Stephen's Speech, Famous Last Words

Morning.

Today's text is from the Book of Acts, chapter seven, verses forty-four to fifty-three.

Our fathers had the tent of witness in the wilderness, just as he who spoke to Moses directed him to make it, according to the pattern he had seen.

Our fathers in turn brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations that God drove out before our fathers.

So it was until the days of David who found favour in the sight of God and asked to find a dwelling place for the 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 the earth is my footstool.

What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord?

Or what is the place of my rest?

Did not my hand make all these things?

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit.

As your fathers did, so do you.

Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?

And they killed those 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.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Well, good morning again.

Thanks for joining us.

I've got one more announcement that I forgot before we get started.

This is the last of Bruce Nicole's Foundations class.

Um how many have gotten to participate in the Foundations class?

Have you gotten to participate?

Yep.

It's many, many throughout the um church.

How's it been?

Great.

Thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up all around.

This is uh hundreds saved, thousands blessed each time we run this class.

And this is a uh um wonderful opportunity to finish it out.

I think uh if you've been participating in it, you know, even if you just want to drop in and audit one of these classes uh for this last time, I think it will be so beneficial.

So, right after church, I know you're thinking all of indie qualifying was delayed till today, and so you're gonna try and run out here.

Um but instead of doing that, you should stick around and uh you should uh participate in Bruce's Foundation's class.

So that's that.

Let's pray, and then we will move into our text for the day.

Father in heaven, you are worthy of all praise.

You are the ones who made the sea, you are the one who made the sea in the dry land.

Lord, you formed humanity from the dust of the earth and breathed life.

Lord, we are the posterity of Adam, your creation.

Holy Father, you have created us by your grace alone and by your love, and by your grace you have redeemed us in your Son, Jesus Christ.

You have formed us into a people, into your church.

We who were once no people, you have made a people.

We who once had no hope or no God in the world.

Lord, you are our God, we are your people.

As we join together on this Sabbath day, this Lord's day, Lord, we are participating in a covenant renewal.

The covenant that you initiated, Lord, by grace alone, I pray that you would work in our hearts so that we might respond in ways that bless you, Lord, ways that glorify you and that bring us joy, fullness of joy in your presence.

Holy Father, let us remember that in your presence there is fullness of joy.

I pray that you would help us to set down all of the areas and ways that we are seeking to grope at the joy that we desire to have, the things of the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the boastful pride of life, all the things of the world that we seek to cling to to bring us joy that leave us empty.

Lord, let us lay those down before you.

And in our worship of you this morning, Lord, let us take up the substance itself, Jesus Christ.

You as our Lord who came to save.

Let us worship and honor you and give to you the whole of our lives, that our lives might be a living sacrifice to your glory.

We lift this up in Jesus' name, amen.

This is the conclusion of Stephen's speech before the Sanhedrin.

It's been a long time.

I don't know how many weeks exactly.

It's maybe our fifth week in Stephen's speech, and it's a long speech that he gives, but to recap where we are, Stephen was one of the first men who were chosen to be the deacons of the early church.

And Stephen is also one of the great early apologists of the Christian faith.

So he would meet with people in the public square and he would argue the truths of Christianity which had been so recently revealed.

He would argue for the truthfulness of the resurrection and of who Jesus is.

And because of this, Stephen was betrayed by his own, by his own kinsmen who were the Hellenistic Jews, those Greek-speaking Jewish converts, of which Jesus was one of those, excuse me, Stephen was one of those.

Stephen was uh betrayed by those closest to him, and he was turned over to the Sanhedrin.

The Sanhedrin was the Jewish court, the very court of men who had condemned Jesus to death.

Stephen is now turned over to for the proclamation of Jesus being alive and of Jesus being Lord.

And as he stands before this council, he is called to give a defense for the accusations that are made against him.

The accusations that have been made against Stephen are that he is saying that Jesus of Nazareth will destroy the temple, and he is accused of saying that he is accused of advocating for changing the customs that have been handed down by Moses.

These are the two charges, and they're blasphemous charges.

They're charges of blasphemy against God and Moses, because the customs that have been handed down, the temple practices, the temple sacrifices, the system of worship was handed down to the Jewish people by God.

And so if Stephen is advocating for those to be changed, then these are charges of blasphemy, saying that he believes that they should change the word of God.

