The Church is Miraculous | Room For More | Pastor Zach Weihrauch

Acts 8:26–40.

Acts 8:26–40

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 the 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 like a sheep?

He was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its sheer is silent.

So he opens not his mouth.

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 this 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 had 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 his Otus, and as he passed through,

he preached the gospel to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.

Well, good evening,

and welcome to the weekend gathering of Christ Community Chapel.

My name is Zach.

I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm so glad that we get to be part

of your weekend, which at least for us, starts on Thursday night.

Especially welcome to those of you that are here because a friend

or family member is getting baptized.

We're baptizing across all of our services this weekend.

Thanks for coming and supporting them.

It's really, really kind of you.

We're excited to be part of that with you.

You know, we are in a sermon series right now going through the book of acts.

We're calling it room for more.

We're calling it that for two reasons.

One is when you read the book of acts, you cannot get away from this fact

that the God of the Bible is always looking to make room for more.

In the beginning of the book of acts, there are about 100 Christians.

By about chapter five, there are 5000.

By the end of the book.

The Gospel of Jesus has spread all over the known world.

That's not by accident.

It's because God is always looking to make room for more.

If we want to be a church that is participating in what God is doing,

we're going to be a church that is looking to make room for more.

But the second thing we mean by that is that when you read the book of acts,

you also realize we need to make room for more expectations about what

God wants to do.

The book of acts is full of amazing miracles, full of of healing

and and provision and amazing things that God is doing.

And it's a challenge to us

who tend to settle for a regular kind of average experience of church

and of Christianity, the book of acts, as calling us to something greater.

In fact, this whole sermon series will culminate on November

15th with the healing service we'll be doing here at the church.

As we just try to say, hey, what we see God doing in the Bible, we want to see him

doing here at our church room for more.

And this week is going to participate in that by looking at one

particular story that was just read for us in acts chapter eight.

So if you have a Bible, you can open it to acts chapter eight.

We'll be looking at verses 26 through 40.

Of course it'll be on the screen behind me.

I do have an outline I'm going to use to guide our time together.

Three points. Very simple.

I want to show you the man on an island, the god of the island

and the mission to the island, the man on an island,

the god of the island and the mission to the island.

All right.

Let me start with the first one.

The man on an island.

One of the hardest things for people to accept about Christianity,

about what the Bible teaches, is that there is only one way

to have a relationship with God, and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.

It's called the exclusivity of Christ, meaning

there is an exclusive path to God, only one path.

That path is available to anyone and everyone, but

there's only one path that is an inescapable truth.

When you read the Bible, it's all over the Bible.

It's all over the book of acts.

Let me just show you one place.

For example, this is the Apostle Peter preaching in acts chapter four, verse 12.

Here's what he says about Jesus.

He says this and there is salvation in no one else,

for there is no other name under heaven

given among men by which we must be saved.

You don't have to accept that, but you can't get around it.

If you're going to take seriously that the Bible is teaching us about God,

then here it is.

There's only one way to have a relationship with God,

and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.

One little thing that maybe will help you understand that,

or at least begin to be open to that, is that most of spirituality,

most of religion is guessing about God.

That is kind of our cultural view, is that we can't really be sure.

And maybe you are

guessing this and I'm guessing that, and that makes a lot of sense.

How could we really know?

Except for this if God speaks, it would be a little bit like this.

If I asked you to guess what my favorite color is,

you would all have different guesses, and some of them would seem like

really good guesses, and no one guess would be better than another.

Until I said actually, my favorite color is blue.

And then if you guessed red, it doesn't matter how sincere you are,

you're wrong because I've told you so.

What the Bible is telling us is that God has spoken.

The time for guessing is over.

And because of that, God is telling us there's one way

he'll accept people, and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.

One of the reasons that's hard for people is because they ask this question,

what happens to those who have never heard about Jesus?

