Acts: The One Who Fulfills Your Deepest Desire (8:26-40)

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Acts chapter 8, verse 26.

Acts 8:26

Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, Rise and go toward the south, to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.

This is a desert place.

And he rose and went.

And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure.

He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah.

And the spirit said to Philip, Go over and join this chariot.

So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, Do you understand what you are reading?

And he said, How can I?

Unless someone guides me.

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

Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this.

In his humiliation, justice was denied him.

Who can describe his generation?

For his life is taken away from the earth.

And the eunuch said to Philip, About whom I ask you, does the prophet say this?

About himself or about someone else?

Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with the scripture, he told him the good news about Jesus.

And as they were going along the road, they came to some water.

And the eunuch said, See, here is water.

What prevents me from being baptized?

And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him.

And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way, rejoicing.

But Philip found himself at Azotas, and as he passed through, he preached the gospel to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Let's just uh bow our heads in prayer.

Um, Heavenly Father, we gather together in person and online on this uh dark, cold night.

Uh Father, we come together to uh give you um praise and thanks uh through singing, through hearing your word, and through preaching, then also to mark ourselves with ashes to symbolize our mortality.

Father, I just pray that uh you pour your Holy Spirit upon us, that as we um as I proclaim your word right now, Lord, that you touch our hearts and minds, and that Jesus would be lifted high.

I pray that in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Please be seated.

So yesterday we had pancakes for dinner here at the church.

Um, many of you might have been in other churches and had pancakes at what as well.

And now we're here and we're putting ashes on our foreheads.

You might be thinking, well, what the heck is going on?

Um This is actually my first um Ash Wednesday service.

Um some thoughts have crossed my mind that it feels a bit awkward, it feels a bit weird, and it feels a bit irrelevant.

And if you have those thoughts as well, these are genuine thoughts to have.

But what it symbolizes, any of our feelings towards it are trumped by what it symbolizes and what it means.

The text we're looking at tonight explains why we would do something like this, but it also speaks of something, a greater need.

Something that we all have, this great need that's in each of our hearts.

So we're gonna look at it.

So please open in your Bible or your bulletin and turn to Acts chapter 8, verses 26 to 40.

Acts 8:26–40

So we're gonna go through three points, but I'm gonna I'm gonna say the points as we go through the sermon.

So the first point is this Jesus sees the rejected, verses 26 to 29.

Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, Rise and go towards the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem, Jerusalem to Gaza.

This is a desert place.

And he rose and went, and there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure.

He had come to Jerusalem to worship, and was returning seated in his in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah.

And the spirit said to Philip, Go over and join this chariot.

Now what's going on here is that Philip, in the previous verses, was just preaching in Samaria, spreading the gospel, and then he's come back to Jerusalem.

And now the Spirit has sent him out now to go down towards Gaza.

And you might be thinking, well, is this the Gaza that we see in the media all the time, every day?

It's not actually.

Gaza used to be in this other spot, actually about 30 miles down the road from where it is, um where it is now.

And it was a desert place.

There was no it was not beside the Mediterranean Sea.

So this is an older Gaza city that's being talked about here.

But it was destroyed and then it moved, it got rebuilt.

So he's going down this road on the way to Egypt, which continues into the African continent.

And when it says Ethiopian, it's talking about in in those days, it was the upper in the upper Nile of the river, in that area.

And in Greek mythology, when they say when they talk about the Ethiopians, if you see it in Odyssey, they say that the people who live in Ethiopia live at the ends of the earth.

And a couple other mythologies also say this too about the Ethiopians.

And this eunuch, he would have been castrated, probably at a young age, in order to serve in the queen's court, so he wouldn't come after her sexually.

This is something they did a lot back in the day, so the queen was always protected, and the king wouldn't have to worry about any of that kind of stuff.

So this man completely castrated.

And then the queen, when it says Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians, is actually a dynasty name for the queen.

This she was a representative of the king.

She would do all his secular daily functions so the king could do the other stuff.

So this is just a dynasty name.

