God's power

Good morning.

This is good.

The sermon text for today is found in Acts chapter 8, verses 26 through 40.

Acts 8:26–40

You can find this passage in the Blue Pew Bible on page 1669.

Please listen as I read God's word.

Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, Go south to the road, the desert road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.

So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake, which means Queen of the Ethiopians.

This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the book of Isaiah the prophet.

The spirit told Philip, Go to that chariot and stay near it.

Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet.

Do you understand what you're reading?

Philip asked.

How can I, he said, unless someone explains it to me.

So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

This is the passage of scripture that the eunuch was reading.

He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

In his humiliation, he was deprived of justice.

Who can speak of his descendants?

For his life was taken from the earth.

The eunuch asked Philip, Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about?

Himself or someone else?

Then Philip began with that very passage of scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

As they traveled along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, Look, here is water.

What can stand in the way of my being baptized?

And he gave orders to stop the chariot.

Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.

When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing.

Philip, however, appeared at Izous and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.

Here ends the reading.

Good morning, everyone.

Hope you're doing well today.

My name is John, and I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood.

As we come to this passage this morning, I want to invite you to join me in a word of prayer.

We ask this morning that as we look at this passage, that you would give us a fresh vision for seeing where you are at work and joining you there.

We're grateful that as you have sent us out on mission, you do so in your power.

Help us to see and delight in Jesus this morning.

We have to send his name.

Amen.

We are in the middle of a series right now called Commissioned and Sent, Finding Our Place in the Mission of God.

And what we've been doing is we've been spending time just thinking together as a church family as we come into the summer, which is like prime relationship opportunity season of our calendar here in Minnesota.

And as we just think about going into this next season of ministry as a church, we've just been considering together what it means, what it looks like for us to live out our identity as neighbors and witnesses.

I basically never say this.

If you've been around Elmwood for a while, you know this.

I don't say this often, so please uh just hear this for what it is here today.

If you were not here last week, if you are a part of Elmwood and you weren't here, or maybe this is your first time here this morning, uh the first message in this series was last Sunday.

And you can find that on our website, you can find it on our YouTube page, any of those places.

Uh that's going to just give you some really helpful context for understanding what it is that we're talking about, because I don't want you to have to sit through me just repeating all of that stuff from last week.

So you can go find that online, and I encourage you uh to do so sometime this week.

Asking for help is a difficult and inevitable part of life.

I remember about five years ago, we were in the process of finishing our basement.

It was just like cinder block walls with like wood paneling over it, just really ugly.

There was no outlets anywhere, it just was kind of a uh gross, dingy little basement.

And so part of the process of finishing the basement meant we had to like put up walls and we had to like frame stuff out and we had to run electrical in the basement.

And my plan was to do as much of that, basically do all of it by myself.

But then at a certain point, I realized I needed to call for help.

Uh in part because there would be inspections that would be done, and I knew that if I screwed this thing up, if I didn't do this right, I'm gonna have to pay someone anyways to redo the work I did.

So I thought, you know, why don't I just like get on the front end of this and just call someone who knows what they're doing, who can set it all upright.

And, you know, the stuff I did was fine, but I wanted to make sure that um everything was the way it should have been done.

And uh making that phone call uh was one of those times where I was faced with some of my own limitations.

And I'm sure that you've experienced a similar situation to this in your life, where you found yourself maybe uh facing something that you said yes to that uh you realize later you bit off more than you could chew, or maybe you decided you were going to help someone and realize in the process that like you were the one now who needed help, or maybe uh you need help with a project that you're working on for school or work, or maybe uh you need help finding something.

You're like aimlessly wandering target for 15 minutes and you're too embarrassed to stop and ask an employee where the thing is until you finally break down and ask someone and face those limitations.

It's typically never fun, is it, to ask for help.

It usually doesn't feel good when we bump up against those limitations, but this is a part of life that every single one of us experiences and can identify with.

Living with a continual awareness of how much we need help because we cannot do the task we are called to do in our own strength.

And that's what I want to think about with you this morning as we look at this picture, this passage from Acts chapter 8.

Acts 8 · chapter mention

And as we get into the message today, I want to just give you sort of the big idea on the front end here.

Here's where we're headed.

The big idea is this life on mission is fueled by God's power.

Not ours.

Life on mission is fueled by God's power.

So let's look at Acts chapter 8.

Acts 8 · chapter mention

And as we look at this passage that you heard read a few moments ago, what we're going to see is an example.

We're going to see an example of someone who is an ordinary person who lived in tune with the voice of the Spirit, and who joined with God where God was already at work.