But Stephen makes a defense, and the defense that he makes is not turning to himself and saying, Well, you don't understand I'm actually a very nice guy once you get to know me, and I didn't mean anything that I said to cause any harm or to cause any trouble here.

You know, we've got friends, we go way back.

Aren't you, aren't our cousins, don't they meet each other?

And you know, he didn't say anything like that.

Instead, what he's what he uh places is his defense is the history of God's promises to the Jewish people, and he explains to them the pattern of rejection of the promises of God that the Jewish people had shown throughout their whole history.

And the background to this pattern of God giving these gracious promises to this particular people and their continual rejection of him is that God had remained gracious and faithful, and that God remained gracious and faithful even to the uttermost, and that is the point that he gets to today.

Because the point of the story that he tells, it must end, it must culminate in Jesus Christ.

Because all of the promises of God that had been given to his people culminate in Jesus Christ.

All of the promises are about him.

Now, Stephen giving this long speech that ends in the declaration of Jesus Christ being the righteous one is not like you or I making the same description, perhaps, to a new friend over beers or a new friend in a coffee shop.

This isn't like a normal Christian explaining what the gospel is, because the men that he's speaking to are the very men who condemned Jesus to death.

This is the very council, the very people who had previously condemned Jesus himself to death.

And so that means when he is bringing his whole narrative to the point of the man, Jesus Christ, he is bringing it to the sharpest point, the most dangerous point that it could be brought to in that room.

It all hinges on what do we think of the man, Jesus Christ.

And that's why the speech, you'll notice up till now has been an explanatory speech.

He's been explaining the history of redemption of the people of God.

But the speech now, here at the end, switches to an accusatory speech.

He will now switch from explaining the history, and he will go straight to the point when he discusses Jesus Christ, he will make an accusation.

He will accuse the Sanhedrin of murdering the one who was sent to save them, murdering the only righteous one.

This shows us what sharing the gospel is like.

Because when you introduce Christ, you are introducing the risk of the gospel.

Because here's the strange thing about our faith.

Our faith is not the expounding of principles.

We are not explaining universal principles that apply to all people at all times that you can conform yourself to.

This is not in its substance, the proclamation of the gospel is not in its substance like a philosophy of life.

It's a declaration of a particular man, one man.

And who he was in history, and what he accomplished in history.

Now, the reason why that's that's sharp, it's pointed, it's like the tip of a spear in its sharpness, the declaration of the gospel, is because of its of its particularity.

You know, many other religions, it's it's we're we're making these these broad universal claims, you know, that God is a God is a broad spirit, and that if you search within yourself, you'll discover the truth of him, and then you'll be able to come to him.

And all people have this opportunity to be able to come to him themselves.

Well, the the declaration of Jesus Christ is there is one way to God.

Do you feel the sharpness of it?

The pointedness of it.

It comes to a point, it comes to a head.

Now the good news of Jesus Christ that comes to this sharpness that comes to this point, it feels like a sharpness because the the very gospel message itself begins with this piercing of our hearts to expose to us our own sin and misery.

This is the entry point of the gospel.

This is the incision of the healing surgery, the heart transplant surgery that the gospel is.

It begins with an incision.

And the incision that it begins with is a recognition, a self-consciousness of your own sin and misery.

Now, those are not joyful things to experience.

They're not joyful things to recognize, but that is where our calling begins.

And uh the shorter catechism, question 31, our effectual calling by the Holy Spirit is described.

Now, our effectual calling is described like this.

It says, What is effectual calling?

Effectual calling is the work of God's Spirit, whereby convincing us of our sin and misery.

That's the first thing that we are convinced of by the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, when the Holy Spirit's starting to work on you, what you're being convinced of is your sin and misery.

Your sin and misery.

That's the beginning of the work of the Holy Spirit.

And what the Holy Spirit does then is it enlightens our minds in the knowledge of Christ and renewing our wills, he doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ freely offered to us in the gospel.

Sin and misery are the first steps of the Holy Spirit's work in our embracing the gospel.

And so Stephen must bring it, if he's going to share the gospel of Jesus Christ in this room, the room where it, one of the most dangerous rooms in history that it's ever been shared in, then he knows that he must bring it to the point.

And the point that he brings it to initially, by the Holy Spirit empowering him, is to point out the sin and misery of the counsel that is trying him.

Now, you can think of this, this is really why is it that the Holy Spirit's first work in us and in regenerating us is exposing to us our own sin and misery?

Well, it this is just ordinary good friend stuff, is another way to think of it.

