Living Waters of Grace 11.19.25

This is Living Waters of Grace, the teaching ministry of Clark

Waffer, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel of Westmoreland, County

of Greensburg, PA. Now here's Pastor Clark as he

continues teaching through God's Word.

Whenever Jesus does that work, when we're born again, we are

given His nature. Even though we still have this

old nature trying to take over every once in a while, we have a

new nature, we have a new life, and not any that the Holy Spirit

comes into our life to live in us at the time we're born again.

And when He's in us, He gives us the ability to live a completely

different life. Amen.

We're not perfect, but we're certainly not the way we used to

be, right? Certain things bother us now

that never used to bother us. When you give your life to

Jesus, He makes you into a new creation.

Your old self has passed away and you've been reborn as a

child of God. Pastor Clark encourages you

today to submit to the process of transformation that the Holy

Spirit is working inside you. It may only seem like baby steps

right now, but once you've been faithfully serving the Lord for

a few years, you'll look back and not be able to recognize

your old self because of how much your life has been changed

by Jesus now. Here's Pastor Clark in Acts

Acts 19 · chapter mention

Chapter 19 with today's edition of Living Waters of Grace.

We are in the book of Acts this morning and we're going to look

at Acts chapter 18, the last few verses starting in verse 24, and

Acts 18 · chapter mention

then we're going to go into the 1st 10 verses of Acts chapter

Acts 19 · chapter mention

19. Acts is a very exciting book

because it's all about the birth of the early church, the New

Testament church, and the work of the Holy Spirit and how He

got things moving in the lives of the Gentiles and the Jewish

people at that particular time. So I find that every time I I

study this book, sometimes I wish I was back in those days,

living in those days. But what's wonderful is that the

the Bible teaches us that Jesus is the same yesterday, today and

forever. So the days we're living in are

just as good as the days in Acts.

Maybe we don't see as many signs and wonders and miracles, but

they still occur. And they happen when the Lord

decides he wants to use them for his glory.

And we can't make things happen, but God sure can make things

happen, can he any time of the day.

So let's pray as we seek his face.

Father, we're thankful today that we have the word of God.

And that's why we're here, Lord, to learn more about you, how to

follow you, how to know you, how to experience you in our daily

lives. Thinking this morning isn't you

said to Peter, if you love me, feed my sheep.

And Lord, that's what we do here.

We only want to feed your sheep. That's that's what you've called

us to do, no other agenda, no other idea, but just to simply

teach your words simply to your people.

We pray, Holy Spirit, today that You would take what is written

here and make it alive for each of us, that we might not only

learn and experience You in a new way, but that Lord, when we

leave here today, there would be something different in each of

our lives because we've encountered You in a special way

this morning. That's our prayer.

We pray your blessing, Lord, on all those who are struggling and

those who are afflicted and those who are challenged in

life. We think of the world we live in

today and the so many people who are hopeless, Father, so many

people are controlled by addictions and the bondage of

sin and not knowing how to get free, Lord.

And You're the only one that can set us free when we come to You,

whom the sun sets free, the Bible says is free indeed.

So we pray your power today, Lord Jesus, in the midst of your

church all over the earth would be setting captives free and

helping us as believers, Lord, not to get stuck and caught up

in bondages of addictions or sins again, but to stay close to

you and to keep our hearts open to you.

And so, Lord, we just commit this morning to you and we

praise you in Jesus name, Amen. So starting in the 18th chapter

chapter, and a 24th verse, I want to read this the rest of

the chapter. Now a certain Jew named Apollos,

born at Alexandria, an eloquent man, and mighty in the

Scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man had been instructed in

the way of the Lord, and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and

taught accurately the things of the Lord, though he knew only

the baptism of John. So he began to speak boldly in

the synagogue. When Aquila and Priscilla heard

him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God

more accurately. And when he had desired to cross

to Archaea, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to

receive him. And when he had arrived, he

greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he

vigorously refuted the Jews publicly, showing from the

Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ.

