Acts: An Unfinished Story

The book of Acts is the action book of the New Testament, and it constitutes therefore one of the most exciting books of the Bible. The full name of it is, "The Acts Of The Apostles," but there are not many apostles mentioned in it. James, John, Peter, and Paul are the only ones who appear in any prominence. Through the centuries Christians have shortened this title and called it simply, "The Acts." I like that better for this is the book of action, revealing how God is at work through Christians.

Contemporary views of the church today are anything but complimentary. One of the nicer things said about the church is that it is irrelevant as far as saying anything to today's world is concerned.

In Acts 2 we left our heroes, the apostles and their friends, waiting in the courts of the temple. If that sounds like an introduction to a television serial it is only because this is the book where the action is -- the book of Acts. As the apostles and their friends waited in the temple courts, three amazing things happened: There was a sound like a great blast of wind which roared through the house where they were sitting, the porch of Solomon. There also appeared tongues of fire dancing upon the head of each of the one hundred and twenty believers, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, other languages, as the Spirit gave them utterance. That is the phenomenon of Pentecost, the beginning of the church of Jesus Christ the body of Christ; it was the birthday of the church.

Last week we left our heroes, the apostles, in the temple courts of Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost. Peter was explaining the apparent drunkenness of the believers to the crowd that gathered when they heard the siren sound of the mighty rushing wind that came when the Holy Spirit fell upon these individuals. He explained the strange excitement of these 120 people, and also their strange utterances, their speaking the praise of God in many languages, even though they were apparently peasants from the province of Galilee. He said this was what the prophet Joel had predicted would happen: that God would begin a new age, what we now call "the age of the Spirit," and that it would begin and be characterized by a proclamation of the truth by all kinds of people and all classes of society -- men and women, young and old, servants and masters, Jews and Gentiles -- all kinds of flesh. The Spirit of God would come upon them and they would be able to speak the truth about Jesus Christ. The age, Joel said, would begin by proclamation, but it would end with tribulation. At the end there would be the strange darkening of the sun and moon, and signs in the heavens and on the earth.

There has been a remarkable awakening sweeping across college campuses in our country today. There is a report in one of our Christian magazines of a most remarkable week of meetings that began in the chapel of Asbury College, in Wilmore, Kentucky, a few weeks ago, and went on continuously for six or seven days and nights. People would come in and fall under a deep conviction of the brokenness and the fragmentation of their lives with other Christians. Their hearts were melted and opened toward one another, and they forgave each other, confessing the things they were doing that were offensive to one another, and restoring each other in love and grace. News of that was reported in chapel at Azusa Pacific College in California, and an awakening of this nature broke out there. I just received word yesterday that it has started in Taylor University, in Indiana, where a team from this church will be going next month. Also something similar now is reported in Malone College, in Ohio.

Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour. And a man lame from birth was being carried, whom they laid daily at that gate of the temple which is called Beautiful to ask alms of those who entered the temple. Seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked for alms. And Peter directed his gaze at him, with John, and said, "Look at us." And he fixed his attention upon them, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, "I have no silver or gold, but I give you what I have; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. And leaping up he stood and walked and entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. (Acts 3:1-8 RSV)

In Acts, the action book of the New Testament, we are examining the first miracle in this present age in which we live: The instantaneous healing of a lame man who, waiting at the Beautiful Gate of the temple, had asked for money from Peter and John as they went up to pray. And, you remember, Peter had turned and said to him, "Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have I give to you: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk," (Acts 3:6 KJV). And taking him by the hand he lifted him up, and the man's feet and ankles received strength, and he began to leap and shout and walk around the temple courts, praising God. Now, Dr. Luke tells us what followed immediately, beginning in verse eleven of chapter three:

Someone has well said that Easter Sunday is the only time of the year when anyone can go to church without being accused of being religious! We are glad to welcome any who may be here this morning who do not ordinarily attend church. We are delighted that you came to be with us. We have been studying through the book of Acts in our morning services, this action book of the New Testament, where we are tracing once again the tremendous explosion of radical Christianity which burst out upon a decadent and weary world in the First Century, noting again the power and the excitement which prevailed because of this message, and discovering that the same thing can occur today, and is occurring whenever authentic Christianity is proclaimed.

