Introduction
Have
you ever been in a church service when a baby cries for ages and ages? There’s
an old story about that very thing; not just a discreet whimper, but a really
shrill yelling for the entire first fifteen minutes of a sermon. And the story
goes that finally, the mother gets up to take her baby out into a side room.
The minister looks up, feels sorry for her and says, “There’s no need for you
to leave. Your precious baby isn’t disturbing me.” And she looks back and says,
“Oh, I know that; he’s crying because you’re disturbing him!”
So
at great risk of disturbing you, on we go in in the book of Acts.
Jesus ascends into heaven, he sends the Holy Spirit in power on the apostles,
the gospel is preached everywhere, there are miraculous signs that accompany it
and, despite the beginning of the first wave of persecution against the church,
the number of believers has not stopped growing. It’s looking good. But when we
turn the page of our Bibles to chapter 6 - what do we find? From the very first
verse, the atmosphere is tense, there is friction, and people are complaining.
As
Gill Clayton once said, there was so much grumbling in a church she heard about
that people used to say “The only thing that’s harmonious in this church is the
organ!”
Some
of us like a bit of a moan sometimes. But, frankly, grumbling is inconsistent
with being a Christian. Moaning is incompatible with your new identity in
Christ. If Jesus is my Lord, I am crucified with Christ, the old things have
disappeared, everything is new, I am seated with Christ in heavenly places,
chosen in him before the foundation of the world that I should be holy and
blameless. Nothing to gripe about there…
A
friend of mine who is a church leader in the south of England told me he was
approached one morning last year by a villager who lamented that the last few
times he's come to a church event there were lots of people in the building. He
actually said, with no hint of irony, “I think a lot more people would come if
church wasn't so full.”
“Do
everything” Philippians 2.14-15 says, “without grumbling or arguing, so that
you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped
and crooked generation.”
But
let’s be honest, we do sometimes complain, and the first Christians did too.
The Church in Jerusalem in the first century seems to have had a split
personality. On the one hand, it was rocking, bursting with life, and full of
the Holy Spirit. We want that, don’t we? But on the other hand, it faced a
major dispute that could easily have split the church in two. We’re not so keen
about that.
A
Dangerous Problem (v1-2)
Chapter
6, verse 1 tells us about the issue that could have caused a deep and permanent
rift. Here's the situation: the growth in the number of believers is continuing
to accelerate. “At that time,” we read, “the number of disciples was increasing
...” So far, so good.
But
at the very same time, there were mounting tensions between two groups of
people called here the Hellenistic Jews and the Hebraic Jews. Remember, all the
Christians in the first few years of the history of the Church were Jewish.
We
just need to unpack this a bit to help us understand what was going on. The
Hellenistic Jews – who were they? They were Jewish believers in Jesus from all
over the Roman Empire. Because they had been born abroad, they didn’t know any
Hebrew, they only spoke Greek which was the main trade language of that day.
They were a bit like Welsh people in the UK who wear the red shirt during the
Six Nations Rugby and sing “Land of my Fathers” with tears rolling down their
cheeks but have never lived in Wales and don’t speak a word of the Welsh
language.
The
Hebraic Jews were totally different. They too were Jewish believers in Jesus
but they were born and raised in and around Jerusalem. They will have known a
bit of Greek but probably refused to speak it. They were a bit like Welsh
people who have never left their village, speak only Welsh as a matter of
principle; pretend they don’t understand English, and resent it when houses in
their village are sold as holiday homes.
These
are the two groups that fell out – you can probably get a feeling for why they
didn’t really get on.
Now
widows in that society were in a bit of a fix. They had no pension provision
and no social security; no income at all. But we saw in chapter 4 a few weeks
back that there were “no needy people” among the first Christians. They shared
all they had and made sure that these poor women had food to eat and were
properly looked after. So every mealtime, they would cook and serve food for
the widows and, as you’d expect, the women naturally tended to sit with those
they could have a conversation with as they ate; Greek speakers on one table
and Hebrew speakers on another. That’s the background.
