Ministry In Adversity

[0:00] So we'll just jump right in this morning. In verse 1, the first thing I want you guys to notice is a ministry failure. A ministry failure. Verse 1 says, In these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews, because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution.

[0:23] So I think to really get started, we need to understand who these two groups of people are. So you have the Hebrews. The Hebrews are national Jews.

[0:36] They would have been born in or around Jerusalem. They would have been brought up in a very Jewish home right there in the Holy Land with the synagogue.

[0:47] They would have just been very Jewish. The Hellenists, on the other hand, they were Jews, but they weren't born in Jerusalem. They were part of the dispersion in the Old Testament.

[0:59] They were scattered abroad, and they were born and raised in other countries. And in those countries, they most likely would have spoken Greek, where the Hebrews would have been your Aramaic speakers.

[1:12] So that's kind of who the two people are here. And it seems, and when we read the text, that the early church, they've established a ministry of helping their poor and the needy in their church.

[1:26] I think it's in Deuteronomy 10 or 14. There's a little bit of a command for Israel to take care of the widows and the needy in their church. So it seems like the early church is taking that upon themselves, and they're doing it.

[1:40] And they actually take it very seriously. They do a really good job at it. If you go back to chapter 2 in verse 44, it says, Now, if you flip to chapter 4 in verse 34, it says, So the entire church, look at the love that they had for each other.

[2:29] They were selling their houses. Everything that they had, they were willing to give up and take it to the needy in the church. I mean, I just think that's a beautiful picture of how the church rallies around each other and they care for each other.

[2:43] I mean, giving of themselves, giving of their possessions, those things that are valuable, those things that you have to have to get through life, they're willing to take those things and give them up to make sure that those in need in their church have the basic necessities of life, food and water.

[3:01] And that's what they were doing. The whole church, they were all involved in this, selling everything that they had. And it seems that the Hellenist widows in that, they've been neglected somehow.

[3:18] Now, let's think about it for a minute, how important it would have been for these Hellenist widows. Okay? Number one, they're widows. So they don't have a husband. The breadwinner in their home is no longer there.

[3:30] So they don't have that security and comfort of a husband to provide for them. They have left the Jewish tradition to follow Christ.

[3:43] They had probably come to Jerusalem to celebrate a feast. And while they were there at Pentecost, they heard Peter stand up and he preached that great message. And they abandoned all that Jewish tradition and custom and they trusted Christ.

[4:00] So they're kicked out of the synagogue. They are now separated from any kind of Jewish help that they would get because they've abandoned it for the sake of Christ.

[4:12] And I would imagine because of that, some of their family has probably forsook them. They're no longer Jewish.

[4:23] They're following this false prophet that the Jewish would have thought would have been looked at as a false prophet. Somebody that they crucified just, I don't know, 50 or 60 days earlier.

[4:34] They're in a foreign country. They had traveled to Jerusalem for this event, for Pentecost, for this feast.

[4:48] And then they stayed. So imagine being in a foreign country with no husband and no help and no means of income. You have to rely on the hospitality of others.

[5:02] And that's what the church was doing. And for some reason, these widows, they've been left out. Now, I don't know why they've been left out.

[5:14] The text isn't really clear. It just says they're neglected. So this is a little bit of speculation. But let's think about what could cause somebody in the church to be neglected.

[5:27] The first thing I thought of was, excuse me, church life is just busy. It's just really busy. If you read the whole book of Acts, if you go back in chapter 1 and start reading it up to this point, you'll find that the early church was busy preaching the gospel.

[5:45] In every chapter. In chapter 2, Peter preaches at Pentecost. In chapter 3, Peter and John, they heal a man, and then they preach outside the temple. In chapter 4, they're arrested.

[5:58] And Peter preaches to the Jewish council. The same Jewish council that sentenced Jesus to death. Peter preaches to them. And then in chapter 5, we see them back at the temple preaching again.

[6:13] So the entire book, they're busy preaching. The second thing they did was they faced persecution. I just kind of talked about it. Peter and John were thrown in prison. And then again in chapter 5, at the end of chapter 5, more disciples were thrown in prison.

[6:30] And this time they were beat. It says they were beat before they were let go. So, I mean, it wasn't an easy time to be a Christian. It wasn't an easy time to be a follower of Christ.

[6:42] Sometimes it's hard for me to think about just because of where we live. We can come here every Sunday with fear of nothing happening to us. You know, nobody's going to kick in our door and come throw us in prison.

[6:55] But this church, they remained faithful to the church and the gospel in the face of that. Second thing, they were growing rapidly. Chapter 2, Pentecost, I think 3,000 souls were added.

[7:10] Chapter 5, verse 14 says, And more than ever, believers were added to the Lord. And in our own text this morning, Now in these days when the number of disciples was increasing, the church was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

[7:23] And it was happening at a very fast rate. And so when there's more people, there's just more needs. There's just more things happening. It's just a busy life. They confronted sin.

[7:36] Chapter 5, we read the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who greed kind of got in their life. You know, we just read about how the church was selling everything and giving it.

[7:49] They sold some stuff and kept it back and were kind of deceitful about it. And Peter and the early church, they step right in and they confront it immediately. So they were busy.

[8:00] They were busy. So maybe in just the midst of all this, it's just an honest oversight that the Hellenist widows, unfortunately, that maybe they just fell through the cracks of what was just a busy ministry.

[8:11] That's possibility number one. Maybe it was a language barrier. These are the Hellenists, they're Greek speaking. They're in the Aramaic speaking region of the world.

[8:23] Maybe they were just unable to communicate exactly what they needed. They were just that language barrier. And it was just lost in translation. The third one is maybe it was some kind of cultural or social prejudice.

[8:41] What if there was a little bit of maybe some hidden racism in the early church? The Hellenists would have been, though Jewish, they would have been very different from the Hebrew Jews.

[8:54] Their cultures would have been similar but different. It's no different than America. If you were to go to the West Coast on Christmas, you would see a lot of the same things.

[9:06] All in America, born in America, you would see the same things, but it may look different. Their decorations would look different or, you know, whatever. It would just be both Jewish, both American, just different cultures, different ways of life.

[9:20] And the Hebrews, you know, it's not surprising. We've seen this behavior in them before. We all know how they treated the Samaritans, right?

[9:32] They were prone to a bit of racism. They were prone to a bit of social injustice. They would go out of their way in travels to go around Samaria because they didn't even want to step foot on it.

[9:46] They didn't want the dirt from Samaria to get on their feet because Samaria was just so wicked and so vile, and they hated them so much. And so maybe there was a little bit of that.

[10:02] Maybe they just looked at the Hellenists and said, Yeah, you guys may be Jewish, but you don't dress like us. You don't really worship the exact same way we do. You don't speak the way we speak.

[10:16] You weren't born in the Holy Land. We were. So maybe there was a little bit of that on, and maybe the Hellenists felt like they were kind of second rate in the church. Maybe they thought they were, you know, a little, you know, a lower class citizen than the Hebrews.

[10:32] And so I think we have to consider who in our lives do we neglect because of social or cultural stigmas.

[10:48] Maybe in ways we don't even realize. You know, it's just the way you were brought up, the place you were raised, you were indoctrinated and ingrained with these ways of life, and you don't even realize it, but it causes you to treat others different because they look different, because the color of their skin is different, because they wear their clothes different, they listen to different music, whatever.

[11:14] Who do we treat different because of that? And I think we need to routinely examine our lives to try to find those biases and those prejudices that we have, and we need to repent of that.

[11:34] And if we have mistreated or devalued someone, even if it's inadvertently, we need to try to reconcile with that person.

[11:45] We need to try to apologize and repent of that sin and be reconciled to those people. So who, maybe even in our church or in your everyday life, is there someone or a group of people that maybe you shy away from?

[12:05] Or that maybe you ignore or mistreat, even if it's unintentionally?

[12:17] That's something that we need to address in the church, and we need to make sure it's not happening to anybody here. Just at Man Up Conference this week, on Friday night, Brian Sams preached about Jonah, and Jonah going to Nineveh.

[12:33] Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh. Jonah did everything he could not to go to Nineveh. Even to the point to where, when he's on the boat in the middle of the storm, he basically says, I would rather die than go to Nineveh, so just throw me over and let me drown.

[12:49] And then he ends up, you know the story, he goes to Nineveh, he preaches to Nineveh, Nineveh repents, and then you get to chapter 4, and you really see Jonah's heart. I'm just kind of summarizing.

[13:01] And he said, God, this is why I didn't want to come here, because I knew if I came here, you would save them, that you would do this work in their life. That's messed up.

[13:14] Basically, he just admitted, I don't want these people to go to heaven. I don't want these people to have your mercy. So what we have to ask ourselves, is there a group of people that we're intentionally keeping the gospel from just because we don't want God to do something in their life, because we know that he will?

[13:32] Because that's what Jonah did. And church racism in the church, it's sinful. And social injustice, you know, this is not what this is about, but it's everywhere.

[13:43] And are we part of it? I think we need to examine our lives and make sure we're not part of it. Make sure there's nobody that we're withholding the gospel from just because we're afraid that God might save them, because we don't like the way they look.

[14:00] Well, that's not the only problem the early church faced. This is just the one of them. If we keep going in verse 1, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews.

[14:12] So I think the second thing we see here, the second problem we see here, is it's an immature response of the members. The King Jimmy, as Jared would like to refer to it as, the King James reads, there arose a murmuring of the Hellenists against the Hebrews.

[14:31] So a murmuring, murmuring is a private expression of discontent or dissatisfaction. Murmurings are those backroom conversations.

[14:45] You know, the ones where you get alone, you get in your little circle, and you're grumbling, you're complaining about everybody, and then the people walk in, and it's just that awkward stop, that awkward pause.

[14:57] It's those snide comments you make under your breath when the people walk by. You know, they walk by, and you say, there goes the favorite Hebrews. You know, us Hellenists, us Grecians here, we can't even get some food.

[15:16] They had a legitimate complaint. It's a big deal that their widows aren't being fed. But instead of going to somebody who could help them, and addressing the problem, they choose to murmur.

[15:34] They choose to create this dissension and disunity, which is the third problem. We see disunity start to divide the church. So in Acts 4, Luke says of this congregation that it was a congregation of one heart and one soul.

[15:53] We saw that earlier when they were all selling everything they could to feed everybody. But now something's happened. They've been forgotten.

[16:05] They've been neglected, which is a legitimate problem. But instead of going to the pastor or going to somebody who could help them, they murmur. Now the church is divided.

[16:17] It's split. It's split along a linguistic divide, a cultural divide, where you've got your Hellenists and your Hebrews, and the church is in disarray.

[16:31] The peace and the unity that they shared in Christ is now gone. All they can see is this Hellenist, outside Jew, Hebrew, national Jew.

[16:47] And I think it's in Matthew, I didn't write it down, I should add, but Jesus said that a house divided cannot stand. A church divided cannot stand. Will fall, will fracture, will crumble.

[16:59] And this all started with just a ministry failure. This planned ministry that had good intentions, it just didn't work out.

[17:13] And there's not many of us here today, but at some point, the church will probably do something, and it may, hopefully unintentionally, it may neglect you.

[17:29] It may, you may feel left out. And it will not be intentional, it will not be intentional here, I don't think so. I don't think that's who we are as a church. But it could happen. We could, the church could fail you in some way.

[17:42] Somebody sitting across the room could fail you, or hurt your feelings in some way. And how we respond will make all the difference in the world. We can respond like the Hellenists, and we can create dissension and disunity, and we'll start to fracture.

[18:00] Or, we could have a hard conversation. And with the spirit of Ephesians 4, which says, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit, and the bond of peace.

[18:21] Our goal should be repentance and reconciliation. If somebody hurts you, give them the opportunity to repent. If you hurt somebody, be willing to humble yourself, and go to them and say, hey, I'm sorry.

[18:35] I've had to apologize to people here before. And it hurts. And I know I've hurt some people's feelings here, but I'm so thankful that they were patient with me. I'm so thankful that they gave me the opportunity to say I'm sorry, and that we could reconcile to each other.

[18:53] It's what we have to do. Sometimes that's hard, but it's important, or we'll just divide. We'll get clicky, and then we'll split.

[19:03] We'll crumble. Because a house divided cannot stand. So what does the church need? Is it more programs? Do we just need to get more programs to make sure that more people are being, their needs met?

[19:22] Well, no, I don't think that's it. They have programs. And the programs that they have aren't working. That's where this whole problem started. The mills on wheels didn't work.

[19:34] The ladies got neglected. So what do they need? Well, they need some leadership, is what they need. And this is exactly what they get.

[19:45] Notice from verse 2 through 4. And the twelve summoned the full number of disciples together and said, It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and wisdom, who we will appoint to this duty.

[20:05] But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. So the news of the disgruntled Hellenists has finally reached the ears of the pastors of the church.

[20:18] And they immediately take action. And you'll notice what they immediately do is say, We're not going to feed the people. Maybe that's kind of what you thought they would do, or did you think they would jump right in and just feed the people?

[20:36] No. What they actually did is they come and they provide a form of leadership by establishing priorities. Notice in verse 2, they said, It is not right that we would give up preaching.

[20:51] Just a little side note, if you ever wake up in the morning and you're faced with a decision and you say, What do I do? If the first word out of your mouth is it's not right for me to do this, then don't do it.

[21:02] It's exactly what they did. See, they have been given a priority, a priority of preaching the word by Jesus. Flip back to Acts chapter 1. You don't have to flip there.

[21:13] But Acts chapter 1, when Jesus begins to, right before the ascension, he says, But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

[21:37] Jesus told them one of their priorities was the ministry of the word. That was their first priority. And they set it up. And other places in the Bible, we see that ministry of the word fleshed out a little more.

[21:52] Later in Acts, Paul is in Ephesus, and he's getting ready to leave, and he gathers the elders together, and he's giving his farewell speech to the elders.

[22:03] And in reference to the ministry of the words, he tells the elders, you guys got to do three things when I'm gone. And I'm going to summarize them here for you. The first one is to lead the church. You guys are to lead the church.

[22:15] I won't spend a lot of time on this because Pastor just preached about this in Titus the other day when he talked about shepherds or elders or shepherds, they're spiritual leaders.

[22:27] And so, but how are they going to lead us if they're not in the word? If they're not spending their time in the Bible, in God's word, how are they going to know how to lead us?

[22:39] What God's will is? So they have to be in the word. H.B. Charles said, pastors serve the church by leading the church. The next thing that Paul told them to do is to feed the church.

[22:53] And that's not, that's not feeding them real food, which is where this started. This is a metaphor. He's talking about spiritual food. And John, I'm sorry, John Owen, the Puritan pastor, said the first and principal duty of the pastor is to feed the flock by diligent preaching of the word.

[23:15] It's a never-ending job for pastor. As soon as Sunday's over, next Sunday's coming. And he has to prepare that meal for us. And it takes time.

[23:26] It takes work. And he has to work at it. He has to devote his time to that. For if not, John Owen goes on to say that he is no pastor who doesn't feed his flock.

[23:39] So if pastors can't spend time feeding their flock, then John Owen says, you're not a pastor anyway. Third thing Paul tells the Ephesians is to protect the flock, to protect us.

[23:50] Since creation, God, his word, and his people have been under attack. It didn't take the devil long to creep into the garden and sow those seeds of doubt.

[24:04] And there are many people today who's not telling you the truth. They're lying to you. And some of them are even lying to you in the name of Jesus.

[24:16] They come with this shroud of, this is what Jesus wants you to do, this is what the Bible says, and it's a lie. It's crafty, it's deceitful, it sounds good, but it's a lie.

[24:29] So we need pastors dedicated to the ministry of the word, sound in theology, sound in doctrine, to protect us from that.

[24:41] The ones who can see through the cleverness and the distortions that those lies are being told to us. In Ephesians, Paul now has left Ephesus.

[24:53] He's writing back to them. He adds one more. He says, pastors, you are to equip the church, to equip us. So back at the beginning when the pastors didn't respond by feeding the people, it's because they have to equip us to feed the people.

[25:11] It's our job to do the ministry of the word. The pastor's job is to get us ready to serve. He's preparing us to serve so we can meet each other's needs.

[25:24] So when it's me that is struggling with sin, it doesn't have to be him who helps me. It can be Shane who can call me and say, hey, let me help you through that. And he can do that because he's been prepared.

[25:38] So if we think about those things, big pictures, what happens if pastors don't do those things? What happens if they don't dedicate their time to the ministry of the word?

[25:50] Well, the gospel can't go forward because nobody's proclaiming it. Who's going to lead the church? If the pastor's not spiritually minded, how is he to lead us spiritually?

[26:04] That's the blind walking the blind. Where are we going to go? If he's not preparing us good meals, what are we eating every week? It's a bunch of garbage.

[26:14] So we're going to be spiritually weak, which leads us to be fit prey for the ravenous wolves that will come. And then the pastor can't even protect us from that because he's probably fooled by it too.

[26:28] And then, I really think this, if he's not equipping the next generation, what happens to the church? It ceases to exist.

[26:39] There's no next generation to come on and take the mantle and to do these things because the pastors aren't equipping us, not equipping the next generation to come along and keep it going.

[26:50] The church would cease to exist. The second priority there was prayer. And when we think about prayer, I don't think we have to look any further than Jesus.

[27:04] God incarnate himself routinely got away on his own to pray. Luke tells us in his gospel, but he, Jesus, would withdraw to desolate places to pray.

[27:21] And I thought about that this week. God incarnate, God himself, routinely took time away on his own to pray.

[27:34] If he needs that much prayer, how much more do I, sinful Andy, need to pray? Spurgeon said that prayer girds human weakness with divine strength, turns human folly into heavenly wisdom, and gives troubled mortals the peace of God.

[27:55] We all need that. We all need those things. But think about our pastor. He needs divine strength, heavenly wisdom, the peace, because they're troubled themselves.

[28:08] And not only that, they minister to troubled people. Your burdens are his burdens. Your struggles are his struggles. And he's got the own weight of his own life, his own marriage, his own kids.

[28:21] It's all on him. And then he's got all of us that I know he cares about. And it's all on him. He needs to be able to get away and pray. And because of that, he can't, pastors can't do everything.

[28:37] They can't be the ones to go to every hospital visit. They can't meet everybody's need because if they were busy meeting everybody's need, there's no ministry of the word.

[28:48] There's no time for prayer. And we just saw what happened if there's no time for ministry of the word and prayer. We crumble again. We crumble again. So they set their priorities.

[29:00] And the next thing they did was they delegated. They delegated responsibilities. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the spirit, full of wisdom, whom we will appoint for this duty.

[29:19] So the pastors come together and they say, listen guys, we can't do this, but this is what we recommend you do. You fix the problem yourselves.

[29:31] Pick out from among you. why is it so important that these people come from us?

[29:43] Why can't it just be anybody? So I thought about that this week and Pastor told you this came about for me going to do a deacon ordination for my brother-in-law, Dustin.

[29:55] Dustin is a qualified deacon. He's faithfully serving his church. So if we had a need here, we could call Dustin and we could say, hey Dustin, there's this need in their church.

[30:06] We need a little help. Could you come down here and do it? Dustin could do it. I have no doubt he could come down here and if it was serving widows, he could come down here and he could do all the things that needed to be done to serve the widows.

[30:20] So why isn't that good enough? Dustin may be qualified to meet those needs, but he really can't serve you people. Not because he wouldn't want to, he would want to, but he just don't know us.

[30:34] He's not invested in us. He's not invested in this church. Sure, he would probably love you, but he don't know what Marty and Faye's been through the past year.

[30:47] Doesn't know what life's been like for Dylan and Ashley over the past three years with their kids and their struggles. With Bev and Terry who were in the hospital this morning, Dustin, whose kids are going through some hard times.