We last left our heroes, Peter and John, hailed into court before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish rulers of Jerusalem. With them was the former lame man who had been made whole. Peter had said to him, "Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I unto you; in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk!" (Acts 3:6). Peter and John had been arrested because they had used the occasion to preach Jesus and the resurrection. It is important to notice that they did not use the occasion to begin a divine healing service. They did not ask the people to bring the sick and lame for them to heal. They did what God had intended done on that occasion, to preach through Jesus and the resurrection the ultimate healing of the inner hurt of man by the power of a new and risen life.

The most exciting event of our exciting times is not the exploration of the moon, remarkable and exciting as that is and really magnificent in its scientific achievement. But the most exciting event today is the healing of the body of Christ. I see it occurring in many places. You have been reading in Christian magazines, and even in the newspapers, of movements of the Holy Spirit on college campuses across the country, notably the one that began at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky a few weeks ago. These are all instances of the way the Spirit of God is moving to heal a sluggish and diseased church.

When the Apostle Paul wrote his last letter to his son in the faith, Timothy, he said, "In the last days there shall come perilous times..." (2 Timothy 3:1b KJV). Those last days began when our Lord first appeared upon the earth. We make a great mistake if we read that as though Paul was talking only about the future. He was talking about the present age, his own day. All the time that lies between the first and second comings of Jesus Christ are the last days. During that whole time there would come periods of crisis, times of danger, times of peril, when men would be "lovers of self, lovers of money... and lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God..." (2 Timothy 3:2 RSV). Whenever those conditions prevail they are, indeed, perilous times. Selfishness creates violence, the demand to have your own way, do your own thing, stand up for your own rights, this -- spread large across a nation -- creates pools of dissent and attrition against one another, and results in waves of violence with bloodshed breaking out everywhere.

The parable of the wheat and the weeds (the wheat and tares in the King James Version) is the Lord Jesus' own prediction of conditions in the church during the age between his first coming and his second -- this present age in which we live. The whole series of parables there in Matthew 13 describes this, but in the parable of the wheat and the tares he said particularly that he, the son of Man, would begin by sowing in the field of the world those who would have the life of God in them, the sons of the kingdom. Shortly thereafter would appear certain signs of evil put there by the devil. The devil would also sow, he said, and do his sowing amidst the wheat so that right in the middle of the wheat would grow up weeds.

When I entered the city of Jerusalem for the first time I came down from the Mount of Olives and went through the gate called St. Stephen's Gate. In my mind's eye I can still see the activity in the Old City and I can feel again the tremendous impressions that were mine as I came in through that gate named in honor of the first Christian martyr. We meet him today in our studies in Acts. Of course this gate is not the one through which Stephen actually passed on his way to being stoned, for that wall and gate were destroyed by Roman armies in A.D. 70, but it is probably erected on the same site and so it is properly named. Stephen, you remember, was one of the seven chosen by the congregation of the early church to be apostolic helpers. Another was Philip, whom we meet again in chapter eight. These two men, like the apostles, did mighty signs and wonders among the people in that early day. We pick up the story in the sixth chapter of Acts, beginning with Verse 8:

On the day when the Lord Jesus ascended from the Mount of Olives he said to his disciples,

You remember that the book of Acts opened with a dramatic presentation of three symbols that would characterize the ministry of the Holy Spirit throughout the age of the church. These three symbols are very prominent all through the book of Acts. They were: The mighty rushing wind, the tongues as of fire, and the proclamation of various languages, the gift of tongues. These indicate three elements which we will find again and again throughout the book of Acts, and throughout the age of the church, wherever the Spirit is at work.

