Stephen: A Standing Ovation for a Servant

Tonight we're going to be continuing in a series that I've had the privilege here and there of teaching called Acceptable Worship. Go ahead and open up your Bibles to Acts 6. Acts 6, that's where we'll be. And while you're turning there, I'm going to give you kind of a brief introduction to the series. If you hadn't been here for one of these, they're kind of been interspersed throughout a couple of years now that we've kind of done this series. The basis of this study, the key verse is out of Hebrews 12. You don't have to turn there, just stay in Acts 6.

But Hebrews 12, 28, 29 says, "Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and all, for our God is a consuming fire." And the basis and the point of this study is to ask the question, what makes their worship acceptable? As we read through Scripture, we see examples of people offering up worship to the Lord. What makes it either acceptable or unacceptable? They're two different kind of examples throughout Scripture. And we've looked at a lot of unacceptable examples. We started off with Cain and Abel. They both bought their offerings before the Lord.

God accepted Abel's offering and rejected Cain's. And then we've looked at a lot of other examples, but we've also looked at some positive ones as well. Mary of Bethany, and tonight we're going to be looking at Stephen out of Acts 6. So I read a book by Elizabeth Elliott, and she talked about in the very introduction of the book about having a meal with some young girls from her church that she was pouring into. And she asked them who their heroes of the faith were in conversation over a meal, and they really couldn't give a response. And that kind of really bothered her, that these young people in the church did not have heroes of the faith.

So if you're going to ask me who are my heroes of the faith from Scripture, Stephen is one of those people that kind of especially stands out for me as being a hero of the faith from Scripture. Not just because of how he died, but also because of how he lived, which is what we're going to look at tonight. So let's go ahead and read out of Acts 6. Actually let's pray first and then we'll jump into our reading. Lord God, I want to thank you for each one of these adults who are here tonight. I want to thank you that we get to come together as a church to study your word, and we get to talk about men of the faith that are recorded in Scripture.

Lord, I pray that you bless, Lord, our time tonight. I pray that you encourage people. Lord, that we, as we look at the example of Stephen, Lord, that we would have, be encouraged and also have a measuring rod. See somebody who's gone ahead of us and run the distance in the faith and be inspired. We ask these things in Jesus' name, amen. So Acts 6 starting in verse 1, "Now 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.

And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples 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, whom we will appoint to this duty, but we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.' And what they said pleased the whole gathering and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, Prochorus, and the Caner, Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicholas, and a proselyte of Antioch.

These they set before the apostles and they prayed and laid their hands on them." So some context here would be helpful. Who are the Hellenists? Hellenists were Greek-speaking Jews. So in the history of Israel there were a lot of what commentators would call dispersions. Meaning at some point in history groups of Jews were dispersed from Israel, from Jerusalem, or from other parts and throughout other parts of the world through conquering nations, through capture, groups of Jews were taken out of their country and lived in other parts of the world amongst Gentile people. And eventually some of those people got to return to Jerusalem.

But obviously there was a lot of influence in their life. And these people that we're talking about here are people who are influenced by Greek culture. You know your history about the Roman Empire. The Romans conquered the Greeks, absorbed their culture, and helped propagate it throughout the known world at that time. The Jews who were part of this multiple dispersions that happened in history were also influenced by this. So when they came back to Jerusalem because of this cultural and historical influence, they were Greek-speaking. Some of them had Greek names. Some of them could both read and speak in Greek.

They were just influenced by Greek culture and they kind of picked up a name, the Hellenist Jews. It wasn't always meant in the best spirit either. They were very much discriminated against by people who were, you know, believed themselves to be true Jews or uncorrupted Jews. And so in the New Testament church you have both sets of these people. You have people who are Jews in Jerusalem and believe themselves to be uncorrupted by Greek culture. Then you have some who are influenced and educated in Greek culture. And there's a little bit of a conflict happening. When they come together, their widows are being overlooked.

Their widows are being overlooked in the distribution of food. Whether by accident or by purpose, we don't know, the text doesn't say, but there's a problem. And they bring this problem before the apostles, the leaders of the church. And it's a serious issue because these kind of things can go from being a practical problem to a divisional problem in the church, something that divides the church, something that causes an even greater issue. And it's worth noting that in the culture of Jerusalem for Jews, not these Christians, but for Jews at large in Jerusalem, there's a lot of division that existed amongst the Jews themselves.