That's the example we're going to see this morning.

So, first, let's just think for a moment about and be encouraged by the fact that Philip was an ordinary person.

This man Philip that we read about in this passage, who encountered this Ethiopian man, he's an ordinary person.

Now, much of what we read about in the book of Acts is surrounding, is revolving around the ministry of the apostles and revolving around the ministry of a missionary named Paul who like wrote most of the books that we find in the New Testament.

And so it can be easy for us to think that for in that in order for us to be used by God, we have to be someone really important.

We have to be someone really special, like the Apostles or like Paul, someone like this.

But what we see with Philip here is this example that Philip was an ordinary person.

Let me just flip back and read you the opening verse of chapter 8, where it says, On that day, and it's talking about a day when a man named Stephen was killed for his faith in Jesus, it says, On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.

So persecution breaks out against those following Jesus in the city of Jerusalem, and it says that the apostles stayed there in Jerusalem, and all of the other disciples, which is a hyperbole, all of the other disciples were scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria.

And it says, even though their lives were disrupted, even though their lives were totally turned upside down by this religious persecution that they faced, they continued to live as faithful witnesses to Jesus wherever they went.

We know that because in verse 4 it says, those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.

And so Philip is one of these ordinary believers who is scattered.

Philip is not an apostle.

He's not like some super Christian.

He's an ordinary person who was living with faithfulness to Jesus wherever he went.

And one of the things that I find so encouraging about Philip is that we don't know anything about his personality or his personal life.

We can assume when we read a passage like this, where we see Philip, you know, doing all this like gospel conversation stuff, and we can assume that he lived with like a kind of chest out confidence.

We can assume that he maybe just had like some natural gifting and he just was like intuitively super good at this, and there was something that just made him unique and special and different from the rest of us.

We can assume that, but we're never told any of that.

Philip may have been an introverted, slightly socially awkward person who was mortified at the thought of walking up to the caravan of a stranger and striking up a spiritual conversation.

Philip may have been someone who dealt with anxiety or went through bouts of depression.

Philip may have been someone who was walking through in that moment like a super difficult season of parenting.

He may have been caring for his own aging parents, he may have been dealing with his own chronic illness or chronic injury.

We don't know any of those things about Philip.

But all of those things may have been true about him.

And what we see is that even though we don't know anything about this man Philip and his personality and his personal life, we know that there were things he could have pointed to in his life as the reason why God needed to send someone else.

There were things that he could have looked at and said, This is the reason why God should send someone else to do this.

This is the reason why I'm not qualified to do what God is calling me to do, to live as a faithful witness.

We don't know anything about his life, but we know he could have looked to any number of those things as reasons why someone else should go.

But what we see is that in the end, all of those things that he could have pointed to, those are non-factors in his ability to be used by God.

And the reason is because the Spirit is the one who does the work.

The success of Philip here in his conversation with this Ethiopian man is not because of his personality, it's not because of his, you know, his personal charisma or because of any of those life factors.

Philip here is successful in sharing the good news about Jesus because he's joining with where the Holy Spirit is already at work.

That's what made him successful, is that he was living in tune with the voice of the Spirit, could see where the Spirit of God was already at work, and in the power of the Spirit, had joined with what God was already doing, and that was why his ministry was fruitful in this particular instance.

So Philip gives us this beautiful picture of an ordinary person who just lived with faithfulness to what God called him to do in that moment.

So Philip was an ordinary person, but the second thing that we see about Philip here is that he joined the Spirit where he was already at work.

Philip joined with the Holy Spirit where the Holy Spirit was already at work.

I don't know if you notice this, but one of the things that strikes me about this passage is that Philip is like totally along for the ride in all of this.

Right?

The Spirit's the one who is orchestrating all of this.

The Spirit is the one who is sovereignly sort of governing and leading him to where he is.

It's the Spirit that speaks to him and says, Hey, go to this place, and then speaks to him and says, Hey, go up to this chariot.

The Spirit of God is the one doing all the work.

And even when you start seeing the Ethiopian eunuch is like, why don't you come up here in the chariot and tell me about the Bible?

And hey, there's some water.

Why don't we get baptized?

Nothing in here is like originating from Philip.

He's just along for the ride in all of this because he's joining with what God is already doing.

All he's gotta do is like literally show up and have a pulse.

And he does that.

God is already at work in the life of this Ethiopian man long before Philip shows up on the scene.

And we can follow some of the clues about what we're told in here to sort of get a picture of what this man was experiencing.

So we're told that he meets this Ethiopian man, and we know that this man is uh he's in a high-level government position overseeing the treasury of the queen.