So Apollo's an interesting man, man who was called by the Lord

to serve him at this particular time.

But there was one problem. He didn't have all the

information yet in regard to the Gospel.

He only understood up until the baptism of John.

He was baptized by John and John was on the other side of the

cross. He was still part of the Old

Testament, the covenant. And when John the Baptist came,

he told the Jewish people in the desert, he was crying out a

repent for the remission of sin. And he was the one who came to

to prepare the way of the Lord. And so Apollo's, his whole

formation, if you may, his spiritual development was based

upon his experience with John the Baptist.

Up until this point, he hadn't really understood that Jesus had

actually come and died on the cross, was crucified and also

resurrected. He wasn't aware of the fact that

the Holy Spirit had come to dwell inside the lives of those

who would believe in Jesus Christ, but he didn't know the

Old Testament Scriptures. He did know that these

scriptures prophesize about this event of what had happened in

Pentecost and Jesus and his resurrection.

So in this particular section, we just read it.

Really beautiful. He's preaching the Lord's using

him, but up to a certain point. And so Aquila and Priscilla, who

were disciples of the apostle Paul, could sense that he was

missing some information in his preaching.

Wasn't that he was a heretic or he didn't know what he was

talking about. He only knew what he knew

because of only what he had experienced up until this point.

And so it says that they took him aside privately and they

explained to him the way of God more accurately.

And and this is a wonderful thing in the Scriptures and we

see the humility of a servant of God.

All of us are works in process. All of us are learning about the

Lord and the ways of God. And there's not one of us in

here that can say that we know it all right, that we're still

not in process of learning and growing and developing in our

spiritual of life. And Apollo's whenever Priscilla

and Aquila approached him, he said, well, don't you realize

like I'm, I'm part of this Apostolic movement and who are

you to tell me like whatever. No, he humbled himself and he

sat down and he listened. And it says they explained to

him more excellently the way of the word of God.

And so he received it at that time and he, I'm sure, was

greatly encouraged because he got the rest of the information.

And so this is really important to realize when we go into

chapter 19, because the apostle Paul is going to run into some

people that Apollos ministered to before he had the rest of the

information. And so it says in chapter 19,

verse one, and it happened when Apollos was at Corinth that Paul

having passed through the upper regions, came to Ephesus.

Now Ephesus was a very prominent city at the time.

Ephesus is is in modern day Turkey today.

That's where that particular city is.

At the particular time though that this was written, it had a

lot of influence. It was about 300,000 people.

It was a port city by the rivers, a very fertile ground.

It was really a place of a sort of a cosmopolitan area of a lot

of people from different backgrounds in the world were

there for people who are into philosophy and a lot of various

kind of teachings of, you know, mysticism and various thoughts

of people that really didn't know Jesus.

And, and it was also the center of one of the seven wonders of

the world at the time, Temple of Diana.

It was about 425 feet long by about 250 feet wide.

It had 127 columns about 50 to 60 feet high.

So it was an amazing structure. People would go to Ephesus just

to see their architecture that was influenced by Athens and all

the Greek scholars and those who knew how to build pretty amazing

structures. It was there, though,

unfortunately, to represent a false God, Diana.

Diana was a concoction of people at that time.

They believed perhaps a meteorite came down and crashed

and they had this, a big stone and they chipped away at it and

they turned it into this horrific looking deity of many

breast. On this particular woman, Diana,

she was a fertility God and people would go to worship her

and the temple prostitutes would be there.

Approximately 150 temple prostitutes were available every

day for men to go in and have relations with.

And this is all part of their horrific Pagan religion.

So there was nothing really good about this structure other than

it was pretty amazing to see. They even found coins later.

This place was destroyed around the 3rd century and by the

Goths, it was completely taken down.

But they did find coins in the area when they did the

excavation that on one side had the inscription of this temple,

Diana, on the other side Nero. And so, again, just a very

difficult place to be to try to preach the gospel.