In the great outline which our Lord Jesus gave of the progress of the gospel throughout the course of this age, he said it would move in three stages: First to Jerusalem, then to Judea and all Samaria, and then to the uttermost parts of the earth. Now, in Acts 9, we are viewing that second stage wherein the gospel is going out to Judea and all Samaria. During that period of time the gospel was being systematically preached throughout every village of Samaria and Judea by outstanding leaders such as Philip and other Christians, and certain of the apostles, as Peter and John. But the Lord was also doing something else. He was preparing the instrument by which the gospel would move into the third stage, the stage in which we today are still involved, that of going to the uttermost parts of the earth. Thus, in Chapter 9, we come to the conversion of the Apostle Paul.

The ninth chapter of Acts is the story of the conversion of Paul, of when Saul of Tarsus became the mighty Apostle Paul. It is a great mistake to think, as many people do, that what happened to Saul on the Damascus road is a complete explanation of everything which can account for the mighty influence of this man during the rest of his life. Paul became a Christian on the road to Damascus but he did not start living the Christian life in all its fullness and potential power for quite a number of years after that. He had many lessons to learn first.

In the last year or so of Paul's life, when he was imprisoned in Rome, he wrote a letter to his son in the faith, Timothy. And, looking back across the years of his ministry, he spoke of the coming of our Savior Christ Jesus, "who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel..." (2 Timothy 1:10 RSV). That is the great and central fact in the good news about Jesus Christ: He has done what no other can ever do -- he has abolished death. That is what is unique about the gospel.

It is often suggested that the book of Acts ought to be called the Acts of the Holy Spirit. I agree. Nowhere is the sovereign superintendency of the Holy Spirit more in evidence than in this wonderful account of how he moved to open the door of faith to the Gentiles.

Let us resume our studies in Acts. Here we learn afresh of the movement of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit at work is like a great river, cutting a fresh channel, going wherever it wishes. Sometimes we Christian flood control experts are disturbed by that. We do not like the way the Holy Spirit moves. We like to dig a channel, line it with concrete, and say, "Come, O River of God. We have dug the channel. Flow through it now according to our desire." But God does not work that way. He makes his own channels. We build dikes and dams and attempt to direct the Spirit's flow. But, as the Lord Jesus said, the Spirit is like the wind; he blows wherever he wishes. No one can tell where he comes from or where he is going. It is refreshing to recognize that.

I invite you to resume our studies together in the book of Acts. We will look at the twelfth chapter -- a very exciting passage. I am sure that you had not been a Christian for very long before you discovered that the enemy with whom we wrestle has a very disconcerting way of striking when everything seems to be going well. Just when you think the path has smoothed out and that you are having a great time in the Lord, with nothing but blessing ahead -- then everything seems to fall apart at once. That is confirmation of what the Bible tells us is the truth: We are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but we are engaged in a life-or-death struggle against principalities and powers and wicked spirits in high places, who are able to unleash a vicious, lashing attack against us -- just when we think things are going well.

The missionary call of Barnabas and Saul, recorded in the thirteenth chapter of the book of Acts is replete with practical helps in a problem that bothers many Christians: How to recognize the guidance of God, how to know the directions of life, and to find the will of the Holy Spirit in these matters.

We will look this morning, in Acts 13, at the first recorded sermon of the Apostle Paul. This man has changed the course of world history by the power of his ministry in the Spirit of Christ. He did so by the preaching of the word of truth, and here we have a good example of how he did it. Paul had preached many messages before, but this is the first of which we have a record. It was a very powerful and shattering message. It was preached in a synagogue on a Sabbath morning and it shook a whole city -- so much so that in Verse 44 of this account we read, "The next sabbath almost the whole city gathered together to hear the word of God."