And this is uh like a high-level government position, like you know, secretary of the treasury type thing.

So he's in this very high, very prominent government position.

And it was common in the ancient world for men who worked closely with the queen to be uh to have to become eunuchs, to have to be castrated.

I'm not gonna go into any more detail.

I'll just leave it to you to try and figure out why it is that a man who works closely with the queen needed to uh become castrated first.

Just leave that to you to ponder that uh this morning.

If you can't figure it out, ask me.

We can talk about it.

But I think you can probably figure it out on your own, okay?

So this is what we know about him.

He's in this position, he's a eunuch, he's overseeing uh this significant area of government life for uh this place.

We know that he's also uh he's searching for God.

We see that he has come all the way from Ethiopia, which is in the modern-day area of Sudan.

So he comes all the way from the region of Sudan all the way up to Jerusalem to worship at the temple.

And this is a significant journey.

This is between three and five months' worth of travel in a chariot like this to go there and back.

So this is a huge investment of time, it's a huge investment of resources, and so you can just get a sense of like this guy is searching for God and is willing to take on and to go on a journey, even like this, to go worship God in uh the temple where he resides.

So here's a man who, in order to get to this rung of the vocational ladder, had to make some life trade-offs.

Here's a man who, in order to get to this rung of, you know, the vocational ladder, had to give up any chance of having a family.

He's a eunuch.

And now he's drawn to the God of Israel.

But as a follower of the God of Israel, what he comes to find out is that eunuchs were always on the outside.

Because eunuchs were not allowed to participate fully in the life of worship but the rest of God's people.

So eunuchs and Gentiles and people like this, there was a special place where they, you know, you can only go in so far.

So he was always kept at arm's length, he would always remain on the fringes of Judaism, and so this is the situation that he's in.

And so I think what Philip walks into unknowingly is Philip walks into a situation led by the Spirit, into a meeting a man who is in the middle of like spiritual and emotional turmoil.

He's like, these are the life choices I've made, and there's no way to undo these life choices.

I'm drawn to the God of Israel, but as a eunuch, I'm forever going to be on the outside.

I'm never going to be able to be fully in or fully accepted because I'm I just I have to stay on the fringes.

And so this is the situation that he that he walks into, and the Spirit, having led him to where this chariot was, says to him in verse 29, says, Hey, uh, go up to this chariot and walk next to it.

And so he does so, and I can imagine that he's, you know, the chariot's, you know, moving right along, and he's kind of just like awkwardly jogs up next to it.

And he hears this guy reading from Isaiah 53.

And he's like, Hey, do you have any idea what you're reading?

And the guy stops the chariot and is like, Well, of course I don't have anything any idea what I'm reading, unless someone tells me how am I supposed to know.

And so he invites him into the chariot and says, Hey, would you give me like a Bible lesson?

Would you would you explain the Bible to me?

And so he goes up there and he explains uh the Bible to him.

And what we just need to, again, notice about this is that the Spirit is already doing the work, and the Ethiopian eunuch invites the man in.

Philip didn't like orchestrate or organize any of this.

He is just there, listening to the voice of the Spirit, attentive, and follows the Spirit wherever he is leading.

So, based on the clues in this passage, here's what I think is happening.

I think that he walks up as this man is reading Isaiah 53.

That's the scroll he has.

So he's got the entire scroll of Isaiah.

And so Philip comes up into the chariot, and this guy says, Hey, would you like tell me what it is that I'm reading?

I don't understand this.

And so Philip begins in Isaiah 53, and it says he began from that very passage to tell him about Jesus.

So he gives him a Bible lesson from Isaiah 53, but I don't think he stopped in Isaiah 53.

Isaiah 53 tells us about Jesus as the suffering servant, but the story of Isaiah goes on further, and they would have come to Isaiah chapter 56.

Isaiah 56 · chapter mention

And they would have come across Isaiah 56, starting in verse 4, where it says, This is what the Lord says.

To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me, and hold fast to my covenant, to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters.

I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.

And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord and to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it, and hold fast to my covenant, these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer.

Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be acceptable on my altar, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.

So here's a man who is excluded because of his status as a eunuch, and you come to the passage in Isaiah where God makes his promise that one day all of the eunuchs and the Gentiles and those who are currently like kept on the fringes on the outside are going to be brought in.

They're going to be able to come into the temple and worship in ways that they are not currently able to worship.

And so as Philip is leading this man through the book of Isaiah, and they come to Isaiah 56, I bet Philip looked at him and said, Do you understand that Isaiah was talking about a time when your identity as a eunuch would not keep you on the outside?

