Stephen's Sermon: Exposing the Enemies of Christ

Man, if you'll remain standing, we'll be looking in God's Word in Acts chapter 7.

Acts 7 · chapter mention

Acts chapter 7, and I'm going to read the whole chapter.

Acts 7 · chapter mention

It's a long section, but I'm going to try to keep it all together,

and we'll read all the way through chapter 7 to basically Stephen's great sermon or speech.

Do listen carefully, because this is God's holy and inspired Word.

And the high priest said, Are these things so? And Stephen said.

Brothers and fathers, hear me.

The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia,

before he lived in Haran, and said to him, Get out from your land and from your

kindred, and go into the land that I will show you.

Then he went out from the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran.

And after his father died, God removed him from there into this land in which you are now living.

Yet he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot's length,

but promised to give it to him

as a possession and to his offspring after him, though he had no child.

And God spoke to this effect, that his offspring would be sojourners in a land

belonging to others, who would enslave them and afflict them four hundred years.

But I will judge the nation that they serve, said God, and after that they shall

come out and worship me in this place.

And he gave him the covenant of circumcision.

And so Abraham became the father of Isaac and circumcised him on the eighth day.

And Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob of the twelve patriarchs.

And the patriarchs, jealous of Joseph, sold him into Egypt.

But God was with him and rescued him out of all of his afflictions and gave

him favor and wisdom before Pharaoh, king of Egypt, who made him ruler over

Egypt and over his household.

Now there came a famine throughout all Egypt and Canaan and great affliction,

and our fathers could find no food.

But when Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, he sent out our fathers on their first visit.

And on the second visit, Joseph made himself known to his brothers,

and to Joseph's family became known to Pharaoh.

And Joseph sent and summoned Jacob, his father, and all his kindred, 75 persons in all.

And Jacob went down into Egypt, and he died, he and our fathers.

And they were carried back to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham had

bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.

But as the time of the promise drew near, which God had granted to Abraham,

the people increased and multiplied in Egypt, until there arose over Egypt another

king who did not know Joseph.

He dealt shrewdly with our race and forced our fathers to expose their infants

so that they would not be kept alive.

At this time Moses was born, and he was beautiful in God's sight,

and he was brought up for three months in his father's house.

And when he was exposed, Pharaoh's daughter adopted him and brought him up as her own son.

And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,

and he was mighty in words and deeds.

When he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brothers, the children of Israel.

And seeing one of them being wronged, he defended the oppressed man and avenged

him by striking down the Egyptian.

He supposed that his brother would understand that God was giving them salvation

by his hand, but they did not understand.

And on the following day, he appeared to them as they were quarreling and tried

to reconcile them, saying, Men, your brothers, why do you wrong each other?

But the man who was wronging his neighbor thrust him aside, saying,

Who made you ruler and judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?

At this retort, Moses fled and became an exile in the land of Midian,

where he became the father of two sons.

Now, when 40 years had passed, the angel appeared to him in the wilderness of

Mount Sinai in the flame of a fire in a bush.

When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight, and he drew back near to look.

There came the voice of the Lord, I am the God of your fathers,

the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.

And Moses trembled and did not dare look.

Then the Lord said to him, Take off your sandals from your feet,

for the place where you are standing is holy ground.

I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt,

and have heard their groaning, and I have come down to deliver them.

And now, come, I will send you to Egypt.

This Moses, whom they rejected, saying, Who made you ruler and judge?

This man God sent as both ruler and redeemer, by the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush.

This man led them out, performing wonders and signs in Egypt at the Red Sea

and the wilderness and for 40 years.

This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, God will raise up for you a prophet

like me from your brothers.

This is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel

who spoke to him at Sinai and with our fathers.

He received living oracles to give to us, but our fathers refused to obey him, but thrust him aside.

And in their hearts, they turned to Egypt saying to Aaron, make for us gods

who will go out before us.

As for this Moses who led us out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.

