Analog Church 01: Witness

Acts 1, 1 through 11.

In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.

He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.

And while staying with them, he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, You heard from me, for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel?

He said to them, It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.

And when he had said these things as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.

And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?

This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to Church This Morning.

We are starting a new series.

It's called Analog Church.

And so this is all part of the plan to not have any digital projection.

This is all gonna be analog this morning.

No digital.

That was a joke.

It's not part of the plan.

We are having screen issues right now.

But anyway, welcome to church this morning.

Thanks so much for joining us.

It's great to see you all.

We are uh uh, like I said, we we are Redemption Church.

My name is James Rathman, I'm the lead pastor here.

Uh there are a couple of ways to get involved, and literally just a couple.

You can uh join us at Redemption Church during our large gatherings on Sunday mornings, which if you are hearing this, you are.

And you can also join us uh in our smaller gatherings, uh, which are our redemption groups.

Now those are actually starting this week.

So redemption, this is an exciting week because redemption groups launch.

And uh yeah, you can go ahead and sign up for those.

The place that you can sign up for those are at the is at the welcome table, which also launched this morning.

So we have a welcome table now, which you can go to and be welcomed by.

Um so with that, we have a request for all of you.

Whether you want to be involved with a redemption group or you've been coming for a long time, or you're this is your first Sunday, our request is that some point over the next month, you would go down to the welcome table and meet someone wearing a shirt just like this, who'll be holding an iPad, and give them a uh uh, they'll have a form to fill out.

We're basically trying to get all of the data that we have on our church up to date and up to speed uh with the transition into basically new data for Redemption Church.

And one of the reasons we want to do that is A, to so that we're sending you the right information for you, B, so that we can know who we are, so that we can make better decisions for our church, um, as well as realize who we're not connecting with, so that we can uh sort of better understand how we can be making a bigger impact in the city.

And lastly, we want to be able to welcome specifically those who are visiting for the first time or the first couple of times.

And the only way we know they're new is if everyone signs up when we have a baseline of data.

Uh does that make sense?

Mm-hmm.

So what's the what's the goal?

What's what's your job?

Sign up.

Sign up, exactly.

So head downstairs to the welcome table, find someone with an iPad, and sign up.

Okay.

So yeah, a lot of new stuff this week.

This is an exciting week.

Um this is much more exciting than Apple's week, where all their new stuff was the same stuff.

All right, so this is our new series uh called Analog Church.

It's called A Million Dollars.

We'll keep practicing.

So uh that was really cool.

That was worth the technical difficulty and the stress on Zach.

Okay, so uh uh this is our new series.

All right, I'm gonna tell a quick story.

So this morning I drove through Starbucks on my way here because I had to get my PSL, and there was the man who was d giving me my credit card back through the drive-thru window.

He took my credit card and then he goes to hand it back to me, and he just bam right into the glass of the drive-thru.

And it was so funny, and I just knew right then and there this is gonna be a good day.

All right.

Uh okay, so we're in it, we're entering our new series.

Uh, but before we do that, let's get a picture of where we are in the year.

We've laid out the series that we're the sermon series that we're moving through throughout the year in a pretty intentional manner.

And what we've tried to do is arc everything towards this one purpose of rediscovering a sense of wonder at the fundamentals of our faith.

So that's looking at these things in our faith that we may have considered basic or overdone or whatever, and uh they've become so familiar that they're sort of like a coin where the embossment has worn off.

We can't really tell what it is anymore.

We can't see the wonder of what it represents.

And our goal throughout this year was to rediscover that sense of wonder at the fundamentals of our faith.

So the way that we did that was we started with a series on the kingdom, and we looked at the focus of Jesus' teaching ministry in a series called Your Kingdom Come.

And we followed Jesus' teachings, his parables on the kingdom, so that we could see what is this thing, this kingdom of heaven, that was the focus of Jesus' ministry, that he said was the main thing that he came to teach was the kingdom of heaven, to preach the kingdom of heaven.