He's talking about a time when your identity, right now, you're on the outside looking in.

There would become a time where your identity as a eunuch would no longer keep you out of God's presence.

Because Jesus gave his life as your suffering servant, that promise of Isaiah 56 belongs to you right now.

You have been brought into the family of God.

You are no longer on the outside.

You are given a name and given an identity that is worth far more than any number of biological descendants.

This is the good news that Philip shared with him.

And immediately this guy says.

Okay, well, what's stopping me from getting baptized?

And so they find some water and he baptizes him, and then he goes along on his way filled with joy, goes back to the region of Ethiopia, and then Philip goes on to his next ministry assignment wherever the Spirit led him next.

And so what we've seen in this passage is an example of like an ordinary person who was used by God in like incredible ways, not because anything inherent in Philip, but because Philip saw where the Spirit of God was already at work, was in tune with the voice of the Spirit, and decided, I'm going to make myself available to what God is calling me to do in this moment.

So, what are some takeaways that we can bring home from this?

As we look at this example, I wanted to suggest to you a few ways we can take this home.

Number one is this learn to love your limits.

Learn to love your limits.

When it comes to living on mission and when it comes to having gospel conversation and inviting people into the life-giving way of Jesus, every single one of us has limits.

We have limits of time, capacity.

There's limits related to your marriage or your singleness.

There's limits related to your vocation or your personality or your knowledge or your skill or your experience or your confidence.

There's limits in all kinds of things in your life.

And like Philip, we, you know, could look at those things and say, well, this is the reason why God needs to send someone else.

This is the reason why God can never use someone like me because I have all these limitations.

Look at my capacity, look at my personality.

These things just make it so that I'm not the right person to send to engage people in conversation about Jesus.

Just send someone else.

We can look at any of those things and draw that conclusion.

But the same thing is true of Philip, it's true of us, that those things we would look to as limits, those are non-factors in our ability to be used by God.

Because we are not doing the work in the first place.

The Spirit of God is the one who is already at work in the lives of the people around us.

And so if we are listening and in tune with the voice of the Spirit and following and joining where God is already at work and joining Him in His power, that is where the ministry fruitfulness comes from in the first place.

It doesn't come from us.

So all of those things are non-factors in our ability to be used by God.

And what this means is that we can learn to love and embrace our limits.

We can learn to not just tolerate those things we look to as limits in our lives, we can learn to love those things and embrace them.

And here's why.

We can embrace them because our limits put us in places where God has to show up.

Our limits, all of the things about us that would limit us in our effectiveness as witnesses about Jesus, all of those things, they put us in a place where God has to show up.

So think about this.

Think about if if you're assessing your family life and you're saying, you know, we try and be super strategic and intentional about the stuff that we let into our calendar, and we try not to just like fill our lives so full of stuff that we have zero room for anything ever.

Okay?

We we try to do that.

And given the season of life of our family and our children, uh, we still just feel like, man, it takes time to raise kids.

Right?

It takes time to like fund raising children.

Okay?

And so you may look at your situation and say, I'm doing the best I can to try and be strategic and invest my time well, and I have like this much space in my life where I feel like I can intentionally and strategically engage with people who are not followers of Jesus.

Yes, there's all the stuff that I do as I'm going about my normal life, but if I want to be strategic about engaging my neighbors, you can say, okay, I've got this 30-minute time slot on Wednesdays between 5.30 and 6.

That's the time slot I have.

That limit puts you in a place where God has to show up.

Because you can look at it and say, okay, I've only got 30 minutes.

That's not enough time to cultivate the kind of relationship that would lead to deep and meaningful spiritual conversation.

I only see this person maybe once or twice a week.

God, you have to show up.

If you don't show up, and if you are not at work in my relationship with this person, moving this thing along, guiding and directing, this 30 minutes is useless.

So that limitation of your time puts you in a place where God has to show up.

And that's why you can embrace and love your limits.

Because it puts you in a place where you are dependent upon Him and Him alone to do what you can't do yourself.

Or you can look at your personality and you can say, I'm just not the kind of person who's interested in having meaningful spiritual conversation with more than like a handful of like three or four people in my life.

I just I just don't enjoy, I'm not an extroverted person, I'm kind of a homebody, I just like to stay around, I just don't want to just engage all my neighbors and do the extroverted thing.

And so you can look at your life and you can look at your personality and you can say, God can't use me.

But that limitation on your personality puts you in a place where God has to show up, doesn't it?

Because if you engage with friends and neighbors and you're like, this is so awkward, this is so uncomfortable, this feels just awful to me, but I'm gonna choose to be obedient to Jesus in that, and God brings fruitfulness out of that, you know who like did all the work in there?