We have historical accounts that say that they're about anywhere from 400 to 800 synagogues in Jerusalem. And a synagogue was a place where people gathered to be taught Scripture as Jews. But that's a lot of synagogues in a very small space. If you're looking for something analogous, you can just look at our town and see how many churches there are in our town or in our county. But there's a lot of division because these dispersed peoples would come back to Jerusalem and they would kind of be birds of a feather, so to speak. They would stick together. They would form their own synagogues. And they would kind of stick together.

They would have their own groups and communities because some of them maybe didn't read Hebrew and they wanted to be taught Scripture, so they went to a synagogue where people taught Scripture from the Greek. It's a very simple, practical thing. They wanted to go somewhere where they could learn Scripture. They knew how to read Greek. They knew how to hear and interpret Greek, so they wanted to go and be taught from the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So a lot of division existed amongst the Jews, and then a very large cluster of people were saved out of that.

And you have that kind of carryover from Jewish culture into the New Testament church, and then this problem comes up about widows not being served. Hellenist widows not being served. So the church could have made a very practical decision here. They could have split the church at this point and just said, "Hey, there's going to be problems here. Let's just let these people worship separately.

Let's just have this group over here who are the Jews who are comfortable, and then we have this group over here who are more of the Greek culture Jews, and they're going to be comfortable together, and maybe there's even some proselytized Gentiles among them. They're going to be comfortable together. Let's just let these people kind of naturally coalesce into two different groups." But that would have been practically dividing the church, and you have to ask, "What would they have lost by this division?" It would have been a practical and maybe even pragmatic decision, but what would they have lost as a church in this city if they let this thing divide them, even in a pragmatic sense?

So they chose not to do that. They chose to bring unity in the church. And what did they have to gain by being unified? So it says in the scripture 6.5, "And what they said pleased the whole gathering." They all agree, this is a good idea. We're going to select these seven men, and it's also worth noting that based on their names, six of these men have Greek names, and one of them it says is a proselyt, somebody who was converted to Judaism from being a Gentile. So there are six Hellenist Jews and one Gentile who have been selected for this job, and maybe that's part of their solution.

They're going to pick some men who are believers, who are godly believers, and they're going to help make sure this problem is taken care of, and they're going to help make sure that we maintain unity within the church, and this doesn't become an issue. So another point here that may be another, well, the first of many no-duh statements in this talk tonight, but the priority here is that their pastors can devote themselves to prayer and preaching. And that may sound like a real kind of, well, of course, kind of statement, but if you really look underneath that, there's a lot of practical application here.

Stephen's job in becoming this table waiter, what we would call a prototype of deacon leaders in the church, his purpose was not just to take care of tables. His purpose was also to free up the pastors and leaders of his church so that they could devote themselves to the thing they should be doing, which is preaching and teaching. I've been a Christian since 1998, which always feels like a long, long time ago, but I've been a Christian for a while, and I've seen a lot of churches ask pastors to do a lot of jobs that really don't have a lot to do with praying or preaching the word.

And a lot of churches kind of overburden pastors with responsibilities and roles in the church that really have nothing to do with preaching and praying. And that's never, it can be a very bad thing because it takes away from their primary responsibility in the church, and the danger is that you overburden them with all this stuff, these practical needs, and then they don't get to do their primary job in the church, and you hinder the primary function of the church. The church is not a business that should be run like a business. The pastor is not a hireling that you get to tell what he should be doing.

His role is to pray and to preach the word. So what do we know about Stephen, one of these seven men who were chosen? The text says that he was a man of good reputation, full of the spirit and of wisdom, and full of faith out of 6'5". I've already said this, but we know that Stephen was probably a foreign born Jew who lived in Jerusalem, somebody who was not born in Jerusalem but came back to Jerusalem. Paul was one of those people. If you read scripture, Paul was born in Tarsus and then moved into Jerusalem. He was also in the same position, but Stephen had a Greek name.