I mean, if Jesus is the only way to have a relationship with God, then then

what does that mean for people who grow up in Yemen or Saudi Arabia

or Sri Lanka or in, you know, Ohio, but just not in a family

that takes them to church, not in a family that is religious.

What does that mean for them?

It's often called the man on an island question, because the thinking is,

if Jesus is the only way to have a relationship with God,

then what happens to the man on an island who's never heard of Jesus?

It's a great question, and it's not a question I'm going to fully

exhaust here, except for to say this.

This story is about one of those men.

This story is about a man on an island.

The Bible calls him the Ethiopian eunuch.

Here's what the writer Luke writes about him in verses 27 and 28.

Here's what it says.

And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace,

queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all of her treasure.

He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning

seated in his chariot, and was reading the prophet Isaiah.

Now what I want to show you is how mathematically improbable

it is that this man would ever actually become a Christian.

For all intents and purposes, he is the man on the island.

Let me give you five reasons this man should never become a Christian.

Five reasons it's incredibly unlikely.

The first is geography.

We're told he's Ethiopia, and most scholars

believe that he came from what we would call modern day Sudan,

meaning he's a long way away from Jerusalem.

It's most likely that he's going to live and die

his life, his entire life without ever hearing about Jesus.

He's not Jewish.

He's not going to synagogue.

He's not hearing the Old Testament be read.

It's unlikely that he would even know.

There was a guy named Jesus who lived and died and rose from the dead.

He is from Sudan.

Sudan is a long way from Jerusalem.

So the first problem is geography.

The second problem is culture.

It's also extremely unlikely that he was from a monotheistic culture.

Most likely he's from a place where there's a god of the river

and a god of the mountains and a god of the hills, meaning he's

not even thinking about meeting the one true God,

or that that one true God would send a messiah.

He isn't growing up in synagogue.

He's not going to church.

He he has no no awareness of the Jewish faith

or how that would give way to Christianity.

He's from the wrong place.

He's from the wrong culture.

The third problem for this man is one of access.

It will be.

Most scholars will say it will be three centuries before.

Where he's from has a single Christian church, three centuries from this story.

So it'll be 300 years before there's a church or

the Bible, or anyone who knows Jesus living in his town.

There's no one to tell him about Jesus.

The fourth problem is that he is busy at work.

The text says he is a royal official

for Candace, the the queen of the Ethiopians.

He handles the money, which means once he gets back to where

he's from, he's got a pretty important job.

Right now he's thinking about what he's seeing in Jerusalem.

But if nothing happens on the road back home, once he gets home,

he's got a full outlook calendar.

He's going to be busy.

And the fifth thing is that even if somehow he stumbles

across the message of Jesus.

How would he understand it? That's what he says.

Look at verses 30 and 31.

It says so Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah

the prophet and asked, do you understand what you are reading?

Listen to what he says.

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

In other words, he's saying, have you read the book of Isaiah?

Pretty confusing. I have no shot.

All I'm saying is, I want you to see, when you read this story,

that there is almost no chance this guy will become a Christian.

He's from a far off place, a different culture.

He has no understanding.

He's a busy guy at work.

He has no context for the idea of one God or a messiah.

It is mathematically improbable.

He is the man on an island.

And the reason I say that is because I want you to understand

that this story is going to give us a window into

how God feels about those kinds of people,

but also this forget the man on an island as a philosophical question.

The truth is, each one of us, if you're here and you're a Christian,

probably have has someone in your life that you think of as a man on an island,

a family member,

a friend, a neighbor,

a colleague that you just cannot imagine would ever become a Christian,

would ever be open to the message of Jesus, would ever be willing

to consider whether or not they would put their faith in Jesus.

It feels mathematically improbable that the person you're

thinking of would ever come.

Well, this is a story about that kind of person.

So what happens?

Well, the first point is the man on an island.

Here's the second point.

The god of the island.

Of course, you know,

because the story was just read to us that this man is going to become a Christian.

