that's not a bad word, he said, but really they are a re-normalization of the way God intended life to be in Eden.

See, Jesus comes not just to help you get ready to die.

Some of you have grown up in Christian subculture, that's what you think.

Make sure you trust Jesus before you die, which by the way, I'm not dissing on that.

That would be a very good thing to do.

But Jesus has come to give us life physically, emotionally, mentally.

Jesus has called us not to take over anything, not to dominate anything, but to have stewardship over all things.

It is our Father's world, it's not our world.

And so the prayer here, Lord, we want your spirit.

We're so thankful that this man that Peter and John got to see dancing, who'd just been crippled for so long, Lord, do that not to make us look good, not to get us street cred, but Lord, this is why Jesus has come to set captives free, to heal the brokenhearted, to make limbs work again, because Lord, that is what Jesus is secured for us.

See, one day, dear friends, if you know him, your body, and mine is looking a lot older than yours, it will be glorified, but not glorified to fulfill your vain imagination of what a cute you will look like.

One day, these whole bodies will be void of all sin, all vanity, all self-centeredness.

They will be we will be whole, completely whole.

That's a part of what Jesus through his resurrection has secured for us, along with a resurrected cosmos.

It's why we live in crisis moments with hope, not hype.

We're not here to be fired up.

We're not here to say, let's go read the Bible and and and and and remember, oh, we read the end of the book and we win.

We don't win anything, friends.

The Lamb of God, Jesus, has triumphed over all things, including your heart and my heart.

And so the prayer, Lord, would you give us as your people, when it's easy and when it's not, manifestations of your spirit, Lord, that will be for the common good.

You're gonna see what that looks like a little bit more specifically here in a minute.

Well, they're praying not to be awesome, they're they're praying, Lord, just help us love in our community among broken people.

And so, uh, what did the Lord do?

Um, they're praying for power, for boldness, not brazenness, not brashness.

Uh, they're praying to be changed.

So, verse 31.

After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken.

And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

And all believers were of one in one heart and one mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.

With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was with them all.

Let's make the connection here.

One of the things I don't like about my old NIV 84, and that's the language God speaks in, but there's paragraphing.

Sometimes there'll be a break in a paragraph, and oh, we're going to another topic here.

And and in my beloved NIV 84, there there's like a paragraphing and then there's another statement, almost trying to make you think, okay, then something else altogether didn't happen.

Something else happened.

But what we just read was this, all right?

They're praying, they're worshiping a God that is compelling to be worshipped.

He is so awesome, he is so near, he is so generous, he is so God, and we are so not him.

And he's already done so much as he promised, because every promise that he made it finds its yes in Jesus.

And so they're praying, Lord, uh, do great things in our midst.

And here's one of the, here's number five of five.

Here's the great thing he did in their midst.

God's grace transformed their lives.

So you go from the uh okay, a room shaken, and some of listen, some of you are old enough like me, some of you are hallelujah, old enough to have known you lived through the best of the Jesus, Jesus movement.

Can I get an amen?

I mean, you know when, and and listen, I will not glorify the Jesus movement, but I'll say, I'm old enough, I'm 76 now, so I came to faith in 68.

I know remarkable visitations of God's Spirit.

Hallelujah.

And they're not done yet.

We need to be aware of the fact the Lord is doing remarkable things throughout his world, and we need to, you know, throw down our little eye things and really tune into a larger awareness that right now, really in the last 10 years, there have been more people per capita coming to Jesus in Iran than almost any country in the world.

Iran is God's Iran.

Um, so so but but that just I'm I I don't want to digress.

Here's a visitation of the Holy Spirit.

And and I love the language, and much grace was on them all, and they all spoke the word of God boldly.

Much grace is on their own.

How much grace?

So much grace that I if I never before I did begin living as a steward, not an owner.

Can you imagine so much freedom?

And you see, this contradicts what happens.

When we get nervous and vulnerable, and we're in transitions, Darlene and I uh just finished uh 50 years of on-staff pastoral ministry, and I'm not on the staff anymore.

And it was felt a little vulnerable there for the first 15 minutes, and it felt pretty good.

But the point is this transitions in life.

Oh, I used to do, I used to go, used to be, and then okay, so what's life on it?

And you start grabbing.

Oh my gosh, Lord, for the last four days the Dow dropped, you know.

Lord, be gracious to your people to reverse the Dow tomorrow.

So there's something, and listen, I'm not playing loose and fancy with investments and stuff like that at all.

But talk about an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

No one lived as though anything they had just belonged to them.

And see, there's no communism here, there's no socialism, there's no mandated.

If you really love Jesus, go to your safety deposit box and give Jim and Ken the title to your piece of property on 30A.

It has nothing to do.

It's it's it's like it's back to this theme of see, we, you know, some of us used to think if God would only kill that blind person, then the gospel would be true.

The gospel's true.

