Sunday, February 9, 2025 AM

Prayer for Gospel Joy and Christ’s Return

Let's go to the Lord together in prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for who you are, that you are good, that you are true, that you are beautiful, the definition of all these things in and of yourself and for us.

Thank you for providing so abundantly, truly, we deserve no good thing, but in Christ you have promised every good thing. And so we give you praise. We ask that you would help us today to rejoice in this gospel story and how all the other stories truly attended and bring attention to it, that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior, crucified and risen and reigning, and He will return.

Help us to live in this hope today. We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Acts 19 and the Riot in Ephesus

I invite you to open your Bibles and turn with me to the book of Acts. We'll be reading from Acts 19, verses 8 through 20. Acts chapter 19, verses 8 through 20. The battle is about to heat up in the chapter, Acts chapter 19, there in Ephesus.

The whole city of Ephesus is just about to be put on tilt. And if you read the second half of Acts 19, you might be curious as how could it be that there would be a citywide commotion that turned into two hours of chanting honor to their matron deity.

Soccer hooligans know no devotion so passionate as these demoniac fans. Why did they get so stirred up? They were stirred up because, practically speaking, they recognized, some of them recognized, that the gospel is bad for wicked enterprise.

It's bad for certain kinds of business. It all began with the separation of the saints from the synagogue, that's verses 8 and 10, the healing of the sick and the deliverance of the possessed and the catastrophic failure of all the known remedies in the field of witchcraft, there in the middle portion of our passage.

And then this gospel story that was being preached in the school of Tyrannus by Paul was then being supported by another story going around about the failure of the seven sons of Sceva. And that story highlighted the shame of witchcraft to such a degree that those who were practitioners of the craft, many of them came and burned all of their scrolls and books, giving up their livelihoods in order to follow Christ.

All of this became a very bad omen for the Ephesian economic model. Ephesus, the capital of magic in the ancient Near East. So know what's just about to happen. The riot in Ephesus is about to take place.

The reasons why are given here in our text. If you would stand with me and look at God's holy word, I'll be reading Acts 19, beginning in verse 8 through verse 20. And he went into the synagogue and spoke boldly for three months, reasoning and persuading concerning the things of the kingdom of God.

But when some were hardened and did not believe, but spoke evil of the way before the multitude, he departed from them and withdrew the disciples, reasoning daily in the school of Tyrannus. And this continued for two years, so that all who dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks.

Now, God worked unusual miracles by the hands of Paul so that even handkerchiefs or aprons were brought from his body to the sick, and the diseases left them and the evil spirits went out of them. Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists took it upon themselves to call the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, we exorcise you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.

Also, there were seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish high priest who did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you? And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, overpowered them and prevailed against them so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.

This became known both to all Jews and Greeks dwelling in Ephesus, and fear fell on them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified. And many who had believed came confessing and telling their deeds.

Also, many of those who had practiced magic brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all, and they counted up the value of them, and it totaled 50 ,000 pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Like here in this passage, and we find in other passages in the Bible that repentance, the fullness of repentance is often attended by the defamation, the disenchanting, and the derision of sin.

Very often the mockery, the mockery of idols is tied to them being left behind or ground into dust and thrown away. You may remember when Rachel stole her father's teraphim, his miniature household idols that he would worship his ancestors through.

She stole Laban's gods. And then when he came looking for them, she hid them in the pocket of a saddlebag and then sat on them and hid them so that her father couldn't find his gods. That's a shame story.

That's a story told to show the shame of idolatry. You know, poor old Laban, right? Poor old Laban's lost his sheep, his sheep, his goats, and daughters. He tracks Jacob down and says with a frown, you stole my gods, my fathers.

You're supposed to mock that. You're supposed to laugh at that. I mean, some gods, they fit in the pocket in the saddlebag and can be sat on. What kind of gods are those? When it was time for Jacob to take his family back to Bethel, remember he made this promise to God, that God preserve me.