He was probably included in this group that would have been considered Hellenist Jews. We know, obviously, he was a man who received the gospel by repentance and faith sometime between the day of Pentecost and after he came to Christ and came to faith. And that phrase there, "full of the spirit" of good reputation, full of the spirit and of wisdom. Whereas we had a good comment about this, he just said that when you're full of something, you're controlled by that something. And the text says that Stephen was full of the spirit and he was controlled by the spirit.

And practically speaking, just a myth that he was walking with God day by day, bearing fruit in his life through his service and his work and his service to the church, bearing fruit in his life. It was recognizable. It was discernible by people around him. The new birth was apparent in his life. You just knew it. He had fruit in his life. Also we could say that he was chosen by his peers. It's just for context. Remember that when the day of Pentecost happened, thousands of people were brought into the church. So it says in the text that the leaders of the church gathered everybody. That's thousands of people.

We can only assume that this gathering was a lot of people, not a small number of people. So when you choose seven men out of thousands of people, these are pretty exceptional men who are selected. These are men who were known to be full of the spirit, full of wisdom, full of faith. He was one of those seven men. So another kind of obvious statement, Stephen loved Jesus. Just kind of put yourself in a historical perspective of Stephen for a minute and remember that all these things have just happened in Jerusalem. In terms of time period, there are about 40 days that Christ is crucified. He's buried. He's resurrected.

And there are about 40 days in a period where he is with his disciples after his resurrection. He ascends back to heaven. And then about 10 days later, the day of Pentecost happens. And the city sees thousands miraculously converted to Christ. So these things are very fresh historically. And that's Stephen's perspective of Jesus. This man who came into Jerusalem, was brutally murdered, was unjustly tried, buried, and then rose from the dead, spent 40 days with the disciples, and then ascended back into heaven. And then 10 days later, you have the events of Pentecost happen where thousands of people come to Christ.

Not only come to Christ, but miraculously hear the gospel in their own languages. As the apostles are teaching, these people hear the gospel in their own language. Even though they've come from all parts of the world into Jerusalem, they hear the gospel in their own language. So all these things are part of Stephen's perspective of Jesus that he loved. So God the Son and God the Holy Spirit had just torn through the city of Jerusalem. He's 50 days from Christ's resurrection to the day of Pentecost, and you have thousands of believers living in the city, an entire church miraculously born in the city. And Stephen is one of those people.

So that's his perspective of Jesus. Stephen also loved the church. He loved the church. And not just an abstraction or an idea of the church. He loved the church. This group of this ragtag collection of thousands of people. He loved these people, and he served them. He loved the real local church. I think some people have an idea about the church and their minds that they love, but they have a lot of problem practically really loving their local church. Because whatever that ideal is in their mind, that expectation is not met, and they wind up separating themselves from the church and just kind of wind up in a lot of bitterness.

Stephen loved his church, his local church in Jerusalem. And people who love Jesus are going to love his church. These things are a package deal. You never had a choice about what family you were born into, right? You were involuntarily born into the family that you were born into. I remember growing up, my mom would always kind of bring up my dad. She would say, "Do you know what your father did?" And it was always my father. Like somehow I was to blame for whatever it is he had done, and I would just fire it right back at her and just say, "You picked him. I was born into this family. I didn't have a choice, but you picked him.

So don't talk to me about my father. You mean your husband is what you mean." We are, as believers, involuntarily born into the church. When we are saved, we become part of the body. It's not we get saved and then we become part of the body. When we're born again, we are born into the body immediately, immediately, whether we choose to be or not. We're part of the body of Christ. Jesus and his church are a package deal. So to believe that we can cut ourselves off from the church as believers is just the height of deception. The church can frustrate us, fail us, or even wound us, but we cannot function as believers apart from the church.

First Corinthians 12, 12 through 16 says, "For as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one spirit we were all baptized into one body. Jews or Greeks, slaves are free, and all were made to drink of one spirit, for the body does not consist of one member but of many. And if the foot should say because I'm not a hand, I don't belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ears should say because I'm not an eye, I do not belong to the body, that would not make it any less part of the body.