And when we were looking through those parables, what we see is that there's almost always this delineation of you're in the kingdom or you're out of the kingdom.

One of the main ways that Jesus describes the kingdom is by describing it in terms of how you know you're in it or how you know you're out of it.

And so we wanted to leave that series sort of provoking this question: the kingdom of heaven sounds really good.

Am I in it?

How do I know if I am in it?

Is that something that can be known on this side of death?

And that's why we moved into uh John's letter, the letter 1 John.

And we spent a long time in 1 John.

It was like 13 weeks, um, so you did it.

You hung in there.

And uh throughout that letter, we saw how John was teaching how we can have a confidence in our faith before God.

How is it that we can reflectively know that we are in the kingdom, that we have been united to Christ, and so that we can move confidently in that knowledge.

And we saw that that's something that John believes and teaches is really available to us.

We really can have that type of confidence in the faith.

And so I know from conversations with many of you that that question has been uh has caused quite a bit of turmoil in your heart in terms of uh I don't feel like I have that confidence.

And I still feel like I don't really know where to go and how to get it.

And I just want to encourage you to continue wrestling with that.

And we're going to continue wrestling with that question, but in a new way throughout this series.

We're going to assume if you had that confidence, the type of confidence that John promises, that John says, if you look at your life and you see the work of the Spirit in it, you see that you're able to love your neighbor, you see that you are able to be obedient to God, you see that you have faith in his promises, if you see the evidence of the Spirit in your life like that, you can have confidence before God.

If you have that type of confidence, how should you live?

What type of life would you have if you had that type of confidence before the Lord?

And as we move into this series, which will cover the first four chapters of Acts, we're going to see that question answered in a way.

We're going to see that it takes into consideration this thing we learned early on in John, which is that type of confidence always takes place in the context of community.

We require each other to experience that type of confidence before the Lord.

We require the experience of repenting and forgiving one another.

We require the experience of loving and being loved by each other in order to know in our hearts that we stand confidently before the Lord.

And so that group of people who stand confidently before the Lord, reinforcing each other's confidence in their understanding of what Christ has accomplished for them, that group of people is called the church.

And Acts is about the beginning of the church, the creation of the church and our entry into the church age.

And as we look at the church in Acts, we're going to see it in its initial moments.

Luke, the author of Acts, captures the history of the church in these in its first initial, immediate moments.

And in that, we're going to see what the intention of the church was from day one.

Day one, you have a particular type of clarity, where you really know who you are.

And as we see what the church was in that day one type of moment of clarity, that church will act as a sort of analog, like an analogy for the type of church we should be today.

So that's the name of our series: Analog Church.

We have an analogy in the early church that we can learn from as our church, us together.

The type of church we're called to be.

So in uh I want to revisit this idea of day one type of clarity.

In uh 2017, Amazon.com had a all hands meeting, and you were probably all there because we all work for them now, I think.

Um uh Redemption Church was recently acquired.

And we are uh Jeff Bezos uh spoke at it.

Uh Jeff Bezos, he's the king of uh the world.

And uh he has this slogan for Amazon that uh it's always day one.

So like you walk in, there's signs over, you know, it's like it's day one, and you hit it when you go out to ship stuff.

And they uh uh he has this slogan, it's always day one.

And so at this 2017 All Hands meeting, somebody asked him, okay, so what does day two look like?

It's kind of a tongue-in-cheek question.

Like if it's always day one at Amazon, what does day two look like?

And this was his answer.

He says, day two is stasis followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating painful decline, followed by death.

And that is why it is always day one.

It's a company with focus, focus on world domination.

Um, don't knock it till you've tried it.

So when we look at the early church, we are seeing a church with a clear, a clarity of intent.

They learn precisely why they exist, precisely why they gather, precisely why they need each other, precisely what their mission is that they're looking to accomplish in the world.

And here's the thing nobody starts a church thinking, you know, I have all these preferences, and I want to express these preferences in the world.

And so I'm going to start a church that's uh going to have a very strict dress code, and it's going to uh have a a really a really deep and intricate language that's hard to learn, and so it makes it hard for people to get connected with us.

Uh, and we're going to be very argumentative about very petty things, and that's going to be my church.

Nobody starts a church like that.

That's no, that's no one's day one, that's no one's clarity of intent, but it happens.

How many of you have been to a church like that?

Okay, there's like three honest people here.

So there's uh we all have been.

We've all been to a church like that.

And there's a, well, maybe you haven't.

I don't know.

This could be your first time at church, and I hope we're not like that.

Uh we're I'm but I'm sure we are about certain things.

Here's what we're trying to refocus on.

What are all these preferences for?

What are all these tiny details and tiny little decisions that we put together to cobble together a service and to connect with each other throughout the week?

What are these things for?

Are we here to start a service or are we here to start a church?

And if a church is really operating in the world, like a movement, like the type of body it's supposed to be, it should have transformative effects.

And we see that the early church does.

The early church has that day one clarity of intent.

And we're gonna see what that is.

It's an analog for us.

We can borrow that same clarity of intent for us today.

This can be our day one.

So, in order to look at this, the first thing we're gonna look at is just how unlikely the spread of Christianity was.

It can be hard to tell from our moment in history, looking back at just how strange Christianity's spread really was.

From where we stand, it seems kind of inevitable because we've been so influenced by it.

Christianity has become the folk religion of the West, where it's impacted all of our assumptions, all of our ways of thinking, from our education systems to our political systems to the way that we run business.

It's in everything.

And because of that, there's this aspect of Christianity where it feels inevitable.

Things had to go this way.

But when you look at it at its birth in this strange historical moment, you see this had everything stacked against it.

How did it work?

It seems wildly unlikely.

So the uh there's a professor of history at Penn State University.

He wrote this article on eon.co, which is like one of my favorite websites ever.

If you've been here for a little amount of time, you know I'm obsessed with it.

And the article is called Christians Were Strangers.

And he's revisiting this idea of when Christians were strangers.

They were these strangers and aliens, they were uh this unaccounted for group of people.

And he says uh this he says, apart from the small and ethnically circumscribed exception of the Jews, the ancient world had never known an exclusivist faith.

So the rapid success of early Christianity is a historical anomaly.

Moreover, because some form of Christianity is a foundational part of so many people's lives and identities, the Christianization of the Roman Empire feels perennially relevant.

Something that is about us in a way a lot of ancient history simply is not.

See what he's saying there?

There's this small group, the Jewish people who are the exception to the rule and that they have an exclusivist faith.

And then out of this small group of people is birthed this explosive movement across the whole world, which is Christianity, also an exclusive faith.

And he's saying it can be a hard history to study because it impacts us so personally, at such a personal level, that we can look back and see it and neglect to see just what a historical anomaly Christianity is.

And so as we look at this today, we're asking the question: why did Christianity happen?

How did it take place?

How did this uh this tiny corner of the Roman Empire, this one strange rabbi who gets in conflict with the elders and his particular religion, end up launching this explosive force that in at an incredible pace for ancient history and even at an incredible pace for modern history, takes over the whole world in a matter of 200 or 300 years?

It's outrageous.

It's such strange, rapid growth.

So, what ingredients did Christianity have that made it so resilient to persecution because it was attacked immediately and through its most formative years?

What made it unbound by cultural distinctions such that uh it was not bound by gender, accepted equally by men and women.

In fact, when you survey Paul's letters, at the end of his letters, when he's thanking a lot of people, he thanks more women than he does men.

So it seems as though it was actually connecting more with women initially.

So it's not bound by these gendered barriers, it's not bound by race.

There's neither Jew nor Greek.

We see early on in Acts an Ethiopian converted right off the bat.

It is not bound by nationality as it spreads out of the Roman Empire, it is not bound by economic position.

It's commonly thought that Christianity really took off among the poor and disenfranchised.

But when you actually survey the data that we have, it was just as much exploding in the uh wealthy stratus of society as well.

It didn't know any of these normal boundaries that every other movement in history seems to move through, like a river throws through a flows through a canyon.

And yet instead, Christianity is just constantly overflowing its banks.

What ingredients did this movement have that make this incredibly unique explosion happen in world history?

What happened 2,000 years ago in this tiny corner of the Roman Empire?

What we're looking at when we look at the book of Acts throughout the rest of the series is not an account from the outside looking in onto Christianity and saying, okay, what sociological factors were present in the Roman Empire at the time that would reinforce this type of a spread?

Not saying that's not a project worth doing, that's not the project we're doing.

The project that we're doing is what is Christianity's own account of its spread?

What is the story that Christians tell themselves?

What is the story that we see from Scripture accounting for this type of a spread?

And I think you'll see that as we look at the story that Christianity tells itself, it's actually the most credible one.

It's the one that makes the most sense.

It doesn't mince words about its weaknesses, and it shows that its strength was from one place that's as supernatural as it seems.

So that's what we're going to be looking at as we move through the book of Acts.

So let's go ahead and start.

Acts 1, 1 to 3.

It says, in the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.

He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking.

About the kingdom of God.

Okay, so this book is written by Luke.

It is a sequel.

So we're starting with Empire Strikes Back, and there is a reference to the first book that Luke wrote, which was the Gospel of Luke.

They're both written to the same person named Theophilus, likely commissioned Luke to write these historical accounts.

And so the first book is the Gospel of Luke, in which he says that he covered, he has dealt with, all that Jesus began to do and teach.

Now here's what you would expect when Luke is writing a book about Jesus when Jesus is no longer present.

You would expect that he would have said, I have dealt with all that Jesus did and taught.

But that's not what he says.

He says, in the previous book, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.

His implication is Jesus hasn't stopped doing and teaching.

We're going to continue looking at Jesus' ministry.

How can that be when he isn't immediately present?

Luke's going to explain that, but he wants to be clear up front that this whole project is grounded in the ministry of one person, and that is Christ.

This whole Christian project, this whole anomaly, when the Christians understand the story to themselves, it's grounded in one person, which is Christ.

And it's his ministry that he began to do and teach.

It hasn't ceased, and we're continuing to track that ministry.

Luke adds this delineation where he says that there is a breaking point from his previous book, which is that it only covers until the day when he was taken up.

And that's an event that Luke will cover shortly.

And before Jesus was taken up, he gave commandments through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.

So Luke, in a couple of verses, he grounds who is doing the ministry, which is Jesus, and then he introduces the main characters of this book, which are the apostles, who Jesus chose.

Jesus himself chose this small group of people called the apostles, which just means people who are sent.

And he chose them and witnessed to them by the Holy Spirit, commanding them to be his sent witnesses.

And the book of Acts is the story of those apostles who follow the command, empowered by the Holy Spirit, go into the world and witness on behalf of Christ.

Finally, this last verse says, He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them over a period of 40 days, speaking about the kingdom of God.

Here's what we need to see.

The apostles were made credible witnesses.

This was not some one-time interaction that they had with the resurrected Christ.

But Jesus spends like a month and a half with them, showing them, look, it's really me.

You can reestablish your connection with really me.

The one that you saw die on the cross, I'm here.

We're eating and we're drinking together.

You can understand that this resurrection really happened, and they can hope in that.

For over 40 days, the apostles were made uniquely credible witnesses in a way that no one else had been.

And finally, during that time, Jesus is speaking to them about the very thing that he had been speaking about his entire earthly ministry, which is the kingdom of God.

It all focuses on this announcement of the kingdom and the king.

And the apostles are called to witness to that.