When Paul and Barnabas left Antioch to go out on their first missionary journey, they started a new movement in the book of Acts. They began the last phase of our Lord's great commission. They started to go out to "the uttermost parts of the earth..." (Acts 1:8b KJV). So this constitutes a separate section of this book. We call this series of messages "The Pattern Setters" because, in this section of Acts, you find the pattern for all Christian witness in any age.

We are all very concerned about events now taking place in the Middle East. God has always made that the focal point of history and of current events. With the intensification of developments there the circle has now come full term, because this is where Christianity began, where the explosion of the gospel first occurred. We have been tracing in the book of Acts the wonderful story of how this radical gospel began to break out upon a decadent, pagan society, to capture the interest and the hearts of men, to waken hope again in a hopeless world, and to change lives by a radical transformation of behavior and outlook.

We are seeing so much of practical help in some of the problems of Christian life as we follow the pattern set by the apostles and the early Christians in the book of Acts. I hope you are realizing, more and more as we go through this book, that here is a description of normal Christianity. This is the way the church could have been, and should have been, in any age. Unless the church is living in the atmosphere of the book of Acts, it is missing out on its heritage.

We are studying the section of the book of Acts which sets before us the account of the early church in operation and which outlines for us the pattern of normal Christianity. We must remember that this book is intended to describe Christianity as it ought to be in every age. When the principles set forth in Acts are followed, the church is always going to be as vital as it was then.

Let's resume our study of how the most revolutionary message the world has ever heard moved into Europe and thus affected the history of Western civilization for some 2000 years. We began, you remember, in the sixteenth chapter of Acts with the story of Paul, Silas, Luke, and Timothy in the city of Philippi, and of the great earthquake that released them from prison with dramatic impact, and of how God used four distinct methods to break through the entrenched evil of that city and to implant a church there. This is what God is always doing in human history. He establishes a bridgehead in the midst of entrenched evil, with its resultant violence and disaster, and, by that bridgehead, he begins to propagate the gospel and thus to clear up the situation. The story moves on in Chapter 17, as Paul and Silas move west, leaving Luke and Timothy behind in Philippi for the time being.

At the time of Paul's visit to Athens, that city was no longer important as a political seat; Corinth was the commercial and political center of Greece under the Roman Caesars. But Athens was still the university center of the world. It was the heir of the great philosophers, the city of Pericles and Demosthenes, of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides -- these men who established patterns of thought that have affected human learning for centuries. Almost all philosophies follow, in some degree, the teachings of these men. But Athens was long past its zenith when Paul visited it. It was now four hundred years after the golden age of Greece, and, though Athens was still a center of art, beauty, culture, and knowledge, the city had lost all political importance.

As we continue our study of Acts into the eighteenth chapter we see the Apostle Paul leaving Athens, the intellectual capital of the Roman world, and coming into Corinth, the center of sensuality. These two cities are symbols of the twin evils which, in every day and every generation, trap and enslave the hearts of people: intellectual pride and sensual lust.

Last week we left our hero, the Apostle Paul, 'back at the ranch' in Antioch of Syria. There he enjoyed a short but well-deserved rest after the two to three years he had spent on his second missionary journey, during which he had carried the gospel to Europe. But he did not rest for long. Luke continues the story immediately with Verse 23 of Chapter 18:

When Paul came to Ephesus he found the city in the grip of superstition, fear, demonism, and darkness. It was a city devoted to sex and to religion -- in other words it was the San Francisco of the Roman empire. The great temple of Artemis was located there and was as familiar to the people of that day as the Golden Gate bridge is to us. It was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Tourists traveled from all over the Roman empire to see it, just as they come to San Francisco to see the bridges and cable cars.

A definition I find most descriptive is that a Christian is one who is:

On this last Sunday of 1970 not only are we drawing to the close of the old year, but we have also reached the end of the present series of studies in the book of Acts. With Chapter 21 we will begin a new series, in which we will see Paul in a role different from any we have seen him perform before in Acts, i.e., as a prisoner of the Lord. But today we are completing "The Pattern Setters" series in which the great apostle has been setting an example for us in the ministry of the Word of God throughout the reaches of the Roman empire.