Now the eunuch would have been a high official, he would have been well off, he would have been always around the high up people in the courts, around with the queen, and he's come to worship in the temple in Jerusalem, and now is returning.

So this the scene is set.

But you might be thinking, if this man is a high official, why would your first point be that Jesus sees the rejected?

So let's break that down a little bit.

Yes, he is a high official.

Yes, he would have been most likely well off.

But the thing with a eunuch, a thing with so someone like him, is that he would always have been a slave.

He would always have been on the outskirts in people's minds.

He would never be as like what you say, like one of us.

He would always be considered this other person.

And at the same time, this man can never be truly belong to the Jewish people.

And here he is coming back from worshiping in Jerusalem.

Because it says in Deuteronomy that a eunuch can never fully enter into the Jewish life.

Yes, he can be circumcised, but because he's dismembered, he can never be truly a Jewish man.

So he's always facing these two rejections.

From his own people in Ethiopia, even though he's a high-up official, even though he's runs with the right people, he's still rejected.

And then when he comes to worship, he's still rejected there, and he has to worship in the court of the Gentiles.

Those are the people that the Jewish people didn't consider to be a part of them, but they still allowed them in the outer courts.

So he's always labeled.

From the beginning, when he's castrated for the rest of his life, he's been labeled.

He's always facing being stigmatized and always rejected to his face or his back.

This is and this is a fear, if you really think about it, being rejected.

This is a fear that we all have in our hearts, whether you say it or you don't.

We all fear of people, we always fear that people will find out what we truly think.

What's truly going on in our heart as we think, as we go through life.

If people truly know, knew what goes on in our hearts, I'm sure people would have a lot to say.

So this is something that's going on in this story, but it's also something that goes on in our lives.

We have a big fear of being rejected.

So if we look again at verse 29, look with me, verse 29.

And the Spirit said to Philip, Go over and join this chariot.

By all standards of that day, a Jewish man would never do this, would never go over and talk to a Gentile like this.

But there's something different about this story.

But the gospel you see here, you see it right here, it breaks through all cultural boundaries, all stigmas, all people groups.

The gospel goes into every single people group in this world and touches them, goes to them.

Jesus sends people out to go to them.

And we hear and we hear this is an of an often critique of Christianity is that it's it's just a white man's religion.

This eunuch would have been a black man.

He would have been, he's an Ethiopian, so he's a black man.

And then there's this Jewish man going to talk to him.

There's no white people in this at all.

That's very important to remember when people say that.

Because Christianity actually comes from the eastern side of the world.

It doesn't come from North America.

So point two, Jesus hears the rejected.

Verses 30 to 35.

So Philip ran to him and heard him, reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, Do you understand what you are reading?

And he said, How can I, unless someone guides me?

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

Now the passage he the now the passage of Scripture that he was reading was this.

In his humiliation justice was denied him.

Who can describe his generation?

For his life is taken away from the earth.

And the eunuch said to Philip, About whom I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?

And then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with the scripture, he told them the good news about Jesus.

Now this man is trying so hard to understand the Jewish faith, but no one has taught him properly.

Or he's just starting out, he's just new in it, he's trying to figure it out on his own.

I remember when I was um learning how to speak Greek, learn how to read Greek, and then also do Hebrew in my seminary schooling.

Um it helped to read it out loud.

It's the only way you can memorize it.

So that's how I kind of picture him here.

He's trying to figure out how to how to read the text, how to understand the text, but he doesn't have anyone to teach him because he's rejected.

No one wants to be close to him because he would have been an outcast, who would have been considered unclean.

But here we see again that the gospel comes through, that Philip is sent to him, that God hears him trying to understand this.

Jesus hears him.

See, the gospel is for everyone.

The good news of Jesus is for everyone.

Philip hears this man the same way that Jesus hears you in your inner thoughts, in your inner heart.

Jesus hears you.

Now, this might be the first time that this man in his life was actually being treated like a human being.

And this is a great truth and warning for all Christians.

Because the gospel is for you.

That's a great truth.

But it's also a warning that we need to treat people with dignity, regardless of their faith background, regardless of anything, whether we disagree with them, we need to treat them with dignity.