Involuntarily born into the body, just as much as you are born into any family." Stephen loved his church. Stephen was also a servant. He was chosen for this task, which if he boiled it down, he was waiting tables. He was delivering food. He was Jerusalem Grubhub. He was meant to take food to these widows to help serve them. And this was a function in his church that helped free up his pastors in order to be able to preach and teach and do their jobs without being hindered by this issue. He was a table waiter. So I don't know if any of you have ever worked food service before. I did briefly in college.

I worked in the Macalesters when I was going to Southern Miss in Hattiesburg. I worked at the local Macalesters there. And during that phase in history, Macalesters had those bright neon shirts that they would wear. People who were employed at Macalesters would wear these like super green and super orange shirts. So I would have to wear those shirts to class in the morning before I went over to Macalesters in the afternoon. And I'd always be wearing these just vividly bright shirts and go into color theory class at Southern because I was an art major. I would have classes about color theory. And there was a very great professor there.

His name was Professor Mead, a great painter, a great teacher. But I would come into class wearing those shirts. He was just one of those teachers, very eccentric, very kind of ticky. And if you wore bright colors in the class, he would call you out because it would like bother his visual sense of color. But he would always call me out. He'd say, "Jared, step forward because I'd be wearing my bright neon shirts." And he would like make some example about how the colors I was wearing were just so, you know, blowing out other colors around the room.

If you had a weird color backpack, he would make you move it and put it away while we were looking at, you know, works of art in his class. But I would work food service in the afternoons. And I was terrible at it because I had come from working at a bookstore for three or four years throughout high school. And I worked in a back, punching in numbers, database stuff, sweeping floors, and working at a very small Christian bookstore to working on my CalSTRS where they're, you know, slinging food to college students. And it was very fast and furious and food slinging everywhere. And I was just not very good at it.

But it's not very glamorous work is my point. If you've ever worked food service, it can be kind of unglamorous to be a table waiter. And I wasn't even a table waiter. I was the guy who came and cleaned up your table after you left a big mess at the table. I was the guy who came and kind of like just cleared the tables off. Stephen was a servant. He was willing to do that kind of work in his church in order to just help his church keep functioning. This is a need in his church. And he was kind of, he was ready to serve his church in this way. He did it because it served a purpose in his church. It created unity.

It freed up the apostles to focus on the ministry and prayer and teaching the word. And he did it because he loved Jesus and he loved his church and he just wanted to serve. So it's also important to maybe think for a minute about what the text doesn't say about Stephen. It doesn't say he was very intelligent. It doesn't say he was very educated. It doesn't say that he was especially talented. It doesn't say that he was a successful businessman. All it says about him was he was a man full of faith in the Holy Spirit. And my point being is this. If you love Jesus, you love his church and you want to serve, there's no barrier.

The church is not looking for people who are charismatic or naturally talented in order to serve. The church is looking for people like Stephen who are just, they love the church, they love Jesus and they want to serve. Even if it's unglamorous work, they just want to serve. It doesn't say any of those things about him. And I think sometimes having grown up in Southern Baptist churches, you see a lot of people who are tapped for leadership for maybe worldly reasons. They're very successful people. They have a successful local business.

They're looked up to in the community because they're, you know, maybe they've done well for themselves or wealthy. You see a lot of that. But the first church, the first early church, picked these men because they were men of faith, full of the spirit and wisdom. Not because of their giftedness or their success and business, but because they were trustworthy men. The church needs men full of the faith and the Holy Spirit. Men we should be those kind of, we should be those kind of men ready to serve in the church because we love the Lord, we love his church and we want to serve. So what's the result of their service?

And I think this is important because the text leads immediately into this right after they select these seven men. They lay hands on them, pray them and commission them for this work. They do the work. And then it says this in 6-7, "And the word of God continued to increase and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem with a great many of the priests becoming obedient to the faith." So first part of that, "And the word of God continued." That's the bridge in between what we just read and what happened after. Because these men were willing to serve and take care of this issue, the work of the church was able to continue.