Not you.

You know, it's like I'm awkward, but like look what Jesus did through me because I was obedient.

Right?

And so those places, whether it's your time or your personality or any of the other factors that you might look at in your life and say, this is the reason God has to send someone else.

This is the reason God can't use me, all those things do is put you in a place where you have to remain dependent upon God.

If he doesn't show up, you don't have enough time.

If he doesn't show up, you will get in the way personally.

We can learn to love and embrace those limits because they point us to our dependence on God.

So learn to love and embrace your limits.

And secondly, learn to see where the Spirit is already at work.

As I look back on the gospel conversations I've had in my life, I think of the ones I had when I was uh a younger follower of Jesus.

Um to be honest with you, I feel like I cringe when I think of those conversations.

I cringe when I think of the poor people who had to sit through those conversations who were not me.

One of the things that I realize about myself as I look back on those conversations is that all of those interactions, basically all of them, began with me, not with the other person.

I wasn't looking for where God was at work in their life.

I wasn't looking for, hey, where what is the Spirit of God doing in that person's life, and how do I just like go be where God is at work?

I wasn't doing that.

I had like a pre-planned speech I wanted to give.

I had a pre-planned message or some end I wanted to get them to, and I would use whatever means necessary to guide and get the conversation to go to that point.

And maybe that's why it felt so forced, maybe that's why it felt so uh like flat, was because I wasn't actually interested in like discerning where God is at work in that person's life.

I was more interested in what I was going to say to them to try and you know argue them into the kingdom of God.

That's what I did.

We have to learn to see where the Spirit of God is already at work in the lives of the people around us.

The question is not whether the Spirit of God is at work.

The question is how.

The question is not whether the people in your life, God is at work in their life doing things.

The question is where is God at work?

And so the question for us is do we have the ability to like pay attention and discern and see, with God's help, what he is doing in that person's life?

So often, the places where God is at work in people's lives are through not pretty things.

We see it here with Philip and this Ethiopian man who's in the middle of this like this kind of turmoil spiritually and emotionally, of like, man, I'm drawn to the God of Israel, but I'm an outsider.

And it was in the middle of that difficulty and pain, that's where the Spirit of God was at work.

And so often, as we look at the people in our spheres of influence, God is at work in their difficulty, in the pain, in the suffering, in the hardship, in the ways that people feel disillusioned with life or with the world or the way that things are in our country or whatever it is, through the disorientation that people feel, through moving, or through divorce, or through life change, or through death, or through any of those things, all of those are difficult places, and God is at work in all of those places.

And yes, in all the good things too, right?

All the areas of joy and satisfaction and enjoyment that people have also give us an opportunity to tell people about the giver of every good thing.

But especially in those moments of pain and discomfort where people feel like, man, just all of these longings and questions I have about life are just like more pointed than they've ever been in my life to this point.

And there's a unique kind of openness to thinking outside of what people already know and believe when they're experiencing those difficult things.

And so so often, God is at work in the midst of those difficult, hard situations.

And if we believe that God is actually at work in the lives of the people around us, what that's gonna do is it's gonna fill us with a sense of expectation.

It's gonna fill us with a sense of expectancy as we look out and say, at each person we meet and say, I wonder what God is up to in their life.

I wonder how the Spirit of God has been, what they've been experiencing recently that's that's made them open to and receptive to the good news about Jesus.

The difficulty and the pain they're experiencing.

Do they know Jesus, who is their suffering servant, who suffered for them?

And those become opportunities for us to share the good news about Jesus.

But it becomes fruitful and effective when we go in there looking for the ways that God Himself is already at work, not looking for the ways we can give our canned pre-packaged speech like I used to do.

So this should fill us with hope and expectancy as we uh seek to live as neighbors and witnesses.

This morning we get to come to the communion table and we get to remember and celebrate the one who is at work in the people who are all around us.

God is at work in the people around us, and we need to learn to love and embrace our limits and learn to see where the Spirit of God is already at work.

And so we get to come to the communion table and joyfully celebrate the one who gave himself for us, the one who gave himself for our friends and for our neighbors and co-workers and classmates who don't yet know Jesus.

And so come here this morning, aware of your own limitations.

Come to the communion table this morning aware of your own failings and your own faults, and be reminded and encouraged that it doesn't depend upon you in the first place.

Spirit of God is the one who does the work.

And so be encouraged by that this morning.

I want to invite you to take just a few moments of silence for confession and reflection, and then we will come celebrate Christ together at the table.