You know, you find yourself in an estate of misery, and this is not hard to do.

In fact, to find yourself in a state of in an estate of sin and misery, you you basically have to do nothing.

This is this is ordinary.

In an estate of sin and misery.

And then what a good friend does is a good friend says, you're feeling bad.

The the state that you're in feels bad.

You ever felt bad?

You guys know what I'm talking about?

And then your friend says, and have you noticed?

Some of us have noticed, we don't know if you've noticed, you're you're doing bad things.

You're doing bad things.

And and we we've noticed your friends who love you, these are related.

Your sin and your misery are are directly related to one another.

And it's a horrible, part of it's a horrible thing to hear.

These terrible experiences are are connected to this terrible part of myself.

But then there's this gospel turn, which is it it enlightens our minds to the knowledge of Christ.

There is there is an opportunity of life in this experience of death.

The sin and misery that is in me can be uh redeemed, it can be taken in by Jesus Christ by his death.

There is a hope for me in this.

Now Satan is very clever because he knows that the incision point, the place where the gospel moves into our hearts, is through the doorway of sin and misery.

And if there's you know two doors before you on any given day, and one door says like fun and happiness, and the other door says sin and misery, you're gonna stand before those doors and think, like, I'm probably gonna choose the fun and happiness door.

It seems like the true life that I would desire for myself is on the other side of the fun and happiness door.

It's not on the other side of the sin and misery door.

And Satan is very deceptive.

He what he likes to say is the sin that we recognize in our lives, the sin that we feel convicted of, or perhaps we've spent uh years or maybe decades hardening our hearts towards uh even the category of sin.

Satan will say things like, Is it really that bad?

Is it really even bad?

And could you really even be responsible for it?

How could you be responsible for your behavior like this?

And then he'll take your misery and he'll say, Yeah, you're miserable, but look at all of the reason that you have to be miserable.

Of course, you would find yourself miserable in a situation like that.

And by the way, you don't deserve misery like this.

And the one who is heaping this misery upon you is the same one who is calling the way that you're living sinful.

And so what Satan does is he takes the sin and misery, which are the incision point, they are the doorway by which we might walk through them towards redemption and forgiveness and eternal life.

And he uses those that we might cultivate resentment towards God for our sin and misery.

And we lead lives towards God that are found that are founded on resenting Him for the sin and misery that we are experiencing.

When these are the very doors of life.

And then to recognize that the point of Jesus Christ for the room that he is explaining this to, which is for all rooms, means that he is going to bring it to the point of their sin and misery.

Because he knows that that point, when you bring it to that point, it's very likely that it will be turned against you, just as it was turned against Jesus.

And that part, that point is just as likely to be thrust through your heart, the one who is sharing it.

And Stephen knows that that is the case.

This is the likely outcome of him sharing the true gospel.

If you desire to share Christ, you must be willing to walk down that road.

Because this is the pattern in which Christ shows himself to us.

Christ walked down the road of sin and misery that we might be saved.

And therefore, for us to share Christ truthfully, we must be willing to walk down the road of sin and misery.

Anything less is sharing a false gospel.

It's denying the very doorway to life for those who most need it.

Stephen is willing to walk down that road.

And in doing so, he provides in this end of his speech the final word on the temple.

And in providing the final word on the temple, he is exposing the reality of their idolatrous worship.

That what the Sanhedrin think they're protecting is not the true worship of God, but what they're actually protecting is their own idolatrous worship.

And then he will directly accuse them of the murder of Jesus Christ.

Because of course, this is what they actually did.

This is the true nature of their sin.

But this is the doorway to the gospel.

So let's look at how he exposes their idolatrous worship.

In Acts 7, 44, we continue in his speech, and he's telling the story of the people of God, and he says, Our fathers had the tent of witness in the wilderness, just as he who spoke to Moses directed him to make it according to the pattern that he had seen.

Now, what he's describing is the tabernacle.

Our fathers had the tabernacle.

This was the tent, which was like this portable temple, is the way that you can think of it.

It's like a circus tent that has the holy of holies, where God met with his people, where the Spirit of God inhabited where his people dwelled.

And in the tent, the great sacrifices were made on behalf of God's people, so that they might be trained that the cost of drawing close to God is death, and that only by blood may they be forgiven of their sins.

The tabernacle for the people of God oriented the whole of their life when Moses erected it.

It oriented their worship.

All of their worship took place within the tabernacle.