But Paul had a real heart to be in Ephesus.

He actually stayed in Ephesus probably longer than any other

city that he had ministered to in his missionary journeys.

This is the third missionary journey now that Paul's on and

he's getting ready to eventually face his martyrdom.

Anyway, he's he's running into these people here.

It says he finds some disciples and he says to them, did you

receive the Holy Spirit when you believe?

That's quite a open-ended question, isn't it?

If you don't understand the context of what was being talked

about prior to this, you might think, well, is there something

maybe I'm missing in my life, or have I received the Holy Spirit?

We'll get into that in a minute. But the reason Paul asked them

this was that he understood that these people only were impacted

up until the baptism of John, and there was something missing

in them in their lives. The Bible tells us that his

Spirit bears witness with our Spirit that we're the sons of

God, sons and daughters of God. You know how you meet someone

for the first time and you just know in your heart they got to

be a believer because there's this witness, the Holy Spirit,

you to them and them to you. We had a a long day yesterday.

16 of us were certified by Red Cross to know how to use the AED

that's on the wall back there and also to do CPR.

So you're in good shape right now, but we don't want to

practice on any of you guys. But what was interesting though,

two of the people there, a couple times they dropped some

names of some people that only Christians would know.

And there's a marriage course out there called Love and

Respect. It's really a fun thing to go

through. You can Google it.

And it's when men and women, husbands and wives have conflict

in their marriage. This former pastor started this

ministry and talked about how men look through blue glasses

and women look through pink glasses.

And our worldview sometimes and how we perceive life is

completely different. A woman sees things different

than men. Anyway, this young woman who was

one of the leading trainers, she says, Oh yeah, love and respect

or something. So finally at lunch, I asked

them if they were believers and they were.

And I just sensed that her and the fellow that that help with

us. But whenever you're around

people that don't know Jesus, you also know that too.

You just censor something missing in their life and so you

want to somehow be able to be used to impact them, to tell

them about what the Lord's done for you and how they can also

know Jesus like you do, so that they can have the same wonderful

encounter with the Lord who loves them.

And so Paul's asking them this open-ended question and they

said to him, we have not so much as heard whether there is a Holy

Spirit. Now John whenever he preached,

it was obvious anybody that was around that he talked about a

baptism that would come by Jesus.

And of course, the baptism of the the Holy Spirit of placing a

lost person into the body of Christ is something that only

the work of the Lord can do with the Holy Spirit cooperating with

the Lord through the Father of the Holy Trinity.

But these guys that were here were so clueless that they

didn't even really, and this is hard for me to grasp.

I'm sure you do too. But you got to realize there's

no Internet. There's no newspaper, there's no

telephone. These people are spread out all

over the the known world at the time.

And to get news to people took time.

And you had to have people that knew the good news to bring the

good news, right. And Ephesus at this time had

really not anybody like that there.

There was no church there yet. And so Paul's asking them this

question and he said to them, into what then?

Were you baptized? And then here's the big answer.

So they said into John's baptism.

So Paul, you know, obviously the light goes on.

Well, they only knew up and to the point of what John the

Baptist had prepared for people to know at the time.

Now Jesus was baptized by John and the the picture of what had

occurred, the dove ascending from heaven upon the Lord, you

know, baptizing him was was a powerful experience and the

voice this is my beloved son and who am I who I am well pleased

and John was so humbled by this whole experience.

Everybody was trying to lift him up as though he was something.

He says I'm not even fit to tie the shoelaces of of Jesus.

I'm this the forerunner. I'm the one that this prepared

the way of the Lord, but I'm not the Lord.

Of course, everything took off after Jesus baptism, but these

people here had not experienced what you and I have experienced

or Paul at the time. And I was thinking about this

this morning preparing as I was getting ready to come in here.

I don't know if you remember what it was like when you didn't

know Christ, but I had some flashbacks of thinking about the

bondage I was in to live a life of nothing but sin.