And they made a calf in those days and offered sacrifices to the idol and were

rejoicing in the work of their hands.

But God turned away and gave them over to their worship. The host of heaven,

as written in the book of the prophets, did you bring to me slain beasts and

sacrifices during the 40 years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?

You took up the tent of Moloch and the star of your God, Rephon,

the images of what you made to worship, and I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.

Our fathers had the tent of the witness in the wilderness, just as we spoke

with Moses, directing him to make it according to the pattern that he had seen.

Our fathers in turn brought it to Joshua when they were dispossessed of the

nations that God drove out before our fathers.

So it was until the days of David, who found favor in the sight of God and asked

to find a dwelling place for the house of God of Jacob.

But it was Solomon who built a house for him.

Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands, as the prophet says.

Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build

for me, says the Lord? Or what is the place where I will rest?

Did not I make all things?

Or did not my hand make all things? You stiff-necked people,

uncircumcised in hearts and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit as your fathers did so.

Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed who announced

beforehand the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and murdered.

You who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.

And now when they heard these things, they were enraged, and they ground their teeth at him.

But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God

and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and said, Behold,

I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.

But they cried out with a loud voice and stomped their ears and rushed together at him.

Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him, And witnesses laid down their

garments at the feet of a young man named Saul And as they were stoning Stephen,

he called out, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit And falling to his knees,

he cried out with a loud voice, Lord,

do not hold this sin against them And when he had said this,

he fell asleep This is the word of the Lord You may be seated.

Let's pray together father in heaven please blast this this

word to us that we may as we

always ask lord see christ here clearly and

we pray it in his name amen so in act 7 11 that the stephen was given the charge

of blasphemy that's that's the charge by the way you say to yourself what he

was charged with blasphemy and he gives us this gigantic speech where he goes

all throughout the whole sweep of redemptive history.

He's one of those long-winded preachers that, given just a small charge of blasphemy,

decides to go through what? The whole of the Bible.

My sons used to joke about pastors who came to our house just to pray for the meal.

And instead of praying for the food, they would pray for everything over the

whole wide world, missionaries in Africa and wars and all over the world until the food was cold.

So it's as if Stephen is just overdoing it in one sense. I mean,

the guy's charged with blasphemy.

He said, we heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.

He never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law. Remember blasphemy.

He speaks against the temple.

And now his response is to go through this long litany of redemptive history.

And in one sense, it's strange because it doesn't look any different than any

other story we've ever heard from the Bible about Moses or Abraham,

Isaac and Jacob, or Joseph going into Egypt. In fact, it's a sort of a strange sketch.

He doesn't seem to be adding anything else. In fact, it's a very skeletal structure.

A little bit of this, a little bit of this. He dots and moves his way through

redemptive history. the whole of the Old Testament almost very quickly.

But why? Why does he give this long speech about redemptive history in a charge

that is against him, a blasphemy?

You'd think that he would say, no, blasphemy means this and what I said was

that. And he doesn't do any of that. It's kind of strange.

Our instinct might be to outline, define blasphemy for me. How did you,

what do you mean by that? And how do you know that to be true?

Like we would in our apologetics class.

He doesn't give a defense in that sense. It's very strange.

It's instead of giving a defense, instead of saying, let me answer your charge.

Instead, he pulls these men into a story.

He pulls them into the story of redemption that they knew all too well and that most of us know well.

If we've grown up in the church, we've heard about Moses, Abraham,

Isaac, Jacob. We've heard about these characters, Joseph, who goes to Egypt and all of that.

So why does he do that? Why does he pull them into this story?

I think part of it is because he wants to pull all of us into this story.

This is the story of Jesus Christ and redemption. And if you're like me,

when I grew up, I went to this little Baptist church, Trinity Baptist church,

independent, proud of it, always will be sort of Baptist church.

And I never once heard the gospel. And I'm not kidding.