The
problem arose when this group noticed that that group
was always getting served first and felt they were given bigger helpings,
leaving only leftovers for the other table. “It's not fair,” they complain.
“Why aren’t we getting the same as they are?”
And
it gets worse because bitterness sets in. The church becomes not only
segregated - which is sad - but it becomes spiritually ineffective because the
leaders (v2) are having to spend all their time arbitrating this dispute and so
they have less and less time to devote to prayer and the proclamation of the
Gospel. That’s tragic.
The
leaders have hit a wall. They are overwhelmed and they obviously cannot do
everything. The twelve that Jesus commissioned to make disciples of all nations
had become diverted from their main calling. That's the basic problem.
‘The
main thing’ was being neglected for ‘the other thing’ and ‘the other thing’ had
become ‘the main thing’. The main thing was no longer the main thing. But as J.
John says, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
Verse
2 says; “The Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said ‘It would not
be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on
tables.”
The
stand-up comedian Milton Jones once said “Sometimes people think of church as
being like a giant helicopter. They don't want to get too close in case they
get sucked into the rotas!”
But
let’s be clear about this. This wasn’t about reluctance to get involved. John
Stott says, “There is no hint whatever that the apostles regarded social work
as inferior to pastoral work, or beneath their dignity. It was entirely a
question of calling. They had no liberty to be distracted from their own
priority task.”
Funnily
enough, we have a similar issue here at the moment. But I was reviewing Messy
Church with Jan this week. We noticed that, at the end, instead of having a
friendly people spending time with the families over the meal, many of us who
might naturally do that are busy tidying the church and moving chairs after the
celebration and waiting on tables. An opportunity to engage people about Jesus
is being missed because of essential physical chores.
That’s
not to say we don’t need to do those practical things. But we do need to raise
up a team of people who are happy to do the hands-on stuff so others can be
released to fully connect with people around the tables. So we’ll be working
hard to put that right this term. And if you’re not above moving chairs, and
prefer that to talking to people, you have no idea how valuable a ministry that
is.
A
Divine Solution (v3-5)
How
did they sort it all out? Very briefly, there are five important things I want
to say about how the Lord led them to resolve the problem. Each of those five
things have a direct application to us here.
Firstly,
they say “Brothers and sisters, choose seven… In this particular context it was
seven men, but elsewhere in the New Testament, Romans 16 for example, women
clearly had a place in leadership teams too. The point is this; their vision
was for a plurality of shared ministries, not one minister.
I
wince every time I hear about someone say they are “going into the ministry” or
“entering full-time ministry” meaning they are getting ordained. In the New
Testament, every Christian is a full-time minister. If you’re a nurse, or a
teacher, or a businessman or an administrator or a stay-at-home mum, or
whatever, you do it all for the glory of the Lord Jesus and that is your
ministry. And in the church Jesus is building there is not one ministry but
many ministries.
I
still hear about churches where, even if they have excellent pastoral care
teams and fully trained pastoral assistants who are probably more pastorally
gifted than the clergy, some people say “If the vicar hasn’t visited me I
haven’t really been visited. Don’t fob me off with the curate or the pastoral
assistant But there is no trace of one-man ministry in the Acts and there
shouldn’t be in today’s church either.
Secondly,
they say they’re looking for candidates who are “known to be full of the
Spirit.” Known to be… So you can tell if someone is filled with the Holy
Spirit. It is not just something you feel inside. This verse tells me that if
you are filled with the Holy Spirit people can see it. Would people describe
you as Spirit-filled? Those I know to be filled with the Holy Spirit are positive
and encouraging, they’re prayerful, they’re joyful in all circumstances.
They’re people I want to be around.