It oriented the very way in which they camped out around it, were all oriented towards the tabernacle.

It was the center of their life.

When the tabernacle was picked up and moved, the whole people of God would move with the tabernacle.

It oriented every aspect of their lives.

And this is because the tabernacle is the dwelling place of God.

And you'll notice what is the character of God like?

It's shown to us in him living in a tent.

Because while God's people were wandering around the wilderness, living in a tent, God Himself wandered around the wilderness and he lived in a tent.

I'd say.

But the emphasis of this text here is not the tent itself, but it's the way that the tent was received by Moses.

It says, Our fathers had the tent of witness in the wilderness, just as he who spoke to Moses directed him to make it according to the pattern that he had seen.

So the tent was not just some bright idea that the people of God had in order to organize their worship of God.

That's not the way their lives were organized.

Moses was directed by God to make the tent and all of its furniture in just this way.

You know, we'll continue preaching through Exodus in the fall, and we'll begin to see the furniture of the temple of God.

The tent of God, excuse me, this tabernacle.

And you'll see that the whole second half of the book of Exodus, basically, is this description of you'll build the you'll build the lampstands and they'll look just this way, and you'll build the curtain and it will look just this way, and you'll build the ark and it will look just this way, and it's these these fine details that are exactly how the tabernacle was to be made, exactly how the tent was to be made.

And this is according to the pattern that Moses had been shown in the heavens.

And so what that shows us is that the tent is modeled after the pattern of God's dwelling in the heavens.

So we might say the tent is not the thing itself.

The tent, the tabernacle is not about the tabernacle.

The tent is not about the tent.

The tent is patterned after the heavenly dwelling of God.

So what is the tent like?

You know, there's the the you can think of the heavenly pattern that Moses was shown was not just a blueprint, it was the thing itself.

It was the dwelling of God itself, where God dwells.

And Moses is shown this, and God directs Moses and says, You will build the tent to be just like my heavenly dwelling.

And what is that like?

What's that?

There's the tent.

It's like that it's on earth as it is in heaven.

That's what it's like.

That's what the tent is.

And so what the tent is, is it's about the heavenly dwelling of God.

And it's a way that God can condescend to us, to people that experience things like the way people experience them.

You know how, you know how you experience things?

How there's tents and you can walk around them and you can live near them.

Or there's buildings, you know how you see a building and you walk into it?

You do stuff like that?

Well, that's the way people experience things.

So God makes the worship of Him attuned to the shape of the creatures that we are, modeled after the glorious heavenly pattern.

And so the tent is not about the tent.

The tent is about the heavens.

It is about worshiping God in spirit and in truth.

And it continues on in verses 45 through 46 says, Our fathers in turn brought it in with Joshua.

They bring in the tabernacle, they bring in the Ark of the Covenant, they brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed 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 God of Jacob.

So he's showing that this tent that their fathers had received were was brought into the land that they now inhabit.

And it was brought in with Joshua.

How is it that they inhabit this land?

Because God drove the nations out before them so that they might, so that he might give this promised land to his promised people.

The tabernacle is the center of conquest.

And so it was.

God dwelt in this tent until the days of David.

And then David, who unites the kingdom and becomes king over all the tribes of Israel, it is set on his heart that he might build a permanent dwelling for God.

He lived in a palace.

And he noticed this doesn't seem right.

I live in this palace, and God, where we worship him, he dwells in this tent.

It's in this temporary location.

There should be a central place of worship, a permanent dwelling of God among his people.

And it is set on David's heart that he might make this tent, that he might make this dwelling.

But of course, it isn't finally David who builds the temple, but it is David's son, Solomon, who builds the temple.

And what are the Sanhedrin concerned about?

They're concerned about the destruction of the temple.

But as we see the story, we get a sense of what the temple is.

Right now, they are not concerned about the temple that Solomon built.

The temple that Solomon built was destroyed.

And it was taken apart brick by brick when they were exiled into Babylon.

But after that exile, God sent his people back and he returned them to the promised land, and they erected a new temple, which was not glorious at first.

But this second temple that was built becomes glorious, even more glorious than the first temple, after King Herod makes it more glorious.

And so what do we have?

What temple is it that they are concerned about?

What is the temple?

Here's one way to think of it.

The tent that Moses was first instructed to erect was a copy of the thing itself.

A copy of the heavenly dwelling.

And the temple is a copy of the pattern of the tabernacle.

And the second temple is a copy of the first temple.

What are they concerned about maintaining?

A copy of a copy of a copy.

Now, strangely, they had begun to mistake the copy of the thing for the thing itself.

This is what had happened to the Sanhedrin.

This is what had happened to the Israelites.

They had mistook the copy of the thing for the thing itself.

Now, as I'm relaying it this way, it might seem that the tabernacle and moving on to the first temple and then moving on to the second temple, that you would think that these became less and less in their outward glory, because that's when we copy things, you know, it becomes less and less in its outward glory.

This used to happen, it doesn't happen anymore.

Like you would make a copy of something, it wouldn't come out well, and you make a copy of that.

That's not really the way things work anymore.

Everything's the same all the time, no matter what.

But these temples, these dwellings of God among his people, in their outward glory, they became greater and greater in glory.

But there was a mistake that was made by the people of God as they witnessed the outward glory of the temple.

They forgot the thing itself.

Because what was the temple, what was the first tent?

What was it there for?

Why was it in that pattern?

It was in that pattern so that the people of God in worshiping him might be reminded, that their hearts might be called up to the reality of God in the heavens, that they might recognize God dwells in unapproachable glory, that he is in unapproachable light that we cannot participate in.

But through this temple, what we see as it shows us this unapproachable glory of God in the heavens, we see that this same God will come down to his people because of his loving kindness and grace towards us, and that he himself might dwell among us.

See, what they had thought was that this temple was a mechanism by which they might ascend into the heavens.

But it is not.

You know this story.

And as he passed through, he was thirsty.

So he sat down at noon at noon and he sat at a well.

And what's at wells in the Bible?

Women.

That's right.

Women are at wells in the Bible.

And so he sits down at a well in the Bible, he sits down at a well, and a woman comes to draw water, a Samaritan woman.

And Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

And they strike up a conversation with the woman.

Jesus strikes up a conversation with the woman at the well, and the conversation gets a bit personal, and so she turns it into something a bit more corporate and asks where the appropriate worship of God is to take place.

The Samaritans and the Jews contradicted one another in where they said the true worship of God was to take place.

The Samaritans had corrupted the scriptures that were given by God, and they had corrupted them to say that the true worship of God was to take place on Mount Gerizim, which is in Samaria.

But the true worship of God was meant to take place at the true temple, which is in Jerusalem, on that mountain.

And so in the midst of this conversation, the woman of Samaria asks Jesus this.

This is from the Gospel of John chapter 4, verses 20 and 21.

John 4:20

She says, Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.

Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me.

The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.

The question is dead simple.

Here's the argument that takes place between Jews and Samaritans.

Do we worship on Mount Gerizim or do we worship on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem?

These are the options.

Jesus, you seem to be a great teacher.

Will you solve this riddle for me?

And instead, he completely breaks her frame.

He completely deconstructs the way that she is asking the question.

He comes into the argument and he destroys the whole premise of the question.

Because he says, This, woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.

She says, I didn't expect that answer.

In verse 22, it says, You worship what you do not know, he says to her, You worship what you do not know.

We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.

She, a Samaritan, she's worshiping what she doesn't know.

She's worshiping a corrupted scripture, although sincerely, it's wrong worship.

And he explains to her, salvation is from the Jews.

The true scriptures that we've been handed down, those are the truth of the matter.

But, he says, the hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.

For the Father is seeking such people to worship him.

Verse 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

The hour is coming and is now here, when the true were where the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.

The Father is seeking such people to worship him.

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.

Okay.

How has he broken the frame?

Why is it that he what is he saying about the worship that's taken place?

What Jesus is saying is that the worship that is taking place at the temple as it is now is idolatrous worship.

Because it's not worship that is in spirit and in truth.

What does that mean for the worship of God to be in spirit and in truth?

It means that you are not worshiping the copy of the copy.

You are worshiping what the copy means.

You are worshiping what the tent means, who the tent is meant to call you to.

Now, why must we worship God like that?

Because look at this.

This is such a strong argument.

He says, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

That means if the people of God had perfectly kept the ordinances that God had given to them for their worship, if they had perfectly fulfilled the sacrifices in exactly the way that He had called them to, in the priestly role in exactly the way that it had that He had established for them to do.

But they did not do that in such a way where their spirit was worshiping the true God in the heavens.

It was worse than idolatry.

It was worse than idolatry to find themselves in that pattern.

But God Himself is spirit, so that means we must worship him in spirit and in truth.

God himself is spirit.

Why must God be worshipped in the spirit and in truth?

Because God is spirit.

See, the problem is not the temple.

The problem was they had forgotten what the temple meant.

They had thought of the temple.

Here's the way that they had thought of it.

They treated the temple as an idolatrous mechanism by which they might twist the hand of God in order to mandate to God that they must be saved because of their obedience.

They treated their religious practices as ways of rising up to the level of God, so that God must obey what they did.

Now that is the definition of idolatrous worship.

That they had come to God and they had utilized their own obedience to him as a way to twist God's arm so that God might obey them.

This is idolatrous worship, because they had forgotten the nature of the temple.

But Stephen has not forgotten the nature of God.

He has not forgotten that God has always required true worship in spirit and in truth.

Here's the brutal reality that he brings them to.

He says in verses forty-eight through fifty, he says, Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands.

As the prophet says, Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool.

What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord?

Or what is the place of my rest?

Did not my hand make all these things?

This is the picture of God that we must receive, that we must be able to understand.

All that God, all that we have that we think we might offer to God, He has made.

That is not the nature of our relationship with God.

Many of you are stuck in this pattern of thinking, the very pattern of thinking that the Sanhedrin are in.

And because of it, you have a refusal in your heart to receive the free grace that the Lord offers to you.

Instead, here is your approach to the Lord.

You look back on your week and you think, it's been pretty good, God.

I didn't fall into that same pattern of sin that I had fallen to before.

And because it's been pretty good in that way, Lord, you owe me.

I must begin to see some blessing for this.

I must begin to, I'm, I must, I gotta have something to show, Lord, that you owe me now from the way that I have been honoring you, the way that I've been worshiping you, the way that I've crafted my life towards you in some way.

And what you're doing is it's the same as idolatry.

Or you have this pattern of sin that's taking place in your life, and you feel enslaved and trapped by it, or one great sin that you refuse to let go of.

And because you live a life that is haunted by this one great sin, perhaps it's this disposition that you find within yourself, this weakness of character that you find within yourself.

So what you do is you start organizing your life to ignore that aspect of yourself, but to make up for it in some other way.

To make up for it in diligence in some other area, or to make up for it in some narrative which gives you relief, you know, some narrative of harm that's been done to you that justifies the way that you've been acting.

Some pattern of transformation that does not match the pattern of what true transformation is in the scriptures, which is we die and then we're born again.

And therefore we relate to God in the same idolatrous way.

Because here's the truth.

The truth of it is we have been saved.

He is the one who comes to us, and he gives it to us freely.

In Acts 7.51, as he reaches this point, this climactic point of the reality of their idolatrous worship, he turns straight to the Sanhedrin.

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit.

As your fathers did, so do you.

This is the first line of the gospel.

We must realize that even the mechanisms that we have used to earn God's good graces are denial of his graciousness towards us.

They are a desire to remain God of our own lives.

And he shows this to the Sanhedrin.

He says, You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit.

As your fathers did, so do you.

You can hear the Holy Spirit which gave the voice to the prophets.

He is taking up this prophetic voice as he speaks to the Sanhedrin now.

And he declares over them the same curses which were declared over that generation in the wilderness which refused to enter the promised land under the promises of God.

They were called a stiff necked people.

These are the places we participate by the Spirit.

In our heart before God, in our ears before.

In hearing his word.

We remember that we come to God in the spirit.

To call them uncircumcised, the Sanhedrin, they are circumcised in the flesh, but it means nothing.

Because in their spirit they deny who God is.

He is saying that these people who think of themselves as the ones who are who decide who is the people of God and who is not the people of God, he is saying to them, You are not the people of God.

You have all of the external markers, you have all of the external markers, and your spirit is uncircumcised.

He continues on in verses 52 through 53.

Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?

He says, And they killed those 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.

This is the point of the whole speech that he had given.

There is one who came and truly worshipped in spirit and in truth, and they hated it.

Why do we hate when we see true worship in spirit and in truth?

Why does our flesh hate to see the true worship in spirit and in truth?

Because it reveals to us our hypocrisy.

It reveals to us our hiding.

It reveals to us that the religious acts of our life that are not done in spirit and in truth are done as mechanisms of manipulating God.

And that if when we stand before him and he sees this false worship that we've offered up to him, we know that he will deny it.

Because it was not the true worship of him.