And if you do, then I'm going to come back and I'm going to serve you. You'll be my God. Well, it was time to go back to Bethel. And so he instructed his sons and his wives to forsake their idols, to leave all of their superstitious totems beneath the terebinth tree at Shechem.

We're not going to need those where we're going. We're going to Bethel, the house of God. We're going to go worship the one true God. We don't need these idols and these gods anymore. We're going to put them down and walk away from them.

Some gods.

And as they make their way to Bethel, the point is made in Genesis. As they go there to Bethel to build an altar and to worship God alone and be true worshipers of the one true God, it says that the fear of God fell upon all the inhabitants of the land so that Jacob and his family passed through unharmed.

Now think, what was the impact of this story on the descendants of Jacob, the children of Israel, to whom Moses is writing? He's writing the story for the children of Israel as they're about to pass over the Jordan River and to go into Canaan, the very land where Jacob and his family were worshiping God all those years ago.

What is the point of the story?

The story is, ah, forsake those foolish idols. Leave behind those superstitious trinkets. Trust fully in the Lord. Worship Him alone and He'll give you success in Canaan. He did it for your father, Jacob.

He's going to do it for you. That's the point of the story. Also here in Acts 19, the Lord gives a story, provides a story to His saints. It is a story that shows the folly and the shame of witchcraft and the wisdom of forsaking demonic powers of magic for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. The story shows the kindness of God in the demon-possessed and the sick being healed right and left and center by sweat rags and work aprons all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And the kindness of God leads us to repentance. And there's just something about the cold, stupid cruelty of witchcraft that makes the kindness of God glow all the brighter in contrast. We've been thinking about the point of Acts 19, verses 8 through 20, and we see that magnifying Christ in our world includes both our separation from it unto Christ and our labor in it to bring it under submission to Christ, to bring about its surrender to Christ.

That's going to include mocking the vanity of deceptions and even destroying various treasured portions of our own cultures that have no business in the Kingdom of Christ. And I think that the pride of man complains against that, that Jesus would not be so cruel and unsophisticated and backwards, and that none of us should be expected to have to join into the mockery of what we adore nor leave it behind just because we're supposed to be following Jesus.

But following Christ entails putting everything on the cross. And only that which survives that death and resurrection is worth carrying forward in our following of Christ. Some have had to leave their jobs.

Some have had to make a separation from family members. Some have had left their bodies beaten and burned to death even to follow their Lord into His everlasting rest. So what idols and what magic or what lies or what witchcraft are we willing to mock and abandon for the gospel of Jesus Christ?

This is not a fair question. It is a grace question. And it is the question being addressed here in Acts 19. And we've thought about the separation from the evil echo chamber of the Jewish synagogue. We've begun to talk about the need to highlight the shame of witchcraft, which we see in the sweat rags and work aprons of Paul being brought about for free in the name of Christ, people actually being healed, people actually being delivered.

This is contrary to the ways of magic in Ephesus where everything that was a deliverance cost you an arm and a leg, and you had to have special secret words and precious elements and totems in order to be healed.

This was completely different, and it exposed the powerlessness of witchcraft. And combined with these unusual signs that we read about in verses 11 and 12, we have an unusual spirit in verses 13 through 15.

Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists took it upon themselves to call the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, we exorcise you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches. Also, there were seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest who did so.

And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus, I know, and Paul, I know, but who are you? So far in the text, we've seen a stark separation from the religious Jews in the synagogue that defamed the way, the church separated from them.

And then we see a distinction between the way that there's healing and deliverance in Christ contrasted to the way that the practitioners of witchcraft tried to do it. And now we have a story where religious Jews are practicing witchcraft.

And they're going to get it entirely wrong. So I want you to meet the strolling Jews. It says the itinerant Jews in the Greek is just the strolling Jews. I think it's a great band name. Next up, the strolling Jews.

I think it'd be an excellent name for a band, but they are not that type of band. They are a band of traveling snake oil salesmen.

Right?

The reason why they are strolling, the reason why they are itinerant, the reason why they are always on the move is because the problem with a successful exorcism business is a constant lack of customers.