Today we begin the last series of our studies together in the book of Acts. We will pick up the story at the beginning of Chapter 21 and move on into the last section of this great book, where Luke recounts for us Paul's imprisonment in Jerusalem and his voyage to Rome. The book closes with Paul a prisoner of Caesar, living in his own hired house there at Rome. And so we will call this last series The Prisoner of the Lord, for here we find Paul in the new and unaccustomed role of prisoner -- unaccustomed, that is, for any length of time -- Paul in chains, languishing two years in the prison at Caesarea and some three years, most scholars feel, as a prisoner in Rome.

This morning we return to the twenty-first chapter of Acts. Last week, you remember, we left Paul in Jerusalem where he had absolutely no business to be. It is almost incredible to us that this mighty Apostle to the Gentiles, with his earnest and fervent hunger to serve God, his matchless devotion to the cause of Jesus Christ, could be so overpowered by desire to have a ministry to Israel, his brethren according to the flesh, that he would be deceived by his own flesh and find himself disobeying a direct command of the Holy Spirit. But, as we saw in our studies together last week, this is exactly what he did. And, much as we would not like to admit that, there seems to be no adequate way of explaining this Scripture otherwise.

During our studies through Acts, I am sure you have felt in your own heart, again and again, the impact of the faith, the prayers, and the power of Paul -- Christ's mightiest missionary apostle. Who would ever have dreamed that this mighty apostle would eventually fall into the devil's trap and disobey the Spirit of God? But that is exactly what we have seen happening to this great man as he neared Jerusalem but was forbidden by the Holy Spirit to go any further. And yet, out of the passion of his heart to be used of God to reach his people, Israel, and to bear witness to this unbelieving nation -- motivated by the highest of desires -- he nevertheless disobeyed what God clearly told him to do. He continued on and thus fell into great difficulty.

We are drawing near the close of our studies in Acts -- this fascinating book which has set forth for us the character of normal Christianity. The book of Acts is given to us as a pattern of what Christianity ought to be in any age. As we have been caught up in the excitement of it, in its rapid movement, and in the triumph and deliverance so evident in the lives of people of that day, we can rejoice that we see something similar in our own day.

We are in the closing part of our study in Acts. The Apostle Paul is fulfilling the great prediction which Jesus himself made about him when he called him to be an apostle. The Lord Jesus said to Ananias, whom he sent to Paul to pray with him and welcome him into the Christian family: "This man is a chosen servant unto me. I will sent him to the Gentiles to stand before governors and kings, that he may bear my name before them, as well as before the sons of Israel," Acts 9:15).

If any of you are sailors, or lovers of the sea, I know you will be particularly interested in the passage to which we have come this morning in our studies in the book of Acts. The twenty-seventh chapter is a fascinating account by Dr. Luke of Paul's voyage to Rome, and of the shipwreck which occurred on the way. Luke was not a sailor; he was a landsman. And yet he was such a careful historian that the detail which he gives in this chapter about ancient methods of sailing affords more insight into sailing practices on the Mediterranean in the first century than all other ancient manuscripts put together.

We arrive this morning at the last page of the first chapter of church history -- the last chapter of the book of Acts. Luke's unfinished book introduces us to the whole record of the history of the church which continues to this day. This chapter is a resumption of the cliffhanger with which we concluded the previous chapter. There we left the Apostle Paul and his company on their way to Rome but stranded as shipwrecked sailors on the coast of the island of Malta. They foundered here after a long and perilous voyage during which they were driven across the Mediterranean before a terrible storm. They lost all their gear and finally the ship itself was utterly lost, just as Paul had said. But their lives were saved, as he had also predicted, because an angel had told him of all this. Now we find the apostle and Julius the centurion and all the company of the ship on Malta as Luke picks up the story in Chapter 28: