The Church: God’s Divine Construction Project, Part 2 (Acts 1,2)

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The Church: God's Divine Construction Project, Part 3 (Romans 11:33-12:2)

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Good to see each one of you this morning. Why don't we get started on our study this morning? And we're going to go back to studying the church.

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If you didn't get a outline last time or if you need one, there are some out there.

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I think some of them are being brought in here, so there are some available. And we're going to continue in our little short study of the church,

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God's Divine Construction Project. And before we do that, why don't we commit our time to our

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Lord and ask His blessing? Let's pray together. Father, thank You for this opportunity that we have to be together, to study

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Your Word, to learn from what You would teach us today. We pray that You would help us to see what the church is all about, help us to use this great historic model that we have given to us by Luke, the physician,

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Luke, the historian, but also Luke, the theologian, to learn about the church, to see it for what

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You see it as and help us, Father, also to implement that in our lives. Teach us now from Your Word and we will praise

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You in Christ's mighty name. Amen. If you remember last time, and just very briefly, we looked at the

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Master Builder's plan. And that plan took place in the midst of opposition, intense opposition, and as we know, that led eventually to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

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But in the sovereignty of God, that was in the plan of God for that to happen. They came to Him and they tried to test

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Him, we saw. That's at the very top of page two on your notes. He pronounced them and their testing as evil and that they were an adulterous generation.

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He later warned the apostles to beware of their teaching, the leaven of the

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Pharisees, and He used that imagery to indicate that the false teaching would permeate the church and permeate their minds and everything about them.

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So He said, stay away from their false teaching. And then later we saw He led His apostles up to,

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His disciples, up to the north area to get them alone to begin to teach them about His impending death.

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And He asked them and solicited from them the response, who do men say that I am?

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Their response, of course, was all over the map, men, some say this, some say that. All wrong answers.

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And then He said, but who do you say that I am? And then Peter gave that great confession, that foundational confession.

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You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. He is the fulfillment of Old Testament messianic prophecies and hope.

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And there was a very high messianic expectation at that time among the Jewish people. They anticipated the fulfillment of those promises.

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They took God at His word. They knew He promised the Messiah from the Lion of David and that He was going to come and He was going to set up His kingdom on the earth.

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They anticipated that. But He also added the Son of the living

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God. So what we have here are two elements of who Jesus Christ is. He is

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God, in fact, and He's man, in fact. He is the promised Messiah, the rightful

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King of the Davidic throne. But He's also God in human flesh.

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And that great confession, that statement from Peter, Jesus said, upon this rock

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I will build my church. And we also noted that it wasn't Peter that He was going to build the church on.

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And it wasn't even this confession per se. It was Himself. And I just wanted to remind us all that when we put our trust in Christ, it is in Christ the person.

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We don't put our faith in a creed. We don't put our faith in a statement. We don't put our faith in some sort of a doctrinal statement or even a confession.

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It's kind of popular nowadays for people to say, well, we're confessional. We have a confession. And that's fine as long as the confession is biblical.

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We tell people, put your faith in Christ the person. Remember John in the prologue to his gospel said, to as many as received

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Him, to them He gave power to become sons of God. So just a reminder, even though we stress this statement and how important it is and how foundational it is, the foundation is the person of Jesus Christ.

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And then we saw the architect of the church. It is God the Father. Peter didn't come up with that by himself. God gave him that, of course, through the ministry of the

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Spirit. And the builder of the church is Jesus Christ. He's not only the foundation stone of the church,

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He Himself is the builder. He said, I will build my church. He's the builder and He's the owner.

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And later then we moved into Matthew chapter 28 and a very brief look at the master's people, an amazing thing.

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He's going to build His church. He's the church, but He's going to use the church to build the church.

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Isn't that incredible that He would use us to build His church? But that's exactly what He wants to do.

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The resurrected Christ claiming all authority given to Him, where?

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Over heaven and earth. And we mentioned that's an echo of Genesis chapter 1 and the created order by God.

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He created the heavens and the earth. Jesus has all authority over heaven and earth. He's risen from the dead.

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He's Lord of all the church with all authority. And He commands His people to make disciples.

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We are to be disciple makers. And we do that. We go, we baptize, and we teach.

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Very important there to emphasize a teaching ministry of the church. The true church is a teaching church, a teaching ministry.

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And what do we teach? All that He has commanded. That is so basic, and it's an amazing thing to see how the departure from that all over the place, right?

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You know that. You've seen that. And then His promises. He's sending the church out into a hostile world.

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The hostility never goes away. The opposition never goes away, as we're going to see in the book of Acts. But we have

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His presence in the person of the Spirit of God. And because we have the Spirit, and we're going to see this in Acts chapter 1, we also have

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His power. And that power also is power to do what He asks us to do, to be witnesses, to bear testimony, and to bear whatever else we are going to bear, but also perseverance.

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We will persevere. It's a promise of eternal life through faith in Christ. So I thought

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I'd just pause briefly to see if there were any questions last time. We moved pretty quick, and we still are.

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We're going to take a flying trip through the book of Acts here in just a minute. But did you have any questions about what we talked about last time?

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Okay, let's open our Bibles to the book of Acts, and we're going to see Jesus doing exactly what

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He said He would do. When He said, I will build my church, that is an absolute promise that He is going to keep.

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And Luke records for us the first roughly 30 years of church history in the book of Acts.

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And Luke, of course, wrote the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts. They originally were basically a two -volume work.

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And then late in the first century, John wrote his Gospel account, and it was recognized as a

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Gospel account, and then sort of inserted in between Luke's account and the book of Acts.

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So if you're, I'm not saying you should take that out and move it around. Too late for that, 2 ,000 years into church history.

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But that's how the early church understood Luke and Acts. It was a two -part work. Luke wrote more of the

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New Testament than any other writer. May surprise you more than Paul or anybody else. Luke -Acts is a two -part work, and it really is valuable to study it together.

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But let's look at Acts chapter one, and we're going to be going through page four and five of your notes.

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What we're going to see, I'm sorry, three and four, what we're going to see first of all is the work of the Spirit to empower the church to do what

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Christ has called it to do. Luke wrote Acts, and we're going to recognize that he references his

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Gospel account in the very first verse. He says, in the first book, O Theophilus, and if you look at Luke, he wrote to the very same person,

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Theophilus, his friend. 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

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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 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God.

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And while staying with them, he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the

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Father, which he said, you heard from me. For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the

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Holy Spirit not many days from now. So when they had come together, they asked him,

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Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? Again, very high level of messianic kingdom expectation.

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They expected the kingdom to come right then and there and come on earth. They didn't try to spiritualize it or change the meaning of it.

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They understood the promise from the Old Testament. It's going to be an earthly kingdom, and it's going to be led by King Jesus, the

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Messiah. And he doesn't correct them as far as anticipating an earthly kingdom.

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He just simply says, you're wrong about the timing. He said to them, it is not for you to know times or seasons that the

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Father has fixed by his own authority. Another evidence,

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I believe, from the text that there will be a kingdom. The Father has fixed the time for it to come by his own authority.

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You're not wrong to ask about a coming kingdom. It's going to be here, but it's not going to come right now.

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And then he says, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all

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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.

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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?

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This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come.

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One more evidence of a coming kingdom, will come in the same way as you saw him go in to heaven.

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Now, there's an awful lot here we could talk about, but we need to go from chapter one to chapter 28.

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We're going to kind of buckle our seatbelts here and go through it very quickly. Don't worry, it won't be any turbulence, but we're going to get through it.

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We have a lot of advantage here from the book of Acts. Number one, from that statement in verse eight, that really forms sort of the theme of the book of Acts, but also it gives us some marker points because he's talking about the spread of the gospel, the movement of the gospel from Jerusalem to Judea, Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth.

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So we have this kind of a geographic outline here and the book is going to follow that.

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But what we also have, thankfully, a very convenient set of progress reports. There's six of them written by Luke and we can, as we move through, we can sort of use these progress reports as sort of markers to see and show, because this is what

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Luke is doing, that God is doing through the church exactly what Jesus said he would do.

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He would build his church. So on your outline there, what we're going to see, number one at the top of page three here,

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Roman numeral one, the promised power, of course, is the Holy Spirit and the expanding sphere from Jerusalem to the end of the earth.

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What we're seeing here primarily, and this is a major theme, a major theme, really critical in Luke and in Acts, is the movement of the gospel from Jew to Gentile.

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This is a huge theme. And this was also a mountain that the church had to get over.

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You remember last week, the scripture reading was from Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council, and Gordy talked about from Genesis, I mean, from Galatians 2, this issue in the church about the gospel moving from Jew to Gentile.

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Well, the Jerusalem Council, of course, was about their decision that the Gentiles are being saved. This was not a minor point.

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Most of us probably are Gentile Christians, but for a Jewish Christian, they retained much of the animosity against the

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Gentiles, even some of them, many of them, after they were saved. It was tough for them to get over that, that God is going to save Gentiles.

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We tend to see, of course, God wants to save everybody, but historically, this is a huge mountain for them to get over, and it's a gigantic issue.

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When you see that, and you understand that what they're failing to want to do is to fulfill that third element of the

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Abrahamic covenant. When God said, I will, I will, I will, five times, one of those was to, through Abraham and his descendants, bless all the nations of the earth, all the nations.

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And so, when he said, I will, he will, and he is. And part of what we're seeing here is

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God actually carrying out what he promised to do. When God makes a promise, he fulfills that promise.

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And so, we have then the expanding sphere of the gospel, from Jerusalem to the end of the earth, is what we're going to see.

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Well, we want to look at Peter's Pentecost proclamation. As you know, Acts chapter 2, we're going to start moving fairly quickly here, the

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Spirit comes down and empowers the church to do exactly what Jesus said it would do.

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And then Peter begins to preach. They of course are accused of being drunk because of this issue of tongues.

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He corrects them by taking them back to the prophecy of Joel. And again, in Joel, what he promises there, if you notice, he says in 217, and in the last days it shall be,

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God declares that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Now, when we see this word all, or every, or everyone, we often think of everyone without exception.

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Of course, we're evangelical Christians. We want everybody, everyone. But what did Joel mean, all flesh?

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And he says, your sons, your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, even on my male servants and female servants.

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In those days I will pour out my spirit and they shall prophesy. That's not all men without exception.

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That's all men without distinction. He very clearly outlines what he's talking about. And then, down in verse 21, it shall come to pass that everyone, not just Jews, but everyone who calls upon the name of the

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Lord shall be saved. And then he addresses the nation in verse 22. Men of Israel, hear these words.

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Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst.

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As you yourselves know, this Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.

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There's the sovereignty of God. You crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.

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There's the responsibility of man. And those two are right together in Scripture. Now we could talk a lot about that, but we'd probably be here after lunch.

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That's not our purpose. But for the purpose of our class and what we're doing here today, we need to see those two are together in Scripture.

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They're not in conflict, but they are together and they need to be understood in that context. The sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man.

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And then he goes and he connects this up to the prophecy concerning David, the kingship of David. What we need to see, first of all, from this

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Peter's proclamation, and that's A, he preached about their sin. He preached about their sin.

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Any proclamation, any preaching, anything we evangelize, we evangelize people, the issue of sin has to come up.

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One of the things that the church growth movement did, it marginalized that. In fact, many books by the authoritarian church growth experts said, oh, you don't want to talk about sin.

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Can't do that because people won't come. You'll discourage them. You'll make them feel bad. You don't want to do that.

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Peter did. And as we know, all of the apostles did. John the Baptist did. Jesus did.

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These men were preachers of the word and the first thing they talk about is sin. If we don't talk about sin, then we can't talk about salvation.

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We don't talk about the wrath of God. The grace of God makes no sense, right? But Peter did to all of these people in the power of the spirit of God and he showed that B, Jesus is the prophesied son of God.

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He's risen from the dead and he's coming back and he will judge his enemies. And what was the required response?

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They asked that as he moves into verse 36 of chapter two, let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both

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Lord and Christ. This Jesus, and there it is again, whom you crucified. Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart.

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He didn't chase them away, apparently, even though he just indicts them in their sin. The spirit of God is at work and they're cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do?

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And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the

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Holy Spirit for the promises for you and for your children, descendants of Jewish people, and there's another group here, and for all who are far off, that is the

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Gentiles, everyone defined in scripture as everyone without distinction,

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Jew and Gentile, oh, but by the way, sovereignty of God, whom the Lord, our God, calls to himself.

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There it is right there. And with many other words, he bore witness and continued to exhort them saying, save yourselves from this crooked generation.

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So those who received his word were baptized and there were added that day about 3 ,000 souls.

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What an amazing day that was. They received his word and they were baptized.

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Baptism is the first evidence of obedience, the first evidence, the first audio visual thing you can see in somebody's life that they truly are saved.

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Baptism is commanded to the church to baptize believers and believers are commanded to be baptized and there it is.

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But notice a little detail here, repent and be baptized, but verse 41 says, those who received his word were baptized.

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There is a connection between repentance and receiving the word. In fact, the good old fashioned word conversion, and I just put it there, conversion, sort of a good working definition is repentance and faith, or we might say repentant faith.

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Those two are together in scripture. They're welded together. They're two identifiable entities.

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You can talk about either one of them, but you can't separate them. If you separate them, then you can misdefine them both.

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They are always together and they together make up what we would call conversion. Apostle Paul commended the

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Thessalonian Christians in his first letter and he said, you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true

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God. That is a good definition from scripture of conversion, repentance and faith, or repentant faith if you like.

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So Peter's Pentecost proclamation talked about sin. Jesus is the son of God and he's risen from the dead.

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He preached the resurrected Christ. He's coming back to judge his enemies and so repent and be baptized, which 2 ,000, 3 ,000 souls did that.

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Now I want to make sure that we understand something, and 42 through 47 is very important.

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It kind of gets more down into the details of what this group of people did. They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, there again, in obedience to the great commission, teaching them to obey.

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And they had the apostles right there to teach them. That would have been great.

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And the fellowship, and I think the best way to understand that is the fellowship which is made up of the breaking of bread and prayers.

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Fellowship is really defined by two major things, the fellowship of communion and the fellowship of prayer.

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And that's what they did. They were devoted to that. But look down at verse 47, praising

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God and having favor with all the people and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were signing up to join the church.

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Day by day, those who raised their hand and said, yeah, I want to join, make me a member. Day by day, those who were being saved.

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Now, is it so difficult to define the church as those whom the

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Lord adds to the church and those who are saved? How do you miss that?

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Well, there's only one way to miss it, and that's not pay attention to the Word of God. But as we know, that's so common out there.

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You can go to a church, you can sign up for a church, but it is the Lord who adds to their number those who are being saved.

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So basic and also so important in understanding what the church is. Well, as we see here in the birth of the church, the growth of the church, and that's under Roman numeral number one, we have the master builder's progress as the church then begins to move out into the world.

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And these six progress reports are going to really be our outline as we see this.

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We're going to move right through. There's always opposition for the church, and it's in various forms, various kinds.

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And just as a reminder, the church is always persecuted from the outside, but it's perverted from within.

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We see that. We see that all around us. In fact, perhaps, I haven't taken a poll, but maybe we evangelical

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Christians worry more about persecution than we do perversion from within.

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But what destroys the church more often than not is perversion from within. So just bear that in mind.

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The Apostle Paul, when he met with the Ephesian elders, you remember that in Acts 20, he warns them.

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He says, from among your own selves. These are the elders of the church of Ephesus, and he talks about false teachers coming from among your own selves.

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Persecution from the outside, but perversion from within. We're going to see this, and that's part of the opposition, as we know.

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Well, the church then goes out. There's healings. There's preaching and teaching. In chapter 3, there's the healing of a beggar.

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Peter speaks in the temple, and Peter and John then, as part of the persecution and the opposition, they are arrested, and there's a great sermon preached by Peter after they get out of jail, and they basically say, you know, you can arrest us.

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You can persecute us. You can do whatever you want, but we're going to obey God rather than men, and they go ahead and do that.

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So the persecution is very evident up through chapter 4, but then in chapter 5, what happens? Something happens internally, and you have this issue of Ananias and Sapphira.

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That's there for a very good reason, so the church can learn how important holiness is to the church and to God, because they lied to the

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Holy Spirit. And then we get to chapter 6, and we realize there's some other issues that need to be solved.

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There are certain widows that weren't being fed, and they were Hellenists. They were these

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Greek -speaking Jewish widows. They weren't being fed by the church, and that was an issue.

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And here we see, very importantly, they met that need, but they also maintained their priority. If you look at chapter 6, verse 2, it says, the 12, that's the apostles, summoned the full number of the disciples and said, it is not right that we should give up preaching the

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Word of God to serve tables. Serving tables is important. Serving tables is critical.

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It was a need in the church, but they had a priority, and that priority was the preaching of the

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Word. Good definition to have for any church, a true church, do they have a priority for the preaching of the

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Word of God? Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the

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Spirit and of wisdom, whom we'll appoint to this duty. Now, for the most part, this is generally seen to be the appointment of the first deacons in the church, men who are going to meet a material need in the church.

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But verse 4, they reiterate, but we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the

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Word. It's very common in the church growth movement in the last 30, 40 years for churches to abandon the

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Word of God or marginalize the preaching of the Word of God to do something else. And that something else is something very good.

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Well, we feed 25 ,000 people a week out of our food bank. We do that. But does your pastor preach the

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Word of God? Well, he's involved in this other ministry. It's a very good ministry, important ministry. Well, then he's abandoned the

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Word of God and the priority of the Word of God in the church. And the church is built upon the preaching and teaching of the

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Word of God. Characteristic of that movement, and still is, they marginalized what was best for something that was merely good.

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And there's a lot of good things you can do, all kinds of things, all kinds of ministries you can get involved in.

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But if you can do those and still keep the priority of the pulpit, great. If not, it's not in God's will that the church does those things.

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Yes, question. I have a question. Is it an area of the role of preaching?

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Were these men elders in the church? I think probably I would lean more toward calling them deacons because it's...

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At this point in the church, the apostles are really carrying out the duties of the elders, the preaching, the teaching, and that type of thing.

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And so what you see here is a bit of a division of labor. These are godly men, but it's just in order for us to keep the priority of the preaching of the

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Word and prayer, we need some other people to do that. I think... Probably more like the elders. I would say so, yeah.

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And I would think if we wanted to put a label on it, we would maybe call these more like deacons in the church.

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So we have this coming up to the first progress report, meeting of this need.

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Did God bless the keeping of this priority? Well, we're told in verse 7, here's the first progress report.

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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.

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God certainly did bless the keeping of that priority. Also, He provided a way for them to meet the needs within the church, this material need of feeding these widows.

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Well, the church continues to move out, Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. We see that in verse 8 of chapter 6 through 9 .31.

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We have still the persecution and the opposition, and we have Stephen being arrested.

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Stephen then eventually, as you know, preaches this tremendous sermon to the hierarchy, and he's talking about their own history.

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They love to hear their history. And he says in chapter 7, verse 2, brothers and fathers, hear me.

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The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham, he was in Mesopotamia, now he has their ear. And they're listening to everything he says, and he recounts their history through the

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Bible. They're loving this, these spiritual leaders. And he goes on and on, and it's a pretty long, extensive sermon, except he gets down to the end.

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Verse 51 of chapter 7, here's kind of the punchline.

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You stiff -necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, now he's calling the

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Jewish leaders uncircumcised, okay? You always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.

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Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and murdered.

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Whoa, just like Peter. He's just hammering them with their sin after he got them all interested in this sermon about their past, which they took a lot of pride in.

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You're calling these Jewish leaders uncircumcised, and they are not keeping the law, and you murdered your own

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Messiah. So once again, sin is a prominent issue in the preaching of the New Testament here.

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And we know what happened to Stephen. He was taken out. He was stoned to death. And you might think, well, boy, there goes the church.

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That's it. There goes the effort. Boy, that's no way to build a church and to move it forward, talking to people like that.

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Look at chapter 8, verse 1. Here we have Saul, who became Paul. Saul approved of his execution.

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And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. And they were all scattered throughout the regions.

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Where? Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. That's it.

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Church is gone. Church is scattered. There goes the effort. That'll never work. Wait a minute. Look at verse 4.

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Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. The church can be persecuted.

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The church can be killed. You can try to burn it out, elect it out, whatever you want to do.

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Jesus said, I will build my church. Here's a good example. Persecution. Now, was it easy for those folks?

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Of course not. It must have been horrible. Their lives were turned upside down. They were chased out.

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They were persecuted. But they did what Christ told them to do. And the church continued to grow.

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So in chapter 8, then, we have the continuation of the church moving out. Philip is preaching.

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People are saved and baptized. Philip then has an encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch. And the church is moving from Jew to Gentile, as we can see, just as he said.

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And then in chapter 9, we have the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. This one who was approving of the death of Stephen.

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He is now saved by the sovereign work of God. And he then becomes a leading evangelist, specifically commissioned to go to the

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Gentiles. God's moving the church from Jew to Gentile. And he's using Paul to do it. He comes back down to Jerusalem.

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And people are afraid of him because they know who he is. And yet Barnabas vouches for him. And so he's accepted.

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But these other people are seeking to kill him. And when the brothers learned this, down in verse 30, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.

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So even Paul gets chased out of the area. Well, guess what that does? It moves his ministry out to where God wanted it anyway.

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And that brings us to progress report number two. Paul's chased out of town. You might think, well, boy, that's it.

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He ought to be right in the middle of Jerusalem, right in the center of the influence and everything. But no, he goes out.

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Verse 31, so the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up and walking in the fear of the

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Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied. All the persecution, all of the chasing the

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Christians out of the area, all that did was advance the gospel. And then we move into the witness to the end of the earth from 932 and following, clear to 2831.

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This whole section has more detail because it's a bigger area. There's more going on there. And there's actually four progress reports in this whole section, witness to the end of the earth.

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We know that miracles are still being done through the apostles because the apostolic message is being confirmed by these signs, the signs of the apostles, and the church moves out.

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We have the story in chapter 10 of Peter and Cornelius. Cornelius was a

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Gentile convert to Judaism. He's what they would call a God -fearer. And we're going to come back and look at this in,

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I think, two weeks. But this is the gospel moving into the Gentile world.

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Peter then plays a big part in that. And then he reports this back to the church in chapter 11, that Gentiles are actually being saved.

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And the church then has to deal with this. And this, again, this is a massive issue. Gentile salvation.

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Wow, how does that happen? We thought we were the ones that God is going to save. We Jews. But back to the

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Abrahamic covenant, all the nations, all the nations. And so then we have the movement of the church.

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It moves out from Antioch, Antioch on the Orontes River, or Antioch of Syria.

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There's two Antiochs. There's one up called Pisidian Antioch, you'll see that mentioned. But Antioch of Syria became sort of a focal point of missionary activity.

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But then there's still more persecution. And so in chapter 12, Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church.

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He killed James, the brother of John, puts Peter in prison. Peter then, as you know, is miraculously released, walks right out of the jail.

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And at the end of that chapter, chapter 20, Herod has a special day where he puts on a robe, a royal robes in verse 21, took a seat upon the throne, and he delivers an address.

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The people, of course, are wanting to cater to him and impress him. And their response was, the voice of a

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God and not of a man. But it didn't go too well for Herod. Verse 23, immediately an angel of the

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Lord struck him down because he did not give the glory to God, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.

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Whoa, that is gnarly. I mean, it's that, you don't want to be eaten by worms.

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But he breathed his last. Verse 24 is the third progress report. In the midst of that persecution, even

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Herod, of course, he's out of the picture now. Here's the progress report number three, but the word of God increased and multiplied.

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People are being executed, people being put in jail. This despotic king is doing all kinds of things.

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He's out of the picture, but the word of the Lord is increasing and multiplying. We then move into the progress of the gospel to Cyprus and Asia Minor.

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Progress report number four is in Acts chapter 16, verse 5. After the ministry through that whole area,

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Acts chapter 16, of course, they come to Philippi, and we have

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Lydia saved, the Philippian jailer, and so forth. We get down to chapter 16, verse 5.

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It says, so the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily.

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Progress report number four. It then moves into the Aegean shores.

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This is on page four, number C, the progress to the Aegean shores. We have all of the ministry that they did there,

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Paul and Silas, and so on. And we wind up coming to chapter 19, verse 20.

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And they are in Ephesus. We know that there was a lot of turmoil there.

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There were a lot of people converted. Verse 19 says, and the number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all.

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And they counted the value of them and found it came to 50 ,000 pieces of silver. And here we have progress report number five.

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Remember, Ephesus is Gentile country. So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily.

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And then there was a riot in Ephesus. There's more conflict. Things are going on.

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There was a tremendous uproar. The apostle Paul, of course, he's right in the middle of it. And then he begins to move back down toward Jerusalem.

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And we know that he then has a meeting with the Ephesian elders near Miletus. And eventually he winds up in Jerusalem.

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And through a series of events, he is arrested. He comes before the

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Roman leaders. He comes before various other so -called courts.

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They're trying to figure out why this guy is in the middle of all this turmoil and preaching this stuff. He's accused of all kinds of things.