If you're successful, then you have to go find some more demon-possessed people to exorcise. Also, if you're not so successful, sticking around is not a good idea. You always have to be on the move. Ephesus is a large city.

Plenty of customer base. Lots of demon possession. Lots of witchcraft. And word got around. Paul's sweat rags. Paul's aprons. Paul, the one who preaches Jesus in the school of Tyrannus.

Paul.

Jesus.

These are the new power words. These seem to be very effective. And so it gets passed around and everyone's trying them out now, including these seven sons of Sceva. Now, seven sons of Sceva. Sceva, a Jewish chief priest.

Did you know that they kept really good records of all the chief priests and there wasn't a single Sceva among them? But these seven men, who knows if they are brothers? Who knows if they even had a father named Sceva?

But their calling card was, we have one of the best exorcism businesses around, and we were taught by our father Sceva. We're all brothers, and our father Sceva taught us. And he's a Jewish chief priest, so he knows what he's talking about.

Who is going to get on a boat and sail all the way to Jerusalem to find this Sceva from Ephesus? No one. You can't check out the story. But it's their calling card, the seven sons of Sceva. Our father's a Jewish chief priest.

No, he wasn't. This is a scam. A snake oil salesman. These men were claiming things that were not true, but they thought they had an angle. They thought they knew the power words. They were just in the same situation as Simon Magus, who saw the power that was coming through the life of Peter, and he said, I'll give you money if you'll give me that secret Holy Spirit power.

The seven sons of Sceva think Paul is like one of them, using special power words and new techniques. They're going to try it out. Simon Magus says, I'll pay you if you give me the secret, and then I'll have that very same power.

And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus, I know, and Paul, I know, but who are you?

Who are you?

The evil spirit answers through the voice of this possessed man as it will soon act through the violence of this possessed man. It answers honestly and deceptively. It answers harmlessly and with threat.

Ambivalence is the harbinger of horror. The demon knows Jesus, but not in that right way. The demon knows Paul, but not in a possessing, dominating way. The demon doesn't know who these seven sons of Sceva are or who they think they are, but it's not going to go well.

The strolling Jews thought that success depended, notice, on the right implementation of the correct incantation. I know the right words, and I put them in the right order, I'm good to go. This is an example of using religion as a covering to look good.

When God made religion as a communion to love God, they said, the Jesus whom Paul preaches. Now, of course, it is necessary to distinguish which Jesus we're talking about because Jesus was a common name.

However, they say in such a way that admits that they don't know this Jesus. And it's interesting, the exorcists knew less about Jesus.

Than the demon did.

You see that?

The demon was more familiar with Jesus than the exorcists were. The evil spirits knew who Jesus was. Very often he was confronting them, and they knew exactly who he was. And he refused their loud protestations in his name.

He was unwilling to have his name amplified by demoniacs rather than proclaimed by disciples. But that the name of Jesus Christ is still considered a power word is proven by those who use it in their profanity.

Have you noticed that? They don't cuss you out in the name of Buddha. They don't try to punch through your logical train of thought and disrupt your thinking in the name of Allah. It is a bit of witchcraft to invoke the name of Jesus Christ, blaspheming him for the purpose of overwhelming others with your sentiments or of punching your thoughts through into the consciousness of your hearers.

And it's been that way for a long time. I came across a lot of archaeological examples in studying for this sermon about the name Jesus being employed in all manner of rituals for fighting off demons, for achieving different forms of witchcraft combined with other so-called power words.

Sometimes totems would have his name on it with the names of other so-called angels and so on, and these would be prayed over and kept on the person. Sometimes you just needed to read the words like Jesus over and over again.

All of that is superstitious and wicked, and we ought not ascribe to such magic. The first year I was a pastor, we had one of our missionaries at our little church that had the church long supported. And he came and he told us a story that really impressed him and thought it was an amazing story.

He told a story of a missionary he had met who had told him that he had been in South America in the Amazon jungles and did not know a lick of Spanish or Portuguese, did not know any of the local dialect, but he was down there and he had a great burden, he had a real burden for the lost knowing that these tribal people were sinners and they needed a savior.

He did a lot of things, sacrificed, risked himself and went down there, but he couldn't speak a word of the language. He didn't know what to do. He's overcome by a burden for the lost, and so he began walking through the jungle and he would just shout the name Jesus, not in Spanish, not in Portuguese, not in the tribal dialect, the English word Jesus, and he shouted it as loud as he could, and he shouted it over and over and over.

In hopes that perhaps some native tribesmen out there in the bush would hear the name and out of a desire for mimicry begin to also say the name and shout the name as well. After all, the promise is, whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Now, that is a story that is as endearing as it is horrifying. That is not what that passage means. The name of Jesus is not a superstitious magic power word to be invoked to get things done. And we see this in the example of the sons of Sceva.

Here's a story that we should be telling, an unusual story that catches the attention. Verse 16,. Then the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on and overpowered them and prevailed against them so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.

This became known both to all Jews and Greeks dwelling in Ephesus and fear fell on them all. And the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified. How's that for a story? One versus seven? Is that possible? You ever seen the attempted arrest of a man who's hyped up on PCP?

Good luck.

Demon possessions and drug use are not a firsthand connection made in the 60s and 70s, although it was well observed in the 60s and 70s. This was going on in the ancient Near East ever so much as it is today.

Demon possession and drug use are often closely connected. Now, this man's drug screen may have come back clean, but nonetheless, the spirit which possessed him propelled him into the violent, shameful beating of the seven sons of Sceva so that they fled beaten and bloody and naked from the house.

And something tells me they had to change the name of their business. That their business was over, that no one would ever receive from them any kind of so-called cures. And the outcome was that the story was spread, it became viral in such a way that the name of Jesus was being magnified.

Now, that this was a business and that they were trying to make money off of this is very clear given the context in Ephesus. But also remember the woman who had the issue of blood and she went from doctor to doctor to try to find relief, but she only was worse until she ran out of money.

Remember that? There was no cure to be found amongst the Jewish so-called healers. And they were willing to offer this cure and that cure over and over again until you had no more money. And then they also simultaneously ran out of ideas.

Isn't that interesting that when the money runs out, the ideas run out? And their power is somewhat unclear. Perhaps the fact of the matter is that the sons of Sceva had only ever play-acted their way through demonic encounters that they only first caused and invented the problem that they then solved for a fee.

It could be that they had only ever thrown dud grenades and this was their first live one and it went off in their hands.

Could be.

But it also could be that they were used to pitting demonic influence against demonic influence to perpetuate a deception, something that I think Jesus hints at in Matthew 12. What is the temptation? There's two temptations.

One of them is to displace communion with procedure. If I can just find the right process, then I will be more spiritual and better off. To replace abiding with technique. Have I followed the right order of steps?

We replace rest with performance. I'll know and feel righteousness when I perform well, not when I rest in Christ. We often in our selfishness demand salvation on programmatic terms. Is it possible that many prefer that Jesus be a fool to manipulate and the Spirit to be a force to mechanize rather than have a Savior whom we humbly magnify?

There's also another temptation, I think, is that when we receive a story like this and we see the folly and the failure of a wicked approach that we would spend all our time exposing the wickedness and the folly of whatever that is and go deep into the polemics against that wickedness and against that false teaching and go into all those details so that we fail to actually magnify Christ.

It doesn't take long to show the folly of falsehood. It doesn't take long to show the emptiness of witchcraft. Yes, it is there. Yes, it needs to be exposed. But for this sake, notice of magnifying the name of Jesus Christ.

That's the point. That's the point. In like fashion, shouldn't our own personal testimony of how God has forgiven me of my sins and answered my prayers and delivered me from this or delivered me from that look how good of a Savior He is that I will mention that in my passing, in my story but it's to lead to the other story of Jesus of Nazareth, the risen Christ who is the Son of the living God to tell the gospel story.

That's the point where He gets the fame. He gets the attention, not me, not my circumstances. It's not about us. It's about our Savior. He uses us. He uses these interesting stories that we all have but notice it's for His glory.

Forsaking Wicked Investments and Confessing Sin

Now, thirdly in the text, another way to glorify and magnify Christ is to forsake wicked investments. We see this in verses 18 through 20. Now, only highlighting the shame of witchcraft but also forsaking wicked investments.

Now, look at verse 18 says, and many who had believed came confessing and telling their deeds. Also, many of those who had practiced magic brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all.

And then they counted up the value of them and it totaled 50 ,000 pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed. Now, Ephesus was truly an evil place. It's full of magic, full of witchcraft, full of demons, full of destruction.

Even Shakespeare described Ephesus in like fashion, putting it into the voice of Antipholus in the comedy of errors. They say this town is full of cozenage as nimble jugglers that deceive the eye, dark working witches that change the mind, soul-killing witches that deform the body, disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks, and many such like liberties of sin.

What an awful place. But it was a place like this, into a place like this, among a people like that, that the grace of God came and saved many, many sinners. And look at the change that occurs. They confess their sins and they forsook their sins.

They confess their sins. This is a grace of God that noticed that those who had believed, those who had repented of their sins and believed were the grace of God. Look how the grace keeps flowing. They came confessing their sins, telling their deeds.

To confess means to say the same word. There's a necessary agreement here of the confessor with the one who holds the truth. The one whom they believed with Him, they now agreed, I'm a sinner, here's my sin.

They agreed with God about what sin is. They agreed with Him about the definition of sin. They agreed with Him about the defilement of their sin. They agreed with Him about the deserving damnation of their sin.

They confessed, meaning they agreed with God. There are many who may come forward and talk about their sin in the way that they like to talk about it. Many a man has come forward and said something about his sins, but he says it in the way that he cares to think about it.

And so there are professing sinners, but are we confessing? Are we in agreement with God? What does God actually say about the sin? It's not simply to say, I'm a sinner, but here's how I like to think of myself.

It's here I am a sinner. Here's what God says about me. We must confess our sins to walk in the light. 1 John 1 assures us. And what do they confess? They confess their magic. Many of those who had practiced magic, many of those who had used curious arts, the word means effort and work that are cast all about, here, there, and everywhere.

It's the same word used to rebuke the busybody nonsense of sinful widows in 1 Timothy chapter 5. It has the idea of, here's some things that are known about to work as we work about to make them known, but we're not sure.

And it's only confusion, curious arts. Did it really work or did it not work? Oh, it didn't work because of this. And you didn't get this right over here. And there's all these curiosities about it and no clarity about it at all.

It's only stealing and killing and destroying. And according to the magical theory of the time, the potency of a spell was bound up with its secrecy. Meaning if it was divulged or confessed, it became ineffective.

And so these converted magicians, what are they doing? They're renouncing their imagined power and their demonic power by rendering all of their spells inoperative. They're confessing. The scrolls of this kind that have survived to this day in museums are filled with gibberish, just gibberish, rigmarole of words and names that were considered powerful and put into various combinations.

Many of these scrolls didn't survive. Many of them were burned by the grace of God right here in Ephesus. They burned it, burned it in the sight of all. We like to say it all burned up. That's our way of saying it all burned up.

The Greeks like to say it all burned down. And they burned it all down right there in their midst. 50 ,000 pieces of silver's worth of occultist material. Why was it worth so much? These nonsense words put together in gibberish that make no sense.

These weird totems that had no real value. Why is it worth 50 ,000 pieces of silver? Because you had to pay to get the deliverance, don't you know? You had to pay to get the deliverance. And you had to pay to get the ability to perform the deliverance.

Someone knew the secret formula and you had to pay them to get it from them. That's what Simon Magus was trying to do with Peter. You had others pay you if they wanted your offer deliverances. And there was always for some reason a better, more potent deliverance that still needed to be bought.