The story will end with him being baptized,

just like we're baptizing across all of our services this weekend.

He will respond in faith to Jesus.

But what I don't want you to miss is why?

And here's what I want you to see.

There's a guy named Philip in this story who tells this guy about Jesus,

but it is not Philip who's driving the action of this story.

It's God.

Let me show you that time and time again in the story.

If you don't mind, just get a machine gun it it'll be on the screen behind me.

Look at verse 26.

It's God who sends Philip.

Here's what it says.

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.

In other words, God says to Philip,

I want you to go to this place, that nothing is happening.

You have no reason to go

except for I know there's a guy there that I'm going to reach.

Verse 29 and the spirit said to Philip, go over and join this chariot.

And God might not have had a lot of confidence in Philip's intelligence.

So he sends Philip to this place.

And just so he's not confused,

he goes, that guy, that guy, that chariot, go talk to him.

Verse 35, when Philip does talk, then Philip open his mouth.

And beginning with this scripture, he told them the good news about Jesus,

meaning he tells them the story of what God has done in Jesus.

And in verses 39 and 40, it's God who takes Philip away.

Here's all I'm saying to you.

This is not just the story of a man on an island,

a man mathematically unlikely to become a Christian.

This is the story of a God who pursues the man on an island.

This is a

story of God whose passionate about reaching far off

people, unlikely people, resistant people.

This is a story of a God who is passionate about reaching them

and is leveraging his power to do it.

And that shouldn't surprise us, because actually, that happens

time and time again in the Bible, in the book of Genesis,

it is God who goes looking for a pagan moon worshiper named Abram

and not only reveals himself to Abraham, but tells Abraham, I'm now going to

use you to take the message of who I am to the nations in the book of Exodus.

It's it's God who pursues a fugitive from justice

named Moses and reveals himself to Moses and says to Moses, I'm going

to send you to my people in Egypt so that they would know who I am.

It's God who goes looking for an ethnocentric, racist bigot

named Jonah and tells him, I want you to go to your enemies and

preach to them the message of salvation in Nineveh before it is too late.

It's the God of the Bible who writes Psalm 67 about his desire

to gather people from all over the world,

that they might worship him at his holy mountain.

It's the it's the God of the Bible who sends his Son

Jesus to come looking for the loss is the God of the Bible,

who tells us to go into all the nations with the message of Jesus.

It's the God of the Bible and Revelation five who says that in heaven

there will be someone from every tribe and every tongue in every nation.

Here's my point.

Although it is fair to ask

if Jesus is the only way to have a relationship with God,

what happens to those who have never heard?

What happens to those mathematically unlikely?

What that question misses is the passion and power of God to reach those people.

God has always been on a mission

to reach far off people and to bring them into his story.

Your hope for your friend, for your family member, for your neighbor is not

how likely it is that they would come to faith.

It is that God is more passionate about reaching them than you could ever be.

And I say this in part

because some of us here this weekend will feel like a man on an island.

We'll feel like if anyone was going to know God, it is.

It is unlikely to be us.

If anyone was going to begin

a relationship with God, to be forgiven by God, to be included by God

and His kingdom through Jesus, it is unlikely to be us.

But this story and the whole story of the Bible is

the story of the God who comes looking for the mathematically unlikely people.

He comes looking for you.

That's who he is.

In a sermon series we're calling room for more.

I don't want you to miss that.

It isn't just that God

wants us to make room for more, it's that he's the one who's doing the looking.

He's the one who's doing the pursuing.

He's the one who's winning.

People like the Ethiopian eunuch to himself.

Every person who'll be baptized this weekend has a different story.

And in that story, there will be different people that they will appreciate

and celebrate and say, this person was a big part of me coming to know God.

But behind every single story is really not a person.

It's a God who is passionate about reaching people.

It's a God who is passionate about reaching you.

So the question then is where do we fit in?