And because of that, the church was able to grow exponentially. And you may think, well, you know, what does that mean? In historical accounts, we think there are about 8,000 priests who are in Jerusalem at any given moment. 8,000 priests attached to temple service in Jerusalem. So when the text says that a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith, that's not a small number. We're talking about a church that was already in the thousands and then you have even more added to the church who were pre-serving in Jerusalem. So you can kind of let your imagination fill in the gap there.

It could have been thousands of people, hundreds, but it was a large chunk of people. The church was working and the church was growing. And those two things were interconnected. Because these men were willing to serve, the church was able to grow. And because men in our church will be willing to serve, our church will be able to grow. Our church will be able to grow. So the work that the Lord gave Stephen was part of making that happen. And the work that the Lord will give to you will be a part of growing this church, family by family and person by person. Whatever that work is. When I was a college student, I volunteered in youth ministry.

Well, in the same youth ministry, Chris led before he left. After Chris left, I think it was the night Chris announced that he was going to leave and come to Brookhaven. And it was very emotional. It's teenagers. You need about five seconds to make teenagers emotional. So they were just very keyed up. Chris had announced he's leaving. And we had a large youth ministry. We're talking about hundreds of teenagers who were there on every Wednesday night, down in what we called the basement of the church. Because it was literally the basement and we just called it the basement. And that's where we met.

But hundreds of students, and I remember there was a student who came up to me. I was standing there with another guy who volunteered in leading music, doing other things. And she came up to us, and just with tears in her eye, she said, "I just want to help." She said, "Do you need somebody to pick up trash? I just want to help." Her response to Chris leaving and there being a need there was to just come up to us, a very talented person. Somebody who was very intelligent, very talented, very gifted, a leader in the school. And her attitude when she came up to me was, "I just want to help.

However you need people to pick up chairs, I'll pick up chairs. You need people to throw trash away, I want to help." And I was just impacted by her attitude. And I thought about her when going through this study again. We need people to serve like that in the church. So Acts 6, 8 says, "And Stephen, full of grace and power, was doing great wonders and signs amongst the people." So we see from the text that Stephen, not only did he serve in the church, but he also engaged with the world. He went out into the synagogues and he would teach in the synagogues and tell people about Christ.

These synagogues that he might even come out of himself as a saved Christian, he went back to those synagogues and taught. And evangelized people, he engaged with the world and God was affirming what he was teaching and preaching through these miraculous signs and wonders. That was always the purpose of miraculous signs and wonders in the New Testament. It was an affirmation that this was the teaching and preaching of the Word of God. Before the New Testament scripture was completed and canonized, this was an affirmation of God that these men were preaching the gospel to people.

So God affirmed what Stephen was preaching by miraculous wonders and signs. And really this is the model that Paul followed as he went from town to town. He taught in the synagogues. He would go into a city, find their synagogues, teach those people, and then he would go out and also engage with Gentile peoples as well. This is a model that Paul followed himself. So Acts 6, 9 through 10, "Then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the freedmen, as it was called, and of the Cyrenians and the Alexandrians, and those from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and disputed with Stephen.

But they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he was speaking." Again, this is not Stephen's natural talent or charisma. This is just God using Stephen. These men, these learned men in the synagogues tried to fight him on these issues of faith, strike him about his claims about Christ, and it says they could not stand up to him. Now, we don't know this, but Paul might have been one of those people that couldn't stand up to Stephen's preaching and teaching. As smart and as educated as Paul was, he might not have been able to contend with Stephen in this way because of the way God was using him.

It says they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he was speaking because he was speaking truth. This was God working in Stephen. Now, you don't have to be a great debater, theologian, or cultural expert to engage people with the gospel. If we're going to learn another thing from Stephen and his servant attitude is that you don't have to be naturally gifted to be somebody who engages the world with the gospel. You just have to be somebody that knows the Lord, loves the Lord, and has some understanding of the scripture. They could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he was speaking.

So let's continue reading starting in verse 11. Then they, these people that he contended with in the synagogues, and I left out a point here. These people, these people of the synagogue of the freedmen were also Hellenistic Jews. These were people who might have been the synagogues that Stephen came out of himself. These were people who were Greek-speaking Jews who were contending with him. The synagogue of the freedmen refers to people who were at one time in slavery. They're freedmen because they were once in slavery. So this is a synagogue of people who got their citizenship and their freedom back from being slaves.

They, these people, secretly instigated men who said, "We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God," and they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes, and they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council, and they set up false witnesses who said, "This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us." They invoked Moses, which is important to a later point.

When gazing at him, all who sat in the council saw that his face was like the face of an angel. So what does that mean, that he had the face of an angel? This is another phrase that he used in scripture, another great example is out of Exodus 34 when Moses comes down from Mount Sinai. It says that his face was literally radiant because he'd been spending time with God. So his face is, if this is the example in August of what's happening with Stephen, then his face is literally radiant as they look at him.

There's something supernaturally exceptional as they're accusing him of these things, they look at him in the face and he's literally glowing. He's literally exuding light from himself. Now if I'm ever arguing with somebody and they turn on like a light bulb, I'm probably going to press pause and rethink my stance, but these people did not. Again, this was God supernaturally affirming what was happening with Stephen and the truth that he was preaching. This is the work of God. So what was he accused of?

He accused him of never ceasing to speak words against this holy place, meaning the temple and the law, where you've heard him say that it's Jesus of Nazareth who will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us. We don't have time to read through this chunk of scripture, verses 1 through 50, but I'll summarize it saying that he teaches them about Moses from scripture. This is one of the key verses here, Acts 7.35, "This Moses, whom they, the people that Moses led, rejected, saying, 'Who made you a ruler and a judge?

This man God sent as both ruler and redeemer by the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush.'" So you have to ask, who is Stephen really pointing to in bringing these parts of their history into this conversation where they're accusing him? He's talking about them. They've rejected Jesus, who has been appointed as both ruler and redeemer over them, and they are rejecting Jesus. They're not just rejecting him, they're rejecting Christ the Messiah. That's what he's pointing them to. So he's revisiting their shared history. They have repeatedly, historically resisted the Holy Spirit.

They've killed prophets, and more recently they've killed John the Baptist, and then the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And then he ends in verse 51 through 53, and he says, "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. 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. You who received the laws delivered by angels, but did not keep it." So I think that was the conclusion of the matter there. There's really no, there's no altar call after that.

You didn't softly, you have somebody start playing music to have an altar call. They were enraged by this. They were angered by this. And then starting in verse 54, it says, "Now when they heard of these things, they were enraged, and they ground their teeth at him." Now this is, I'm always amazed in scripture where we have mobs of people who just kind of lose their mind and wind up killing somebody. It's very demonic in its nature, and it says that they were enraged, and they literally just ground their teeth at him. And is that not a horrible sound? Jude, my son who's eight months old, has like eight teeth now, and he grinds them.

And it is a horrible, horrible sound. So this is an intense thing for people to grind their teeth and rage at what they've just heard. And it says in 55, "But he full of the Holy Spirit gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God." This is a vision that he's having right in the middle of this. They're losing their minds and anger about what he's just told them, and he's having a vision of the Lord right in this moment. He gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

And he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together at him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. And as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." And falling to his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." And when he had said this, he fell asleep, which is Scripture's way of saying that he died.

So if some of his words sound familiar, it's because he's repeating certain phrases that Jesus himself used on the cross. Luke 23, 34, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." And verse 46, "Then Jesus calling out with a loud voice said, 'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.' And having said this, he breathed his last." Even in his death, Stephen is a man full of faith, wisdom, and the Holy Spirit. And he's still walking with Jesus in these moments. So chapter 8, flip over, verses 1 through 4, it starts in 8 with, "And Saul approved of this execution.

And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria except the apostles. devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church. And entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison." Verse 4, "Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word." So the question can be asked, what effect did Stephen's death have on the church? And you can answer that very clearly.

What men meant for evil, which it was a very evil act, a very hard thing to see, men grinding their teeth and raging and stoning a man to death, what men meant for evil, God meant for good. There's a great MacArthur quote. Stephen was the trigger that shot the church into the world. This was, Stephen was the first martyr of the New Testament church, the first person to die because of his faith in Christ. And it ushered in a great persecution that primarily focused on these Hellenistic Jews and ran them out of town. And because of that, you had this great dispersion of these people all into all parts of the world.

And ultimately, what you've done is caused the spread of the gospel in the world. So Stephen's death is the trigger that shoots the church into the world. This is a terrible example. Have you ever seen those videos on the internet where somebody steps on a spider and it like turns into five jillion spiders and they all just kind of run in all 5,000 directions? And you see that and you're like, "Well, it's time to burn down that house. It's too late." It's the death of Stephen causes the church to be just exploded into the world. They're sitting in all parts and regions and they just build churches. They don't build churches.

They build them in the sense they grow churches in all parts of the world where they go. And it's the great dispersion of the gospel. And you have to ask after his conversion, how do you think Paul looked back on the life and death of Stephen? He talks about Stephen later on in Acts after he's converted. He's giving another address. He's giving part of his testimony to people. And he talks about Stephen and he says, "When I had returned to Jerusalem, I was praying in the temple.

I fell into a trance and saw him saying to me, 'Make haste to get out of Jerusalem quickly because they will not accept your testimony about me.' And I said, 'Lord, they themselves know that in one synagogue after another, I imprisoned and beat those who believed in you. And when the blood of Stephen, your witness, was being shed, I myself was standing by and approving and watching over the garments of those who killed him.

And he said to me, God said to Paul, 'Go, I will send you far away to the Gentiles.'" So the man who probably had a big hand in rallying people to stone Stephen and accuse him is also there standing by approving of what these people are doing and holding their cloaks for them as they stone this man death. So this is the man that God chose to continue Stephen's work in an even greater way. So if you're asking, did Stephen's death have an effect on Paul? I think it did. I think after he's converted, maybe this is probably one of the first things that he thought of. I helped kill this man. I held people's cloaks while they stoned him to death.

And I used that as a launching point for a great campaign against the people of the church. He didn't stop there. He immediately just picked up that momentum and started raiding people's homes, dragging people out of their homes, beating them, having them put in prison. And he went from town to town doing so with the Jewish authorities' approval. He went from town to town doing so until God stopped him on the road to Damascus and he became a converted person because he met Jesus on the road. But I imagine that he thought about Stephen often. And I imagine, I said at the beginning, Stephen was one of my heroes.

And I think I realized when I was studying through this again that Stephen is probably one of Paul's heroes too. And what a wonderful testimony of the work of God in the midst of great tragedy that this man's death became Paul's great hero. Because of the death, even though he had a lot of guilt on his own hands, Stephen probably became one of his great heroes of the faith and actually continued a lot of the work that he did. He was the same model of going from town to town, going into synagogues, preaching about Christ. He continued the work that Stephen had started. So another Elizabeth Elliot quote to kind of round us out here.

Oh, and I skipped over an important part here. I'm sorry. If you're going to give this a title, so this series is called Acceptable Worship, but if you're going to give this title tonight, it would be Stephen, a standing ovation for a servant. And it's a standing ovation because if you look back in that scripture, let me get back to it here. It says that when Stephen sees the heavens open, he says, "Behold, I see the heavens open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." Come correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think this is the only place in scripture where you see Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

Other places are where it's depicted. He's always seated at the right hand of God. But Jesus in this moment, for Stephen, is standing. A standing ovation for a servant, for a man who waited tables in the church. Not somebody who wrote 5,000 books, not somebody who built great ministries that bore his name, not somebody who had PhDs, not somebody who was naturally charismatic, not somebody who was accomplished or maybe even a successful businessman. This is a man who delivered food to widows for Jesus because he loved his church. And this man is receiving one of the only standing ovations from Christ in scripture.

So I'm going to leave us with another Elizabeth Elliot quote, "There is nothing worth living for unless it is worth dying for." And if you know who Elizabeth Elliot is, then you know her husband is Jim Elliot, who was killed by the Aca people that he was trying to reach. He was one of several men who were killed. So when she writes that, she's not writing that lightly. She's writing that having borne the death of her husband. There's nothing worth living for unless it is worth dying for. And I think Stephen would have amen that. He's a hero, not just in the way he died, but also in the way he lived.

So let's pray and we're going to talk about prayer requests and move into that. Father God, thank you.