You see how that works? How much was 50 ,000 pieces of silver in that day? Well, it would provide 137 years of daily bread for one person. It's like 137 years salary all burned up right there in their midst.

Let me ask you something. What is 137 years of daily sustenance compared to eternity? Jesus said, if your right eye offends you, pluck it out. Right hand offends you, cut it off. Your right foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.

He says, how much better to enter into heaven maimed, indeed to enter heaven poor, than split hell wide open, body nicely preserved, and your witchcraft collection still pristine. Do I really actually have to give up things out of my life that hurt when I part with them?

Is Jesus interested in me doing any of that? My dad, when he became a Christian at age 17, first in his family to become a Christian, deeply convicted by some of the things he was listening to, some of the music he was listening to, the glorifying immorality and profanity.

He was so convicted by this that he went home and he set up his records, his vinyls, and his eight track tapes, and he got out his BB gun and proceeded to obliterate it all. He was a good shot. He was an Eagle Scout.

There's a real sense that the grace of repentance is here expressed by that fruit of confession and the fruit of forsaking. Let's not put too much attention on the book burning. This is a fruit of repentance, because I'm afraid superstition might creep in again.

If only we can get a bunch of people to burn and ban and boycott, that'll bring back the golden days of godliness to our nation. Has this sentiment been about lately to some degree? It's not new. First of all, our burning and banning and boycotting has to do with our loyalty to the King of Kings.

If he so desires me to do this, then I, in my loyalty to Christ, will do so, and each man will stand or fall before his own master. If I have a conviction to follow that, I'm going to do it. And it's no good trading one superstition for another.

Just going through the process of burning and banning and boycotting doesn't mean that this automatically brings about success and blessing. Second of all, we don't want the godliness, or the church, or the culture, or the mindset of 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or 400 years ago.

Don't want it.

Don't need it.

It's not on the schedule. We want the godliness and the church and the culture and the mindset of Christ, which lies.

Ahead of us.

Our anchor is not behind us.

It is ahead of us.

Our shepherd does not call us backward into history. He calls us forward into His story. He owns the horizon. Let us be eager to set aside the weight of sin, which so easily besets us, that we are run with endurance the race that is set before us and run toward that horizon to see what our magnificent King is going to build next.

No way we lose. The power, something I heard Pastor Jeff Noblitt say one time many years ago, power of the gospel in the world is directly related to the holiness of the saints in the church. It's just a pattern observed in the Scriptures.

But this is not achieved by a method or a technique, as if the more monk-like we are, the more holy we are. This is not about a procedural list of things that we have to destroy and eliminate from.

Our lives.

It's about a personal love. What does Christ call us to? Sometimes we're concerned about getting defiled, right? If I engage too much in a certain economic avenue, if I spend too much time working in a certain type of secular business, and so on and so forth, so-called.

Listen, Roman roads don't need to be avoided, just the temples alongside them.

Okay?

And as we're traveling Roman roads, we don't offer any incense to Caesar. But we don't get defiled by Roman roads. We make them holy as we bring the gospel on them, here, there, and everywhere. Jesus owns the whole thing.

It's His turf. But we are called, I think, in a testimony to magnify the name of Christ, we are called to set things aside and leave things behind. It is true. And as I said before, it's not a fair question.

It's a question that grace brings to mind, and it's the question that really is addressed in Acts 19, and also Mark 8. When Jesus had called the people to Himself with His disciples also, He said to them, "'Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and.

Follow Me.

Whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospels will save it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the Son of Man will also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.'". What a lot we have to look forward to.

Let's pray. Father, we thank You for the time that You have given to us. I thank You for the encouragement that we see in this passage of those who are willing to forsake these deceptive arts to hold fast to the truth of Christ.

I thank You to see how the name of Jesus is magnified. Help us to have wisdom to pursue those same avenues in our lives where we make much of Christ by what we are willing to leave behind, but also by what we are desiring to grab hold.

Of.

So, Lord, we thank You for Your wisdom and Your truth. We thank You for Your Son, Jesus Christ. It is in His name that we pray, amen.