Uh Peter and John got out of this imprisonment a couple of chapters later.

James is going to be in prison, the church is going to pay pray, and he's going to lose his head.

He's going to be delivered to heaven, not out of prison.

The same sovereign God is writing a story.

Because this sovereign God has determined that all of history is bound up with what he's doing in and through the person of Jesus.

And therefore, suffering is not ultimate.

I'm so thankful that Alzheimer's and cancer have an expiration date.

I'm so glad that political insanity has an expiration date.

I'm so glad that privatization and racism and inequity all have an expiration date.

I'm so glad that this same Jesus, who will not only wipe away our tears, will redeem the pain behind our tears.

This is the Jesus we serve in 2026, and there's a lot of stuff going on in our world that our God is well informed about.

This house was shaken.

One of the biggest theologies of shaking, the pastor's winding down.

I'm looking at the clock, so Bible closes, you know, he means it.

One of the biggest themes of shaking in the entire Bible is God saying to us, I only have only one unshakable kingdom.

Everything else will be shaken.

Folks, we don't look for the church to get her act together or for some new president, three administrations down the road.

We don't, we don't look for, we look for Jesus.

Jesus right now is the ruler of the kings of the earth.

He is right now the wonderful, merciful, great high priest that's praying for us.

He he is the fulfillment of the whole word of God.

And it's our joy to own our vulnerability, our fears.

It's our joy to say, Lord, thank you for always bringing us back to the gospel.

Uh I'm in the first service I made the parallel that I saw this passage, kind of like knowing who I am as a fly fisherman, which is a lot of time more talk than show.

But one thing I do know about my fly fishing, every year I've got to relearn just the rhythms of a cast.

And that's been added this year with the reality of my balance is not the same.

And as you get older, you've got to learn things and you've got to be aware of the fact, Lord, I need you more than ever, not less.

And see, the beauty of the scripture is it's calling us into the to an amazing river of life, an amazing stream called the river of life that flowed in Eden that will flow through the new heaven and new earth.

And you say, our calling is just to get in that stream together afresh.

Would you wouldn't you love to live through a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit?

Well, let me say you are right now, by the way.

The Spirit is working inside of you every single day, 24-7, gossiping that you are a beloved son and daughter, the living God.

A lot of it is not give us something big, but Lord, help me listen.

What voices am I listening to more today than your spirit bearing witness with my spirit?

That I belong to you.

That you love me.

I will conclude with this and pray.

You see, it's a matter of this talking about possessions and being generous.

Precious friends, if you know Jesus by grace through faith, which is the only way to know him, here's a few of the things that are true of you right now that we dare not forget that do shape everything else.

Right now, if you know this Jesus who came for you and came for me and is coming again, right now, if you know him, all of your sins have been forgiven.

Past, present, and future, word, thought, and deed.

All of them, not the 16% you're aware of.

Right now, you've already passed through judgment to life.

God has declared you eternally righteous in Christ.

He cannot love you any more than he does today.

And don't quickly yes but that.

Well, if he really loved me, wouldn't he let him fill in the blanks?

He loves you, he delights in you.

This is your father's world.

He's made you his son and daughters, made us sons and daughters.

He is appointed the very day, because he's a merciful God, when he will send back Jesus to finish making all things new.

But Jesus is doing that right now.

Uh, if it pleases the Lord to give us some extraordinary visitations of his spirit, hallelujah.

But his ordinary, every single day, work of his spirit in our mix, the word and sacrament, through just the gospel, the spirit that has sealed us, living in us, the Lord has all things well under his control.

He is not just our sovereign Lord, he is our Abba Father.

You can trust him, I can trust him.

Let's do so together.

Amen.

To pray with me.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, thank you truly for Village Chapel, Lord, and for all these years that Jim and Kim, Lord, with such creativity in class, but also with such humility and dependence, Lord, have gone through the raptures and ruptures of being pastors.

And I thank you for them.

I thank you for church wise enough, Lord, to create a new context for them, Lord, to uh trust this remarkable team, Lord, that you've put together here at Village Chapel.

And we'll continue to grow, Lord.

We do pray for Kim's health and healing, pray for them as they uh, Lord, will further realize new ways that you're calling them to serve this community and the larger community.

Well, Lord, today thank you that two Sundays out from Easter, you've just given us some fresh aroma of what you're always up to.

Lord, we we are appropriately concerned about um wars, not just rumors of war.

And King Jesus, we thank you that as a Prince of Peace, uh, you are our peace now, and you will bring peace to bear.

Uh war is not ultimate, your kingdom is.

Keep us humble, keep us thankful, keep us generous, Lord.

Lord, show all of us how to live far more in this upcoming season.

Palms up, palms up in praise and palms up and releasing what we think we have to have and cannot afford to lose.

Come, Spirit, come, bring glory to Jesus, we pray in Christ's name.

Amen.