And that's my third point.

Not just not just the man on an island and the god of the island,

but the mission to the island.

Philip is a really interesting character in the Bible.

He does a lot of different things.

In acts chapter seven, the apostles are too busy

praying and preaching and preparing to preach, to meet all the needs

of the people who are struggling.

So they pick seven guys to

basically wait on people, to serve people so that they can keep doing ministry.

Philip is one of those guys.

He is, in the original language, a table waiter, not a glorified position.

He will also, at the beginning of chapter eight, preach to a crowd.

Here at the end of chapter eight, he shares Jesus with one guy.

Later on in the book of acts, he'll host the Apostle Paul in his home,

and we're told that he has four unmarried daughters that he has discipled,

who are prophesying about God themselves.

In other words, Philip is a little bit like the junk drawer of the book of acts.

He does a little bit his master Jack of all trades, master of none.

Philip is not the hero of this story.

His first job is just to serve people.

They didn't pick him because he was the most eloquent or the most talented.

Philip simply is looking to join God in what he's doing and why.

Well, because here's what Philip knows.

Here's what every Christian who joins God in his mission knows.

Here's what every church that joins God in his mission knows.

We were all once the man on an island.

It is

mathematically improbable that any of us would place our faith in Jesus,

that any of us would turn away from our sin.

You say, well, not me. Pastor Zach, I grew up in the church. Yeah.

Do you know anyone else who grew up in the church and has walked away?

Why? Isn't that your story?

Well, the answer is because God pursued you.

This is what the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians chapter two.

Listen to how he describes the story of every Christian.

Here's what he says.

And you are dead in the trespasses and sins,

and which you once walked, following the course of this world,

following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work,

and the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions

of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and of the mind,

and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

Let me translate that for you.

You and I, we were the men or the women on the island.

We were dead set against God, rebellious against God,

seeking in every way we could to do our own thing, to ignore God.

It was mathematically improbable that we would ever know him except for this.

Here's how Paul continues. Verse four.

But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us,

even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace you have been saved and raised us up with him,

and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,

so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches

of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing.

It is the gift of God, not as a result of work, so that no 1st

May boast and why?

Here's what he tells us in verse ten, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ

Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk.

And them.

You see, what Philip understood is that if God could reach him,

God could reach anyone.

Friends, listen to me.

I don't know who your man on an island is.

I don't know who the family member or friend

or neighbor or colleague that you want so badly to come to faith in

Jesus, to be forgiven, to know how it is to have a relationship with God.

And you think it'll never happen.

Where do you find the optimism to believe?

Where do you find the encouragement to invite them to church

to tell them about Jesus?

It is simply this If God can save you, if God can save me,

if God can save the Ethiopian eunuch,

then there is no one outside of his reach.

There is no island so far away, no person so far away that he can't reach them.

And I'll just end with this.

If you hear this weekend and you do not have a relationship

with Jesus and you're you're thinking,

I just don't know if I could believe that God could forgive me.

Every person who's baptized this weekend is saying to you, if he can forgive me,

if he can come

looking for me, then he can find you.

Church.

If we are going to be a church that makes room for more,

the first step is to be reacquainted

with the miracle of our own salvation

and to find in that story and in this one, a reason to believe

God isn't done writing those kinds of stories.

Let me pray for you, father God, thank you so much for this story.

Thank you so much for the message it gives to all of us,

that there is no one beyond your reach.

No dad, no mom, no uncle, no aunt, no cousin, brother, sister, friend.

That is too far for you to reach.

No one sitting here right now under the sound of my voice,

who is too far gone that they cannot be forgiven in Jesus?

My prayer is that through your Holy Spirit you might be pursuing them right

this moment, just like you were pursuing this Ethiopian eunuch.

That you would use me like you used Philip.

I'm not the hero of the story.

Philip wasn't the hero of the story.

You are the God who saves.

In Jesus name we pray. Amen.