All I could do was sin. I had no way of stopping sin,

even though my conscience would tell me the things I did were

wrong and not right. I didn't have any power to

change my ways. Down deep inside I knew I needed

to get it together, but I didn't know how to get it together

because I habitually kept living my life in the same pattern

every day. And that's what lost people do.

That's what people without Jesus Christ are living like.

They're living under the power and the bondage of sin.

They don't have the ability to to break out of it.

Now they might go get some counseling or try to get some

help that way, but that's temporary.

That's like a Band-Aid because you, you have a corrupt, fallen

Pagan nature. And no matter how much you try

to do good, you, you can't be good enough ever to be accepted

to God. You need Jesus to save you from

your sin and you need to come to the point in your life that you

realize you need to be saved from yourself sin.

I knew when I was 20 years old that I needed a miracle of some

sort to Get Me Out of the pattern of life I was living and

I hated it. I would go to bed at night and I

would this be in such despair and depression and

discouragement of my addictions to so many different things that

were not right. And it wasn't till Jesus Christ

came into my life and I was given the gospel and I realized

that He died for my sin to save me and to forgive me, but also

to free me from my sin. That's the big missing

connection. Sometimes when we preach the

gospel, we tell people to believe on Jesus.

He'll forgive you of your sin. You go to heaven and you don't

have to worry about going to hell and he loves you and all

those things are true, but you have to 1st realize that you're

a Sinner and that you need to turn from your sin.

That's called repentance and that you need Christ to do a

miracle in your life so that you don't stay stuck in your sin,

right? And whenever Jesus does that

work, when we're born again, we are given his nature, even

though we still have this old nature trying to take over every

once in a while, we have a new nature, we have a new life, and

not any that the Holy Spirit comes into our life to live in

us at the time we're born again. And when he's in us, he gives us

the ability to live a completely different life.

Amen. We're not perfect, but we're

certainly not the way we used to be, right?

Certain things bother us now that never used to bother us.

And there's certain things that we used to do that we detest

now. And there's no longer, we, we no

longer can do them. That's the work and the power of

the Holy Spirit. So these people that Paul's

speaking to, they have this desire to believe, but they're

missing these key ingredients. They're missing the power of the

cross and the and the resurrection, and they're also

missing this power of the Holy Spirit Spirit, God the Holy

Spirit, because they haven't received him yet.

And so Paul says to them, John in verse 4, indeed baptized with

the baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they

should believe on him who would come after him, that is on

Christ Jesus. So they were prepared to believe

in the Messiah. Apollos preached the fact that

John proclaimed the baptism of repentance, being prepared for

the one who was prophesized in the Old Testament to be the

Messiah. OK, but the Messiah has now

already come. He's been crucified, He's been

buried, He's been resurrected and the Holy Spirit came down

upon the church in the 2nd chapter of Acts at Pentecost to

begin to dwell inside the life of the believer for the first

time. And the Old Testament, the Holy

Spirit came upon people and then he would take off when they

offended him or they sinned. The, the, the power of the Holy

Spirit. Even in the the times of Gospel

when Jesus was walking, the Spirit was working in and

through Christ. And Jesus even said that the

apostles at one time received the Holy Spirit and he blown on

them the, the wind of the Spirit and they, they sensed the

presence of God, but there was no indwelling of the Holy Spirit

until Pentecost. This is the great teaching of of

the book of the Acts, the power of the Spirit, God the Holy

Spirit coming to indwell in US and to stay in US and to be the

guarantee of our salvation and the reality of our experience

being real until the day that we're taken out of here.

So Paul said yes, John and Dee baptized with the baptism

repentance. Saying to the people that they

should believe on him who would come after him, that is on

Christ Jesus. So they're already in man.

They're like ready. OK, so when they heard this,

they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.

They were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.

Many of you, I trust, hopefully all of you who are born again

have been baptized in water. Baptism does not save you, but

it is a confirmation that you have been saved because it's the

first sign of obedience after you become a believer.