When someone would say to me, give me the gospel, or did the pastor preach the

gospel? It was always something like this.

Jesus died for you as a wonderful plan for you.

All you have to do is accept him into your heart as your personal savior,

and you'll be saved. That's it.

Died on the cross, accept him into your heart as your personal savior.

I never once heard anything from the Old Testament.

Maybe you're like, well, what's the big deal? Think about it.

All we've heard so far in the book of Acts is Old Testament.

All we've heard about the gospel of the New Testament is from the Old Testament.

Now, I don't know how that strikes you, but if you grew up like I did, it struck me as amazing.

Like, wait a minute, I thought the gospel was a very simple bridge analogy or

something that you told someone so that they would get out of hell and go to heaven.

What Stephen is showing us is that the gospel has roots into the whole of the

scriptures, all the way back to the promise to Adam and Eve themselves.

And so it's more than just a story where you hear something and respond by not

going to hell and going to heaven.

This is a story that pulls all of us into it, and it tells us about the whole

of human history, where God is going with things.

And here with the men of Israel, it helps us to understand the nature of redemptive

history for Israel. He starts to go through it.

He says, we see Stephen using the Old Testament to attack the false teachings

that were so prevalent in his day. It may be the same false teachings you still believe.

I want you to pay attention to that. Are we together?

When I'm going through this list of things, and when I did this when I was growing

up as a kid, I thought, well, the Jews thought certain things about themselves,

and Jesus came along to correct them.

But I realized something that a lot of the theology that I had about Israel

and the Jews came from the false theology of the Jews themselves.

It was like, all of a sudden, I'm like, wait a minute. If what Jesus is saying,

and now what Stephen is saying, the things that we learn about Israel and the

temple and the law and the prophets and the history and so forth,

it never meant what these Jewish people thought it meant.

Talk about the word inconceivable, right? It never really meant what they thought it meant.

For instance, the Jewish people were always thinking that the promises were

exclusive to Israel and the Jews, that they were ethnic.

That they belong to the Jewish people exclusively. This is a false notion.

It's never been the case.

Those of us who were in Sunday school with Jonah, we remember the story of Jonah,

when Jonah was told, pick up and go to Nineveh, that great city,

and teach them and preach them and tell them, yet 40 days I will judge them.

He went to Tarshish, why did he go? We went over that.

One thing we learned from that was that all along the way, as Jonah was working

his way towards the city of Nineveh, God wanted us to know that he loves Gentiles

and that his promises of grace and mercy were for the nations, not just for Israel.

Jesus is the culmination of the promises that we saw in Jonah.

Remember the sign of Jonah that he went off and was three days and three nights in death.

And then he rose again from the dead on the third day. That was a sign of the coming of Jesus.

And that's a sign of the coming of Jesus so that anyone and everyone who believes in him will be saved.

It's not a disruption of the promises to Israel.

It's not. It's the promises of Israel fulfilled to the nations.

Now we're gonna see this when we get to Paul's ministry. you can't miss it.

You can't miss it. He literally slaps us about the head in the face with it, and you can't miss it.

But because we're surrounded, I think, in our culture with at least 100 to 150

years of a theology sometimes called dispensationalism,

we very seriously misunderstand the place and importance of the patriarchs, of the promises,

of the covenants, of the ark, of the temple, of a lot of things that Stephen is going through.

So let's look at his sermon, okay?

Stephen goes through and he begins to just preach this sermon.

Number one, you'll notice in his sermon, and I don't know if I have this yet,

by the way, okay? I'll just be honest.

I went through it this week, kept going over this and think, I got it.

Because I was trying to think, as you always should try to think as a preacher, what's the point?

You might be thinking, he still hasn't made a point yet. Come on, get to the point.

What's the point of this? What's the point of this sermon? I mean,

what's it for? I would get over and I thought, okay, I actually thought I'm going to divide it up.

I'll divide it up into the first section that goes to, that has to do with rejecting the prophets.