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He meets and is brought before these various leaders, Festus and Felix first, and then

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Festus who succeeds Felix. He's still in jail. He's in jail for about two years.

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Finally, he comes before Agrippa. And Agrippa hears his case.

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And Paul appeals his case. Since he's a Roman citizen, he can appeal his case to Rome. And that's exactly what

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Paul wanted to do. He wanted to go to Rome. He wanted to go... Actually, he wanted to go to Spain by way of Rome eventually, but he wants to go to Rome.

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Rome would be considered the uttermost parts of the world and the uttermost parts of Gentile country.

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And so Paul gets put on a ship, as you know, and undergoes a lot of tribulations on the ship, shipwreck and the whole thing.

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But he finally winds up in Rome and he's put under house arrest. He has a meeting before Jewish people that come in, the

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Jewish leaders, and they're trying to figure out why are you here, why are you in jail. He preaches the gospel to them, preaching about the kingdom of God, trying to convince them about Jesus, both from the law of Moses and from the prophets, why they're

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Jewish. They have an Old Testament background. He's using that to show that Christ is a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies and messianic hope.

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There's a mixed response to that. And finally, down in verse 28 of chapter 28, he says, therefore, let it be known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the

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Gentiles. They will listen. And here we have Progress Report number six, the last two verses of the book of Acts.

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He lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the

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Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance. That's what Paul did.

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The word there, proclaiming, is the same word that's translated elsewhere, preaching. It's the word keruso. It means to preach or proclaim, used for preaching.

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What did Paul do? If you want to just say, what did Paul do? What was his ministry? Preaching and teaching, preaching and teaching, preaching and teaching.

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What's the church supposed to do? Preach and teach, preach and teach, preach and teach. And there it is, book of Acts.

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That's what they did. Persecution all over the place, chased out, murdered, falsely accused, falsely imprisoned.

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Paul did nothing wrong to be put in prison, but no matter where they were, they still carried out the Great Commission, preached the gospel, baptized, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded.

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I just want to draw your attention to one thing on page four. Well, before that, one thing on page three that wasn't there at the bottom,

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Roman numeral three. You have A, B, C. You should have a D. The progress to Rome, chapter 19, 21 through 28, 31.

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I left that off. We got to get Paul to Rome. Paul got to Rome. But on page four,

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I want to draw your attention to something here real quick. On the right -hand side, you have these progress reports.

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Just follow along. Number one from six, seven of Acts, and the word of God continued to increase.

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Remember, this is the progress of the church. What's it say? 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.

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Next one, Acts 9, 31. So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up, walking in the fear of the

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Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied. Number three, 12, 24. But the word of God increased and multiplied.

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Number four, so the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers.

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Number five, so the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily. And then, of course, the one we just saw,

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Paul. What's he doing? Preaching and teaching, preaching and teaching. What do you see here?

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The word? The church? What's advancing? The church?

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The word? The gospel? What's the relationship between the advancement of the word and the advancement of the church?

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Anybody want to take a shot at that? Absolutely. Peter? The gospel.

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The gospel? What if the church is light on the word and doesn't use the word, the gospel's not there?

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People justify that. People rationalize that. There's books. I have books. I've read books on church planning by experts.

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They would essentially disagree with this. They might just redact out the parts that talk about the advancement of the word.

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Is the church advancing the word, or is the word advancing the church? Answer, yes, right?

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So just one more thing I want to leave you with, Paul's statement to Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 3.

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He's writing this. Of course, Timothy, he is sent to Ephesus to do some work there as his representative. He says, I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things so that if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living

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God, a pillar and buttress of the truth. Paul understood the importance of the church being that place where the word is.

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It's a place where the word is protected, it's proclaimed, it's taught. And that's foundational to the church.

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Do you have any questions on what we just saw? Quick flight through the book of Acts.

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I'm thankful that Luke put those progress reports there. Saves me from having to outline it.

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Okay, let's pray. Father, we do thank you for your word.

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We also thank you for the many promises that we have from your word. We know that we can count on them just as certainly as the first church counted on them.

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And that no matter what happens to us in our generation, no matter what authorities decide to do or governments decide to do, it's irrelevant because you said,

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I will build my church. Help us to be faithful to what you have called each one of us to do. Help us to continue to honor you and glorify you.

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We pray now as we gather to worship, you would be blessed and pleased. We pray that you would be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ, amen.