And so he declares to this room that murdered Jesus Christ, you murdered the righteous one.

That has been done by you.

And this is where the speech terminates.

It comes to an end and a point on Jesus Christ, the murdered one.

Now Stephen knows, and what will happen as a result of this, and Stephen, he must have known that in bringing it to this point, he would receive the very fate that was given to Jesus by this same group of people.

And what we'll look at next week is Stephen will be cut off now from his speech.

And at the declaration of them murdering the righteous one, at the accusation that he made against them, he will be stoned.

They will pick up stones and they will hurl them at him until he dies.

He will be stoned by this group.

Stoned for proclaiming what?

You know, he gets stoned right before.

I wish there were a better way to say that.

You know.

Most commentators, and even John Calvin, so I do what Calvin says, say that he was he was cut off.

There was more to go.

There was more to go in his speech.

You know, I think there was.

He had successfully defended himself, but there was more to go in his speech than just the declaration of Jesus being the righteous one whom they had murdered.

But the men in the room are so offended.

They're so re it it reveals the depths of their sin and misery so much that what they do instead of hearing the rest of the news is they turn on him and they kill him.

And that can happen.

That can happen.

But the rest of the news that he would have had to share was there is salvation in the name of Jesus Christ, even for those who murdered him.

But how do you receive a grace like that?

How do you receive such a graciousness from the Lord?

What do you point to if you stand before God, and this is the offer of salvation?

Forgiveness of sins by the blood of the one you murdered.

If you stand before God and that's the offer of salvation, what do you turn to of that's your own, that belongs to you, that you say, Lord, I give you this as a reason for saving me.

I give you my own good works.

Lord, I give you the precision of my theology.

Lord, I give you the way that I had structured my family, I give you the way that I learned to gain some self-control.

I give you these, I give you whatever it is, whatever you think it might be.

How do you offer that up to God when the offering next to it is the blood of his son, which he laid down for you?

You realize that there is nothing you could offer him.

Instead, the place that we stand in to receive our salvation is only under the blood of Jesus Christ.

And the truth of the reality that he died for our sins.

Then you know what happens there after that incision is made?

What do we stand before God offering?

We stand before God and we say, we say something like this, like this: nothing in my hands I bring.

Simply to the cross, I cling.

His sacrifice is the only sacrifice sufficient for me to be saved.

It is the only sacrifice sufficient for me to be saved.

And then you know what happens?

The gospel is heard.

An effectual calling is made in our hearts.

That's what causes this to happen.

And by the effectual calling, we're able to know our own sin and misery.

And in knowing our own sin and misery, we say there's nothing that I can offer to the Lord that I might be saved.

Nothing.

But in seeing that there's nothing that we can offer, and the death that that is, it's like looking at the life that we've made and trying to offer to God, and God's saying, it's worthless to me.

It does nothing for me.

It's not a sufficient offering.

But then we see Christ, his sacrifice on our behalf, that frees us from sin, and that cuts out our old heart and gives us a new heart.

Cuts out our heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh.

That's what the gospel has an opportunity to do.

So Stephen brings it to a point because he knows that in sharing the gospel, he's doing heart transplant surgery.

And so he must cut.

What I want to say to you today is if you feel that cut happening, if you feel the reality of your sin being exposed to you in your heart, if you recognize the reality of your sin and misery, do not stop there.

Don't harden your heart towards it.

Don't take up the stone and flee from it.

There is life on the other side of this.

Glory and resurrection is on the side of that death of our old hearts.

And that's offered to us freely in Jesus Christ our Lord.

He is the one who can transform our hearts.

That's the proclamation that Stephen makes.

Do not cut it off like the ones who heard it from him cut it off.

It is an offer of life and freedom in him.

Let's pray.

Holy Father, I pray that you would work in our hearts to recognize just how deeply we need your grace.

Lord, I pray that you would, in seeing the true, the true pattern of the heavens that's shown to us, the pattern of the gospel in Jesus Christ, which has been fully revealed now in Jesus Christ.

Lord, I pray that we might trust fully in your gospel for our salvation.

And that in trusting it, we might trust it as the hope of the world.

So that we would no longer consider our lives as something worth clinging to.

But we might lay them down in the pattern of Jesus Christ, in the pattern of Stephen, knowing that we know the one who will save us.

So that your glory might be made known.

Give us a spirit like Stephen's, Lord, so that your name might be courageously proclaimed.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.