So that's what we'll see here.

So we see that this whole project of the sent apostles who are made credible witnesses to witness on behalf of Jesus, Luke sees this entire project as grounded in the person of Christ.

It's all grounded in witnessing to who Jesus is and what Jesus has done.

That's what sparks the movement of the church.

That's the clear vision and direction of the church.

It's nothing other than that.

And you think of what sparks other movements and you see how unique this actually is.

You see, his movement was not sparked by the recognition of an oppressor.

His movement was not sparked by a realization of his own, of their own economic disenfranchisement.

That's not what sparked the movement.

Movements get sparked that way.

It's not inappropriate for movements to be sparked that way, but it is unique for a movement to be sparked by the announcement of a good king.

A movement to be sparked not in opposition to some bad news, but a movement to be truly motivated internally, intrinsically by this good news.

And that good news is who Jesus is, that Christ is the king.

That's the foundation for this whole project of the church.

Sent witnesses.

So as Luke continues, we have this group, the apostles, which seem to be this really special group, selected, hand chosen by Jesus to be his witnesses, sent by Jesus, equipped by Jesus to be credible in this unique way, as he was spending all this time with him over these 40 days.

So in order that we don't get too high a view of the apostles, Luke starts the story by showing just how wildly inadequate they are.

This task, this announcement of a new king to the world, they are completely insufficient for, and they prove it right away.

So first let's look at a couple of warning signs that start to develop, and then a question that they ask that makes them look really dumb.

Alright, Acts 1, 4 to 6.

And while staying with them, he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, You heard from me.

For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

It's nice when Jesus promises you something and is like, it's just gonna be a couple days.

I'm like waiting for a promise from Jesus like that.

Like it'll just be like two more days, hang on.

It's like, all right.

I'll keep watching Netflix.

So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?

So a couple of takeaways from this.

First of all, Jesus says, don't leave Jerusalem.

Why does he say don't leave Jerusalem?

Because they really wanted to leave Jerusalem.

It had just been a month and a half ago that their leader had been executed by the authorities in Jerusalem.

It hadn't really cooled down there.

And so for them to be still continue to be hanging out with this guy puts them in a very precarious position in that city.

And he's saying, Stay here.

I'm going to start this here.

And I want you all to be together and unified on this project.

So Jesus sort of gets ahead of their desire to flee.

Next, he gives them this incredible promise.

Only a couple days from now, do you remember how I've been saying from the beginning, John, who you loved and respected, baptized with water, I'm going to be baptizing you with the Holy Spirit.

Just as I promised in Isaiah and Ezekiel, as I promised to these prophets of old, that one day you, a person, a fickled, fragile person like you, sinful, evil person like you, will be filled with the Holy Spirit of God.

The same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will dwell in you.

It will animate your life and draw you towards me.

You won't need to be taught what's right and wrong.

It will be written on your heart.

This is the heights of a possible promise that could be made to a human that our heart of stone might be replaced with the very spirit that raised Christ from the dead.

And here's how the apostles respond.

Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?

Now I know what you're thinking.

That doesn't seem like that bad of a question.

It's a really bad question.

So John Calvin has one of my favorite uh quotes in a commentary ever about this question.

He says, There are as many problems with this question as there are words.

Oh, burn.

JC.

So let's look at all the problems with this question.

First of all, what it reveals is their small-mindedness about this incredible promise that Jesus had just given them.

First, they say, at this time, Lord, will you at this time?

They expected the kingdom to be established not by a long struggle with suffering that they would actually share and participate in.

They expected the kingdom to be established in a flash, in a moment.

Jesus would come back, he has returned, and he would make the kingdom.

All their problems would just go away.

And they would all of a sudden be living as kings themselves in this heavenly realm.

And they could look down on their previous oppressors, and they could then be the kings in glory.

They wanted something immediate.

Jesus was starting a project that would last millennia.

The difference is the way that they would experience the hardship would be totally different.

Because they would now be empowered by the Spirit to endure it.

And it wouldn't be breaking them down.

In fact, all the hardship they would face would be building them up.

But that's not the way they saw it.

They thought, at this time, will you immediately restore this kingdom?

Next, this word restore.

Restore shows that they didn't have a future orientation, they had a past orientation.

They weren't having faith in what Jesus was going to do.

They were having a hope to return to what they had seen God already do.

They thought that the kingdom, the heights of the kingdom, had already been experienced by Israel.

Under King Solomon, Israel sees its greatest days, its most glorious days.

And they were hoping for a return to that sort of a state where they were no longer politically oppressed by the Romans.

Instead, they were the ones in charge.

They had the power.

But what Jesus is doing with this project, the kingdom that he is starting, that he is a king over, is not a political kingdom.

It's not so small.

It's not a restoration to just lots of gold and jewels and luxuries that they had previously had.

It's much more adventurous than that.

The kingdom that Jesus is making is not a restoration of the previous kingdom of Israel.

In fact, the only analogy for the kingdom that Jesus is making is the creation itself.

Because he is making all things new.

All of the places in life where the effects of sin have corrupted the way that we live, starting with our own hearts.

And that's a good place to start, right?

Because think of who do you lie to more than yourself?

Whose expectations do you disappoint more than your own?

Imagine the joy that could be brought back.

If God could come in and by his spirit make your own heart right.

And then if he could overflow that into the rest of the world, that's the type of kingdom that Jesus is talking about.

It is not just a return to political autonomy.

And finally, they narrow it down and say, Is this just, are you restoring the kingdom to Israel?

And Jesus' kingdom is for all.

It is the redemption of all creation.

So we see that they are incredibly small-minded.

And Jesus sees these witnesses whom he has picked, whom he has been preaching about his kingdom with for the past three years at least, and for the past 40 days after resurrection.

Like, what's a guy gotta do to get credibility in this town?

And they still don't get it.

They're so deeply inadequate, they're so captivated by the luxuries of this world, by the desire for relief from their own discomfort, that they don't see the promise of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus is holding out to them.

But Jesus hears that and he confronts their wrong, he comforts their inadequacy, and then he commissions them to be his witnesses.

That's three C's, so you know it's true.

He said to them, It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.

First, he confronts their wrong, and the uniqueness of their wrong is how prideful it is.

They're asking questions about times and seasons, and they know very well that those belong to God.

That we are creatures that exist within time, we're trapped.

We are creatures that exist within physicality, we're trapped in it.

There is no getting out of it.

Our job, required by God, is to relate to Him as the creatures with the boundaries that He created us for.

To not say we'll be faithful with you once you reveal what your future is for us, but to say, we will be faithful with you in the present that you have given us, because you are God and we are the creature, and you know what is best for me and my soul and the care for it, and I don't.

In order to live with any sort of peace, we have to have the humility to let what is God's be God's, and to not take those into us as a creature.

We have to wake up every morning and say, I don't know what today holds.

And all my worries is my way of saying, I'm God, I can know the future.

I know what this will turn out to be.

It takes incredible humility to say, I don't know.

God does.

I know him.

So I'm going to trust him.

He confronts their arrogance.

Second, he comforts their inadequacy.

He says, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses.

These inadequate people have given him every reason to not choose them.

He says, I'm going to give you my spirit.

And that will be the power you need.

I will make you adequate.

I will make you, by my spirit, working in you, I will make you understand what the kingdom is that is really coming.

You will know it will be written on your hearts.

You will see it in my word, and when you read my word, it will no longer be this debate in your soul of how can I trust this or how can I move through this.

It will be self-evidently true.

That's the way the Spirit will work in our hearts.

And so he comforts their inadequacy and finally he commissions them.

This is likely the thesis verse of the whole book of Acts, Acts 1-8.

When Jesus says, You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.

That's the outline of what we're going to see happen.

And it's the story that we are in.

The story that we are in is that ends of the earth part.

We're here.

It worked.

Somehow, with these inadequate witnesses, whose only role was to witness to Jesus, and yet they were inadequate to do that, was to speak to the kingdom, and yet we see right when they were about to get started, they had no idea what that meant.

Instructed by Jesus himself and didn't know what it meant.

How does that Christianity spread?

The answer is next, which is that it had the only adequate king.

So when Jesus said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.

And while they were gazing into heaven, as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?

This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.

What we see happen in this moment, this strange moment, where if you were half listening and you thought, it kind of sounded like he just read that Jesus flew up into the sky and they couldn't see him again, then you were probably whole listening, because that's what I read.

Jesus lifts up into the sky, but what's happening there?

He is ascending to his rightful place in the throne room of heaven.

He is taking his place as king of all creation, king of the whole universe, and that's the good news.

The good news is that a world who had no king and had become utterly corrupted by sin, and who Satan had been able to fill that power vacuum in our own hearts and then in creation generally, now has the rightful king on the throne.

And so Jesus gives them the very thing that they need to bear witness to.

He shows his apostles, look, I'm the king, you bear witness to me.

I'm going to the heavenly throne room, watch how I get there.

One of the only things that could possibly account for the explosion of Christianity and the way that it happened in world history is if Jesus really is on the throne.

If Jesus himself, if his ministry didn't cease with the gospel of Luke, but if that was only what he began to do and teach.

And if the announcement is this good news that the right king is back on the throne, and he can be back on the throne of our hearts individually, and then he's back on the throne of the universe.

That's what heaven is.

We don't have very good concepts of heaven because they're informed by bad medieval paintings, where like everyone is a baby.

We don't have good impressions of what heaven is.

Here's a metaphor for heaven that's going to be very, very, very inadequate.

Have you seen the Truman show?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That was my impression of you.

So if I ever run into all of you, uh, I'll do my impression of you.

So uh the moon in the Truman Show.

Do you remember the moon and the sun?

I think it was both, the moon and the sun.

That was like the control room of the Truman Show set.

And when you were in the moon, you could sort of access everything and you were in control of whatever happened there.

That's the way heaven relates to earth.

When Jesus is in heaven, he can make this promise of, I will be with you always.

And it's like, well, is that how is that?

Because you were up there and I saw you go away.

It's because that's the way heaven relates to us.

It's this control room of everything.

So we can have this utter faith that Christ as the king is on the throne.

He is in control.

In a much more immediate way than the Truman Show illustration.

But it's better than babies.

Look, this is the end of every great story.

The right king gets back on the throne.

It's the end of the Lion King, when Simba beats Scar, and then he goes and he makes that epic roar on Pride Rock, and then you zoom out, and there's a time lapse, and all of the pride lands become green again.

Why?

Because the right king was on the throne.

That's what we witness to.

Why is the world as corrupt as it is?

We've had the wrong king.

But there's good news.

The right king is back on the throne.

And he's going to be restoring everything.

Gladiator, when he kills Joachim Phoenix, which is his name in the movie.

And he at the end he's king for a moment.

And he hands the power back over to the people.

So Rome was a republic again.

What was the good news?

We for a moment everything was fixed because we had the right king on the throne.

The Lord of the Rings.

You know the name of the last book?

Return of the King.

What do you think?

Tolkien just dreamed that up?

No, this is the only story.

It's a tale as old as time.

It's a song as old as rhyme, Beauty and the Beast.

The final scene.

The king it finally becomes the good king again, and then everyone immediately magically transforms into who they were supposed to be.

They were no longer corrupted into just these objects.

They were fully human again.

That's a good reading of that.

That's what we bear witness to.

Why does the church work?

Why does it seem to keep going when you see this incredible inadequacy in it, in its leaders, in its participants?

The explanation that the Bible gives that Christ really is on the throne, guiding it.

He really has empowered us by his spirit.

And we are called to bear witness to that fact.

When we think of growing a church, what we're aiming a church at.

Church is described as the pillar and buttress of the truth.

A pillar holds up the roof, and a buttress holds up a pillar.

These are just supports.

We're just witnesses.

We hold up a great news.

And that news is great for us and for the whole world, and that's that Jesus is the king.

It's the explanation for whatever success the church has had.

So that's what we're going to be looking at.

How these inadequate apostles spread this great news.

And it's going to be an analogy for how we can do the same.

So, with that, we're going to take one question, and only one, hopefully the most popular question.

Afterwards, after the service, if your question wasn't taken or you'd like to discuss questions further, I'm going to be right here, and we're going to take some time.

That'll just be a continued open form QA.

So we're mixing that up.

Okay.

And the question is hard to read when it's not right there.

In the process, is the process of the Holy Spirit coming upon one in the baptism?

Jesus references in these verses, typically a cognizant or conscious experience, or is it something that takes place with one oblivious to the happening, or is it somewhere in between?

Okay, so there's a lot to say here because we can talk about the whole, like, what is the process of our salvation like?

Like, what is our call?

What is our justification?

What is our glorification or sanctification?

What is the process or the rhythm of the events of our salvation like?

And I imagine the question is uh how do I know if this is something that's happened to me?

Is that something that happens in a flash that I'm aware of?

And here's what I'm gonna say.

I don't know what happens simultaneously or what happens prior or how this all plays out in the consciousness of any given person.

Here's what I do know.

When the Holy Spirit rescues you, it works like this.

You are blind.

And now you can see.

And when you when can you see?

Is it when the first photons hit your eyes and it registers, or is it when you say, I can see?

It's kind of a little bit of both, right?

From that moment where all of a sudden vision matters and then you're conscious of it.

I can see.

Being a Christian involves both of those stages.

It's where you look and you see, oh, my wrongdoing wasn't just some conditioning from my childhood, it's because of my sin.

It's because of me.

And all of a sudden the veil is removed.

And you say, well, then I need a hope that accounts for my sin, not just to be rescued from my circumstances, and you see that that hope is Christ.

You see, there's the vision and then there's the response to that vision.

And both are necessary.

I think one's prior to the other, but I I don't know.

I I don't think it's something I can be too scientific about, other than that.

And that's our one question.

So let's remember the type of king that we have when we take communion.

Most kings send out their troops to die for them.

Our king dies for us while we are his enemies.

That's the good news that we have to announce to the world.

The right king is on the throne.

We remember the sacrifice that he made by communion this morning.

His body that was broken, that's represented by the bread, and his blood that was poured out represented by the wine.

There are no communion tables in the back, they're only up front.

So come to the front.

If you would like communion.

We recommend communion only for those who can consciously say the veil has been lifted.

And if you think that it has, recognize that by joining us in communion this morning.

That Christ is the King.

And the good news is He's the King who gave Himself for us that we might live.

We have good news to witness to.

So let's learn how to do that as a church.

Okay, let's pray.

Holy Father, we praise you.

We praise you for your glory that you have made known to us in ways that our tiny little brains can actually understand.

I think if we were to try and grasp you in our minds, our heads would explode.

But you come down to us so that we can know you in such a way as knowing a person.

And Lord, that's the only type of way we can know things, because you made us people.

And Father, I pray that by your spirit working in us, that our sense of wonder might be cultivated at just how incredible this is that the very same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead might dwell in us.

And it might empower inadequate people like us to spread a witness to something so glorious that is, the creator of the world is king again.

That he's no longer counting men's sins against them, but he invites all who would come to him.

Father, what incredible news we have to share.

I pray that it would settle into our hearts, that we would apply it personally to ourselves, we would learn how to live in a community that embodies it.

Lord, we pray that your spirit would empower us to do this.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.