In
the 19th century, a young man from very humble origins with a heart for God and
filled with the Holy Spirit met a young woman also on fire for the Lord. But
she was from a noble family. It was like the chimney sweep falling in love with
Lady Mary in Downton Abbey. They fell in love. She went to her father to ask if
she could marry him, as was the custom. He told her, “Listen my dear, this young
man is not from a good family. You don’t know where he has been!” “Yes, Daddy,
I don’t know where he has been,” she said. “But I know where he is going, and I
want to go there too.”
People
who have a heart for God and are filled with the Holy Spirit know where they
are going. And others are attracted to go with them; that is the essence of an
anointed leader. Do you need a refill of Holy Spirit joy and power today?
Thirdly,
they say they’re looking for leaders who are full of wisdom. God is looking for
sanctified good judgement. That only comes from soaking in God’s word. It makes
for fair-minded, discerning people, safe people who you’d go to for advice.
I
love the Riding Lights drama sketch, I wonder if you’ve seen it, where a
sleeping man, suddenly jumps out of bed and says, “I had a dream. I saw the
Lord in the seventh heaven, and behold, Jesus spoke to me and I fell at his
feet as though dead. There were angels and peals of thunder. He has given me a
message for the world. I must go...” And off he goes. Then his wife walks into
the room and rolls her eyes, “Why is it,” she says, “that men who have visions
never make the bed?”
I
like that. God is looking for wise leaders who are grounded; not all head in
the clouds.
Fourthly,
they were looking for stable people. “We will turn this responsibility over to
them” they say at the end of v3. Who’s going to entrust responsibility to
people who are volatile and unpredictable? The apostles make it plain that
these new leaders are going to be in charge. They say “we don’t need to
micro-manage this work. We have solid leaders in place that we can trust with
this ministry.”
And
fifthly, they looked for leaders with the attitude of a servant. The word
“distribution” in v1 and the word “wait” in v2 are the same in Greek; the word
is diakonia from which we get the word Deacon. It just means
“service.”
Milton
Jones, the one who joked about the rotas, says that in church, people sometimes
say “I really want to be used!” But when you ask them to put the chairs out
they say “Now I’m just being used!”
But
people who are Spirit-filled, wise and trustworthy are not above serving others
in humble ways.
A
church leader from Cape Town called Phil Dooley said recently, “The best teams
are made up of nobodies who love everybody, serve anybody and don’t care about
becoming a somebody.”
And
so we read in v5 “This proposal pleased the whole group. They chose Stephen, a
man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit; also Philip, Procorus, Nicanor, Timon
(that’s not the meerkat in the Lion King, it’s another one - I think you knew
that but just in case…), Parmenas, and Nicolas from Antioch, a convert to
Judaism.”
Interestingly,
all seven are Greek names and not Hebrew ones. Those who felt they were being
overlooked beforehand were given leaders who spoke their language – literally.
A
Desirable Outcome (v7)
Verse
7; “They presented these men to the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands
on them. So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem
increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.”
Ending
So
here’s the thing; the action they took when this crisis blew up
- solved the practical problem
- released seven people who were doing nothing into ministry
- gave 12 overworked people a bit of a break
- freed up space for prayer - which is the key to blessing
- got the gospel out on the streets so that it was more potent than ever before
And
look, after this crisis, even Jewish priests were converted and that was a
group that had been particularly resistant to the gospel before.
All
this tells me that, surprisingly perhaps, restlessness and conflict in the
church can be fruitful. It’s actually much better than harmonious apathy.
I’m
never scared of conflict in church. I get more concerned when no one cares enough
to feel passionately about anything. If Christians respond positively when
there is disagreement it can actually be a springboard to growth and the key to
a new level of blessing. Having said that, please don’t all start a bun fight
in the hall over coffee!
So
what is God saying to you today?
- To step up into a ministry of serving others so that the gospel can be more fruitful?
- To keep the main thing the main thing?
- To make sure you are filled with the Holy Spirit before you leave this place?
- To grow in wisdom this term by soaking in the word of God?
- Maybe something else…
Let’s pray…
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 31st
August 2014.
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