Because every person is made in the image of God and they deserve to be treated with dignity.

And that's what we see here.

Philip is treating the eunuch with dignity and he's helping him.

Now, the Isaiah text, if you're familiar with the Bible, it's speaking directly to when Jesus is before the council, being falsely accused, and he's silent.

He doesn't say anything.

And then when he's also before Pilate, about to be condemned to death, he is silent.

It's a mock trial.

There's no it's a complete injustice of Jesus.

But here's the here's the thing.

The thing with the gospel is this is that our hearts are so broken, are so lost, are so calloused that God has to intervene for us.

And that's what the gospel is, is that we will always reject God no matter what.

We'll always try to one up and become our own gods.

But the gospel comes in, even though we've rejected God, God comes down and opens his hands to us.

And Jesus comes into our lives and speaks into our heart and calls us to himself, and he brings us to him, but we have to cry out to him and say, Jesus, help me.

So point three.

Point three is this that this desire that I was talking about at the beginning, Jesus fulfills our deepest desire.

Verses 36 to 40.

And as they were going along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, See, here's water.

What prevents me from being baptized?

And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him.

And when he came up out of the water, the spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and he went on his way rejoicing.

But Philip found him, found himself in Azotes, and he as he passed through, he preached the gospel to all the town until he came to Caesarea.

Now what's this desire?

This deep desire that's in all our hearts, the thing that we struggle with, the thing that we are so afraid for people to find out, is that we want to belong.

We all want to belong and be a part of something.

See, our hearts are so prideful that we are constantly struggling with accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

Even when we call ourselves a Christian, we're still struggling with this.

We're still constantly in a battle of trying to be our own gods, trying to be the run our own lives.

But the gospel is for you.

It's for everyone here in this room, it's for everyone here watching online.

It's a constant reminder that Jesus is for you.

He is here for you, he's calling out to you.

But we are constantly rejecting this because we are afraid to be rejected by this world.

We want to belong, but our pride pushes God away out so much that we want Him to be rejected.

We want to reject Him.

But this text shows us when you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior in your life, you become a part of God's family.

See, this eunuch man, he had no one in his life, truly.

Even though he pretended probably to be this high-up official to show people that he's good, he's a good man, he's a big, um, he's big up in the Queen's court.

He still was completely rejected and alone, and he had this desire to belong.

And then the Jewish people, he wants to belong as well, but he can't.

He's completely alone.

And we're all like that.

We all want to belong to something, but we've pushed him away.

And the gospel is good news, as it says here, the good news of Jesus, and that's that because we are so lost, God sent a savior into this world for us to be redeemed.

When you put your faith and trust in Jesus, you belong to a family.

You belong to a true family that crosses all cultural boundaries.

You become a child of God and you become baptized into the church.

So why do we do Ash Wednesday?

Why do we put ashes on our foreheads?

It is to show that we are merely but ashes and dust, and to ashes and dust we will return.

We all will, we all will face it.

It's to show that we are in constant need of God's forgiveness and we need to repent.

But it's also to show that we are redeemed children, a part of God's family through Jesus Christ.

That's why the eunuch went away rejoicing in this text.

For the first time in his life, he belonged.

He wasn't stigmatized, he wasn't a slave anymore, he was a child of God.

But as a child of God, but as a child of God, through the good news of Jesus Christ, that's the only way to become a child of God is through Jesus Christ.

You see, Jesus becomes the rejected, so we that we can become the accepted.

That is the good news of Jesus, that he's here for everyone.

Just gotta reach out to him.

Let's pray.

Um, Heavenly Father, uh, thank you that we can come before you, Lord, um, that we can make these statements, that we can put these ashes on our forehead to symbolize, Lord, our mortality, our deep, deep need for you and the gospel daily, for Jesus in our lives.

Father, we just pray now as that we enter into this part of the service that you would deeply impact our hearts and our minds to just cry out to you, to repent to you, to tell you how much we need you, Lord.

Thank you for the good news of Jesus and the fellowship of our family together.

I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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