[30:59] Dustin don't know that. So he can't serve them in that way. But we can. We can. Because on Wednesdays, the men who can come together and we study the Bible together and we share what's going on in their lives and we pray for each other.

[31:18] I know you ladies are doing that monthly, right? Monthly, you come together, you talk to each other, you know what's going on in each other's lives. Thanksgiving and Christmas we have those awesome services where we all come together and we're singing and we're praising the Lord together and we know what each other's thankful for.

[31:37] I'm convinced that we are better suited to meet our needs from inside our church. The people who we love, the people who are invested in us, we're invested in them. We're more than capable of serving each other.

[31:50] I think that's why God brought us together, us specifically at this specific place, to serve each other. Secondly, they had to be men of honest report or people of honest report.

[32:04] I think that just means that they're spoken highly of, both inside the church and outside the church. So in their daily lives, in their job, they're unsaved friends, only have good things to say about them.

[32:21] They're just very mature people. Their life is not characterized or covered in scandal in any way. Second, they had to be full of the Spirit.

[32:36] On the most basic level, I think that that means they had to be saved. Right? Upon salvation, God sends the Holy Spirit to indwell our lives. And he lives in sight of us.

[32:47] So we are literally filled with the Spirit upon salvation. But I think it's more than that. I think it's somebody who lives a life that is guided by the Spirit.

[32:58] You know, they're going to be reading their Bible every day. They're going to be praying. They would be a good example of who to look for for spiritual disciplines. Spirit-filled. Thirdly, they need to be full of wisdom.

[33:13] So they're just wise. They make good decisions. They're not rash in decisions. They don't make hasty decisions. It's not necessarily about being smart.

[33:25] You can have the highest IQ in the room right now and be the most foolish person here. it's about being prudent and exercising discernment, understanding how the decision you make, how it affects everybody else around us, men who are wise in their decisions.

[33:47] So now again, why such qualifications to serve tables? I mean, why didn't Peter just say, hey, James and John run down to the marketplace, find the guy with the biggest shop, the most customers, whose employees are just organized and they're just rolling people out there.

[34:10] Go get him, tell him to come down here and Andrew and Phillip, y'all run down to the bank and get the financial guy. And then the financial guy can come in, he can run the money to make sure the food supply never ends, right?

[34:24] Manages the money, widows always have food and then the logistical guy comes in and just makes this a well-oiled machine where it's just busting people through the light.

[34:35] Why not do that? Why such a spiritual emphasis? It's because the real problem here is not, it's not the physical need.

[34:46] The physical need manifested the problem, but it's actually a spiritual need. It's deeper than that. It's that spirit of disunity, that spirit of division that's crept up between the two groups.

[35:01] That's what needs to be addressed here. And so to address spiritual matters, you have to have spiritually minded people. The banker and the logistics man, they just care about keeping the thing rolling, keep it pumping through.

[35:17] But the spiritually minded people from among us who care for each other and love each other, they want to meet the need, but they want to make sure your spirit's okay. They want to make sure that your walk with the Lord is where it needs to be.

[35:31] So that's why there's such an emphasis here on spiritual minded people, because we need spiritual leaders to guide us, to promote that peace, to help us reconcile to one another.

[35:43] So next in verses 5 and 6 we'll see the response of the people. And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Taman, and Parmenius, and Nicholas, a proselyte of Antioch, and they sat before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands on them.

[36:12] So the Bible really doesn't tell us what happens. I think it's safe to assume that these seven men did what they were selected to do. They came in and they ministered to the widows.

[36:25] So if we think back to the beginning when I said we were speculating about what it was, maybe it was a busy ministry life, well now you have seven servants who are capable of taking that weight. You have seven people who have come in and they have alleviated some of the busyness.

[36:40] busyness, okay? So if it was just busyness, now you have people who are set apart to serve them in that way. If it was language, or if it was a cultural and social divide, if you'll notice the names of these seven people, they're all Greek.

[36:59] They're all Greek speaking. And so if it was a language barrier, now you have seven men who are uniquely capable of serving in that way.

[37:10] They all speak Greek. They all speak the language. So now if it's a language barrier, they come in and they can communicate and things are done. It's easy peasy after that. If there was some kind of social or cultural divide, how wonderful is it that the congregation as a whole chose seven Greeks to fill the need?

[37:35] if it was cultural, if they were butting heads, now even the Hebrews were involved in this, they said, well let's pick these seven guys, all these Hellenists, and they can come and they can serve the church.

[37:50] Man, you can see the reconciliation and the unity start coming back together. You can see this great example of these two groups serving each other.

[38:01] And so that's what they did. They pleased the congregation. It says it right there. The whole congregation was pleased. And so kind of the question here is, are these men the deacons?

[38:18] Well, in his book, The Deacon Biblical Foundations for Today's Ministry of Mercy, Cornelius Van Damme says, when all factors have been considered, it seems best to understand the ordination and in Acts chapter 6, as to an office that would be later called deacon.

[38:36] Although they are not called deacons here, the first readers of Acts may have seen the seven as deacons, and this identification of the seven as the first ordained deacons has been the mainline position of the Christian church since the second century.

[38:53] So at the very least, what we have here is Deacons 1.0. It is the prototypical deacon for a ministry or an office that would later come in the church.

[39:05] And so, in the little nine marks books, deacons, they said deacons do three things. Matt Smithhurst wrote that book, he said they do three things. They meet tangible needs of the church, which is exactly what these guys did.

[39:17] They came in and they're serving the tables. Second thing they do is they promote peace and unity in the congregation. Verse 5, the whole people were pleased.

[39:30] They come and they begin the healing process and uniting the church back together. The third thing that they do is they support the work of the pastors.

[39:42] And they do that by meeting tangible needs and promoting peace and unity. So we see this perfectly here, a deacon ministry and how it is beneficial and helpful to the church.

[39:57] So verse 7, this is the last thing we see, the results. And the word of God continued to increase and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.

[40:16] I don't think verse 7 is a direct response to verses 1 through 6 that we just read. I think chapter, or verse 7 is the results of Acts 1, 1 to this point.

[40:30] It's a big summary statement of everything that's happened thus far. So from Acts 1, 1 to 6, 7 what I think we see pictured is a healthy church.

[40:43] It's not a perfect church. We've talked about some of their problems today. The sin that was there, the disunity, the possible cultural divide. It's not a perfect church, but it is a healthy church.

[40:58] Adrian Rogers said, where there is healthy life, there is growth. Where there is healthy growth, there are problems. When there are problems, there are God-given solutions. And where there are God-given solutions, there is even greater growth.

[41:12] Church, that's exactly what we see outlined in chapters 1 through 6 to this point. We see the church growing, faithfully preaching the gospel, confronting sin, and they keep growing, and they keep growing.

[41:31] That's my prayer for our church. That's what I want for us. A church that focuses on the gospel. A place where our pastor not only leads us, but he prioritizes the gospel and prayer in his life.

[41:47] So he can, he can, we can be that beacon of hope here for Cornelius and Lake Norman. A church that we may be different, our cultures are different, we may look different, our traditions are different, but we lay all that aside and come together and we're unified under the gospel.

[42:08] Unity in Christ. And a church that when that unity is kind of tested, when division comes, is that we would be willing to be patient with one another, to love one another, to be willing to say I'm sorry, to humble ourselves and say I'm sorry, and then be forgiving enough to say you know what, it's okay.

[42:34] It's bigger than that. And we would stay united under the gospel. a church where we lovingly serve each other, to where a pastor equips us, and from among us when needs arise that people just give of themselves, whether it's financially, maybe we help each other out in that way, but maybe it's of our time and of our talents to where we come up and say hey I can meet that need, I can do that, I can take that off your hands, I can make that hospital visit, I can make them supper, where we do that for each other, just because we love each other.

[43:11] And a church that by God's grace that we grow, not only in our love for Him and our knowledge of Him, but that we will grow in number. I want us to be a healthy church.

[43:23] That's my prayer today.