And then I thought, no. Then I thought, what about the land?

There's a lot about the land.

When you start reading it and you read it over and over, you start to see,

it's not just a story about redemptive history.

It doesn't just go, once upon a time, there was a guy named Abraham, blah, blah, blah.

It's telling you something about where he came from and how he left and where he was going.

You'll notice there's an emphasis right at the beginning that he was called

to go to a land that he never possessed.

It says it over and over again. It's surprising. Once you see it, you can't miss it.

The land of the promise. I want you to keep this in mind because people today

are still obsessed with that land.

They're still obsessed with that land in Israel. And yet when Stephen goes over

and he says, it wasn't ever about the land.

You'll notice he says, Abraham didn't possess one square foot.

What? I thought that's what he was called. He was called to go where?

To the land. No, he was called to follow God in faith.

And God was his refuge. And God was his hope. And God was his strength.

And God was everything to him. And it was never about what? it was never about

the land. Isn't that amazing?

Here is a story all about the land, and yet constantly through it,

we're reminded it's not about the land.

The land forms a pattern or shadow or type of something or someone who is to come.

And for Israel, this is impossible to conceive. Now we see it in the Old Testament.

We don't have time. I know I'm going through a long sermon anyway.

I'm going fast. I'm going through like Warp 7 if you're a Star Trek fan.

I'm going fast, I promise.

So when God's people thought of themselves, they always thought of the land.

Listen to Habakkuk. Habakkuk describes it. And Habakkuk is common for all the prophets.

Israelites could not conceive of their identity without the land.

It's inconceivable. No land, no people. That's why exile was so horrible.

We're not in the land. We have no hope. When they prayed, where did they face?

Jerusalem, the land, the place. What did Nahum the Syrian do when he was healed of leprosy?

Let me have a slice of this land. He put a bunch in a cart and took it with him, right?

The land was so central. Habakkuk says this about exile and judgment.

He said, when I heard my body tremble, my lips quivered at the voice,

rottenness entered my bones and I trembled in myself that I might rest in the

day of trouble when he comes up to the people he will invade with the troops

though the fig tree may not blossom,

nor fruit beyond the vines though the labor of the olive

oil may fail and the fields yield no food though the flock may be cut off from

the fold and there be no herd in the stalls yet I will rejoice in the Lord I

will find joy in God of my salvation Habakkuk finally got this idea that even

though God will take the land, what is the promise?

Well, it's God, the Lord. He said, even if I don't have any land or any food

or anything, period, just like Stephen.

Even if I lose everything, what do I have? I find my joy in God, the God of my salvation.

God could not be contained to a single land. This is a unique problem that Israel

keeps repeating, whether it's the land or whether it's the temple.

God cannot be contained to a single people, an ethnic group,

or a single slice of land, or a single temple.

He can't be possessed like the other gods of the other nations,

which is what they tried to do.

Remember when they came out of Egypt And this will be one of these things I

keep cycling back to is when you read Old Testament stories,

be careful because you tend to read yourself as a good guy.

You tend to read yourself not as someone who was failing all the time,

like these goofy Israelites.

They get out of Egypt and the first thing they do is, where's Moses?

He's went up to meet with God. He's been gone for a long time. Just make us a calf.

And then it's a funny story because when Moses comes back, they're like,

well, we put this stuff in the fire and out comes a calf.

Don't know what happened. I don't have any idea what happened,

but why did they do that? They wanted a God like all the other peoples.

In fact, you'll notice they named that God, they named that calf Yahweh, the Lord.

This is now the Lord. He's a

golden calf that we're going to put in the shrine like all the other gods.

But God kept reminding the people, I'm not like other gods.

I made all things. I created all things. I'm not possessed by a land.

I don't dwell in a land like these other gods.

All the other gods of the people were like that. You can see this when you look

at cosmic geography in the Bible. It's pretty cool.

There were certain lands designated as Baal's land and Moloch's land,

and other gods had their mark or name on this land because that's how gods ruled in those places.

And when you conquered those gods, you got to put them in the shrine and put

them as part of your land.

Are we together? So these gods were conquered and they were possessed and so

forth. And God is always saying, I'm not like that.

I want you to live by faith. The entire first section, and it's woven throughout this whole narrative.

Abraham was called to live by faith. He was called to go to a land he never possessed.

Joseph was called to live by faith. He never possessed the land. He was put in exile.

He was made a slave and he was raised up by God. All these leaders and all the

leaders that are given as good examples are leaders who finally realized they

had to live by what? By faith.

Not hope in the land, not hope in the temple, but by faith. The focus is on

the call of faithfulness, not on the land.

Go out, verse 3 says, go out from your land and from your kindred and go into

the land that I will show you. There's a journey.

Abraham's on a journey. He's on a pilgrimage. It's not so much about the land.

It's about him following Christ, following God in this journey.

Stephen was stating that Abraham had no possession in this promised land because

it's not and ever was about land.

You'll notice too, by the way, when this story goes on, Stephen is emphasizing

that it's in Gentile lands where the faith promises are given.

It was among the Chaldeans that God revealed himself to Abraham.

It was among the Egyptians that God revealed himself to Joseph.

It was among the Midianites that God revealed himself to Moses.

What? It wasn't Jews and it wasn't in the land. No, never was.

Because it was never about Jews or the land per se, but about the promise of God.

He keeps revealing himself to these great men outside the land where there is

no land. And the same is true of the temple.

And as you can see, I'm working my way through this sermon lightning fast because

there's a lot more there.

But what I was trying to do this week is look, what is different about Stephen's

presentation that makes these guys so angry?

Because if you're just giving an Old Testament story, if I'm just telling you,

oh, guess what? There was a guy named Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,

and they had circumcision, and this happened and that happened.

What's the big deal? But you'll notice Stephen keeps saying,

these guys called out outside the land, given the faith promises outside the

land, never possessing the land because God was who they were supposed to possess.

And then there are these people along the way who keep rejecting this.

These people along the way, even the temple, for instance, tribal deities and

pagan gods could be put in a temple or a shrine.

And even when we just read it from Kings, even when Solomon made the temple

for God, Solomon was a bit, this is theologically kind of odd because God made

the heavens and the earth.

He made everything. And yet we're going to act as if we're going to place him

here in this temple, which they didn't because you'll notice there's no idol.

There's nothing they put in there,

just the ark that represented the place where he would come and dwell.

God, it says in 1 Kings 8, But will God indeed dwell in the earth?

Behold, heaven and the highest of heavens cannot contain you,

how much less this house that I have built.

Yet have regard to the prayers of your servant and to his plea.

O Lord my God, listen to the cry and the prayers of your servants before him. Come dwell with us.

That's what he's saying. Come dwell. Come live among us. Why?

Because that's the promise and that's the hope.

Whether it's Abraham in the land or whether it's Solomon in the temple or anything

that the patriarchs were ever given, their ultimate hope.

And all of them had to be driven to this. And so do we.

All of them had to be driven. It's not about the things I have.

It's not about the things I do.

It's about Christ dwelling with me and me living with him by faith.

Remember I said, this rejection theme is in the Bible.

And when we read the Bible, we often arrogantly, remember I said this at Jonah,

I'll say it again, again and again.

When we read the Bible, especially as good Christians, because we've all been

to Sunday school, we have to be careful. I said this morning,

we don't always know the stories of the Bible.

Most everyone here has been to Sunday school. Actually, most of you have been to Sunday school here.

So I can presume that you know a little bit about the Bible.

So when you read those Bible stories, our tendency is to say,

how dare, how dare those people, how dare Joseph's brothers throw him into a pit? Those bad guys.

If I had been there, if I had been there, Joseph would never have been thrown

into the pit, sold into slavery. Really.

If I had been there, nobody would ever would have made a golden calf.

I would have fought against Aaron. I would have been the one person in the whole

nation of Israel that said no shrines, no golden calves, no, no.

We do that because we're arrogant, we're prideful, we're not realistic,

and also because we know the end of the story, right? I read that story.

I know how it ends, and I don't want to be the bad guy in the story.

But usually we're the bad guys in the story if we're honest with ourselves.

We reject God many times because we want the things that God would give us.

This rejection theme is interesting in his sermon as well. Rebellion against

God's appointed servant, rejection.

It's emphasized here that Stephen mentioned that Joseph's brothers made two

full visits to Egypt before they even recognized that their brother was there.

Same is true of Moses and his rejection. When he first rose up to save Israel,

they rejected him. Who received him? The Midianites.

Again, a Gentile people. Moses has to go down and marry some lady from Cush,

some lady from Sudan or Ethiopia, an African, and go into the family with Jethro.

It's Midianites. It's not the Israelites.

This Moses, he says in verse 35, whom they rejected saying, who made you ruler

over us is the one God sent to be ruler and deliverer of the hand of the angel

who appeared to him in the bush.

He brought them out after he had shown them wonders and signs in the lands of Egypt.

It was from Egypt that God delivered his people in the persons of Joseph and

Moses and eventually Jesus because they're the ones who were rejected and sent to Egypt.

And then God called them out of Egypt. Matthew 2, verse 14, when he arose,

Matthew 2:14

he took the child, the young child and his mother by night and departed for Egypt.

And there he was until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled,

which was spoken by the Lord to the prophet saying, out of Egypt, I called my son.

You see, Stephen is going back and he's basically taking a Christ-centered view

of the Old Testament. Are we together?

Getting sleepy yet? Because it's a long sermon. It's not my fault it's a long sermon.

I'll just say that. Stephen's fault, because this is a very long sermon. That's my excuse today.

Okay. So he's weaving together a center on what?

On the promises of God and someone who would come to dwell with him.

It's basically about Jesus.

This is a sermon about Jesus. And he keeps pointing out that the arrogant and

the unrighteous people here kept rejecting Jesus or the Messiah who was to come.

Look carefully at the stories that you think you already know.

And you realize that more and more, it was not Stephen who blasphemed against God. It was the Jews.

This sermon is not so much anymore about Stephen being on trial.

Now it's about Israel being on trial.

Israel and the Jewish people who constantly all throughout hundreds and thousands

of years of redemptive history have been the ones when God comes to them and

says, I love you, they say, we don't want that.

We want a land. We want a temple. We want an army. We want a king.

And yet God said, I sent you Moses and I'm gonna send you someone like him that

you gotta listen to. It's amazing.

This is that Moses who said to the children of Israel, the Lord your God will

raise up for you a prophet like me from your brother and him you shall hear.

A greater than Moses has come. And Stephen is preaching it.

And Stephen, by the way, yikes, Stephen didn't.

Well, first Peter hadn't been written, that section about present your defense

with gentleness and meekness.

I'm just kidding. He's a preacher on fire for God. And he comes to them and he says, basically,

all of those foolish people that rejected the promises of God and the prophets

of God, that rejected Moses and rejected his voice and rejected the heart of

the covenant, all of those people are summed up in you.

You are the people. And he says it right at the end.

This is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel

who spoke with him at Sinai and with our fathers. he received living oracles

to give to us, and you are like your fathers, all of these people who have rejected him. You're like them.

Now, this reminds us of what Jesus has already said.

Jesus did the same thing, by the way, in Matthew 23.

This is Jesus' sermon is a bit of a setup for Stephen's sermon in that sense.

Jesus in Matthew 23, 29 says, woe to you, you scribes and Pharisees.

Again, for us, this is a little bit different. For us, we're Protestants who've

read the Bible, and whenever we hear scribe and Pharisees, we think, ah, bad guy.

Guess what? In the Bible days, when this was written, they were the good guys.

These were the leaders. These were the priests. These were the great prophets.

These were the religious men.

So Jesus says, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees. You're hypocrites because

you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous and say,

if we had lived in the days of our fathers, there it is that's the classic thing

we do if i had been there if it had just been me.

Oh, by George, I would have saved the day. If we had lived in those days of

our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.

Therefore, you are witnesses against yourselves, he says, that you are sons

of those who murdered the prophets. Yikes.

That's Jesus. Their opposition would doom the nation of it. This is Israel's

judgment, final judgment as a nation.

Jesus came to them and said, you guys are doing the same thing your fathers

have done. And they rejected him and they killed him.

And now Peter, and now finally Stephen, stands before them and say, stop doing this.

You're doing the same thing that always has been happening to redemptive history,

where the land and the temple and the other items of the promises are what you're focusing on.

When the heart and soul of the promise is that you get Messiah,

you get Jesus Christ, and he is the very one you killed and murdered.

And man, in response to that, it literally, they're foaming at the mouth.

It says they literally start gnashing their teeth. They can't stand it. They're shaking.

And that's when they grabbed Stephen and they drag him out and they kill him.

And we'll talk about the martyrdom of Stephen next week.

But their opposition and this final opposition that seems to just seal the doom,

seal the fate of Israel as the stoning of Stephen occurs is their final opportunity to repent.

That whole sermon, that whole long sermon was a reminder to them that they need

to repent and that it's not too late. Instead, they turned against him and they killed him.

God's grace was evident. The promise and the hope of the Old Testament saints

was only to be found in Jesus. And it's true of us today.

We are also distracted by many things, many things in life that we think we

need. The martyrdom of Stephen reminds us that we need none of them.

We need none of them. We need only God.

We need only Christ. We need only to live for him, regardless of anything else that we have.

Everything else in that sense is a bit of a distraction. The promise and hope

of the Old Testament saints was found in Jesus.

They were saved by grace through faith in Jesus, as we are also.

If we are not like these men, and you say, well, of course I'm not like those men, Pastor.

I'm a Christian, a member of Wilmington Reformed Church.

And yet our tendency is to be like these men's, to focus our attention on the

other items, the lands and the temples and the things of the covenant.

We learned of Jesus in the Old Testament. We hear the story of Jesus and the call of Abraham.

We hear the story of Jesus and the story of Moses and Joseph.

They're not a collection of just inspiring stories about heroes.

They're stories about Jesus and of the gospel, the good news,

that if you are someone who is willing to reject everything there is in this

world and follow him, like Abraham, not to the land, but to a city I'll reveal to you.

You'll notice that's the call. It's not about the land.

It's about the God who calls him to that land.

One greater than Joseph has come. one greater than Moses has come.

If you hear him this morning, if you yourself are willing also to lay aside

everything in your life and follow him alone,

only and solely, so that you hunger and thirst for righteousness,

not worrying about anything else in this world, then you also will find grace and mercy.

If not, then there'll be judgment for us as well.

And think about it, if Jesus was not willing to withhold judgment over the precious

and sacred nation of Israel.

How much more do you think he will not withhold judgment against us if we also

reject him? Let's pray together.

Lord, as we think of this story, Stephen's sermon, we pray that you would help

us to recall the promise of the covenant is not so much the land of the temple, but God, it's Christ.

And Lord, we also have a tendency to be distracted by other things,

Things that we want, things that we desire Things that turn our attention away

from Christ Lord, as we come to this Lord's table this morning We pray that

you would turn our attention back to Christ,

To our ultimate hope The one who came and died and rose again And forgives us

of our sins And gives us a reason for living And a direction for living Even

if that living is unto death as it was with Stephen We pray you would bless this church,

Lord With the hope of Christ That we would be centered on Christ that we would

love Christ, that Christ would be our all in all.

We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

The men would come forward. We'll take the Lord's Supper.