For Jesus said, go into all the world and preach the gospel into

every living creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father

and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

And lo, I'm with you always, even to the end of the age.

And baptism is, is an awesome thing.

When you get baptized and some of you have had the privilege of

baptized, baptizing it, you come out of the water, smile and it's

just like it's just a blessing because you're doing what it is

that Jesus told us to do. That's the first sign after you

become a Christian that I want to follow you Lord.

And when you're baptized, you're identifying with his death as

you go into the water, his burial, and then as you come out

of the water, his resurrection. You're affirming, I believe that

Christ Jesus is my Lord, that he died for my sins and he was

buried on the on the 3rd and he rose again on the third day

according to the Scriptures. And how how awesome is that?

You know, to be able to identify with the with the Lord Jesus.

A matter of fact, in the book of the Acts, when people were

riding down on their carts and their horses and all that kind

of stuff, they could always tell that something was special was

going on when they saw people being baptized in the water.

And they would say those people are of the way, the way, the way

of the cross, the way of Jesus, as he's the one that says, I am

the way I am the truth. I'm the life.

No man come to the Father but through me.

And so this is an exciting time for these people.

Now they're they're they've been baptized in the name of Jesus.

And when they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the

Lord. And when Paul had laid his hands

on them, and this is really important to understand the

laying on of hands is a wonderful ministry and blessing

that we can all do for one another.

You pray for someone, you, you, you're compelled to lay hands on

them. There's nothing empowering in my

hands or your hands, But it's a it's a sign of a blessing and a

sign of contact that you just want to bring comfort.

And the Bible talks about the this movement of the Holy Spirit

through the elders and the leaders of the church, that if

any are sick among you, let him call upon the elders of the

church that they may anoint them with oil and pray for them.

And they lay hands on them, pray for them.

And sometimes there's healings that occur.

Sometimes God chooses to bring healing, but there's no

guarantee that healing comes every time we lay hands on

someone or every time we anoint someone.

The Bible tells us in First Corinthians 12 that the Holy

Spirit gives gifts, gifts of healing, gifts of all kind of

things in the Bible, that He does these things severally as

He wills. Not as I will, not as you will,

OK, but as God wills. But in the apostles, they were

special group of people. There's no more apostles.

Now some people claim to be apostles, but there is no

apostles in the sense of what was ordained by Christ.

Apostles had to be eyewitnesses of Jesus Christ in his life

physically. OK, that was the first and it

gives the signs of the apostles in in Hebrews.

They were gifted to do miraculous signs and wonders.

This was the sign of authentic apostles.

We're so glad you joined us today on this edition of Living

Waters of Grace. Pastor Clark is teaching through

the Book of Acts, which is the only book that chronicles the

history of the early church immediately after Jesus's

ascension. It gives us a front row seat to

how the Gospel began to move outward, starting in Jerusalem

and reaching into the heart of the Roman Empire.

In just three decades, a small group of frightened ordinary

believers became a bold, spirit empowered movement that

transformed the known world. Acts is not just a history

lesson, it's a reminder of what God can do when His people are

surrendered, obedient, and filled with the Holy Spirit.

And their perseverance still inspires us today.

May we follow their example and live faithfully for Christ in

our own time. We hope today's message

encouraged you. Living Waters of Grace is a

ministry of Calvary Chapel Westmoreland.

If you're in the Greensburg, PA area, we'd love to have you join

us in person. Our Sunday service begins at

10:30 AM at 400 E Pittsburgh St., Unit 6B.

Be sure to visit calvarychapelonline.com to

confirm times and learn more. If you are in the Greensburg

area, you can listen to Grace FM on the new 91.7 frequency.

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Gifts can be sent to Grace FMPO, Box 716, Greensburg, PA 15601.

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Thank you for tuning in and spending this time in God's

Word. Be sure to join us again for

Living Waters of Grace.