A few of you have asked about the recent revival I preached at Clement Baptist Church. I'm going to post the sermon notes I worked from on here. I also have an ambitious plan of uploading all the sermons that I have on DVD from the revival on to YouTube. While my notes and what I actually say are not always 100% in agreement it's pretty close. Enjoy!
Pastor Glen
It’s all gone to Hevel
Good Morning Clement Baptist ChurchIt is an honor to be sharing with you today from God’s Word. A little bit about myself. I am Glen Newsome, Jr. I am the Associate Pastor at Antioch Baptist Church and I have been on staff there for 11 years. I have been married to my lovely wife Lindsey for 12 years and I have 4 kids Madison, Anna, Sam & Lucas.
When I was 18 I received the Gospel of Jesus Christ and it radically changed my life as the Lord shaped me and molded me and directed my paths. After months of prayer I settled on The Gospel as the topic for our shared time together this week. What is it? What does it look like? Why does it matter? We will spend our time mainly in Acts 8 and God willing we will cover that whole chapter this week.
When we talk about the book of Acts two things usually come to mind. 1) The day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit comes up on the Apostles and Peter gets up and gives a sermon that is heard in every language due to the miracle of tongues. The second thing that gets mentioned is going to be the Apostle Paul. After all the Apostle Paul wrote 2/3’s of the NT and is main character for most of the book.
Chapter 8 serves as a transition chapter from the birth of the early church in Acts 1-7 and the missionary adventures of the Apostle Paul in chapters 9-28. Turn if you will to Acts 8:1-4 for a message entitled it’s all gone to Hevel.
Acts 8:1-4
Now Saul was consenting to his
death. At that time a great persecution arose against the church which was at
Jerusalem; and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and
Samaria, except the apostles. 2 And devout men carried
Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him. 3 As
for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering every house, and dragging off
men and women, committing them to prison. 4 Therefore those who
were scattered went everywhere preaching the word.
Ecc 1:1-2
The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in
Jerusalem. 2 “Vanity[a] of vanities,” says the Preacher; “Vanity of vanities,
all is vanity.”
These are the words of King Solomon, son of King David. One
of the richest and most powerful people to ever live. They say that Solomon’s
wealth was such that silver was essentially driveway gravel to him. Yet, here
he is at the end of his life declaring everything worthless. Some translations
rend this as vanity, futility, or even meaningless. The Hebrew here has those
concepts but it doesn’t quite cover it fully. The Word is Hevel. It refers to something that appears to have substance from a distance but upon closer inspection it’s really nothing. I remember in my early 20’s when I had my first real job. I was working for a bank doing tech support. I was good at it, I enjoyed it and I worked hard at it. I started volunteering for things and extra shifts. I started working 6 days a week and being on-call on the weekends. I was there regardless when it snowed, I was there on Saturdays and Sundays. I even worked through a couple of tropical storms. After about 2 years of this I got a promotion and a big raise! Yet, I had let every other aspect of my life slip to where the job was all I had and then another bank came in and took over. My manager was gone and the new manager eliminated promotions and wanted to get rid of the entire department. All that hard work amounted to nothing, to Hevel.
There are many of you that can relate to that experience. When someone else gets the credit for all your hard work? When your cursed out by that friend or family member who you’ve been nothing but loving and patient with? When you have prayed for years for a certain person or situation and you’ve only seemed to have made it worse? To the point where you cry out God, are you even listening to me? It’s tough and it’s all Hevel.
The church here in Acts 8 is going through that here. In chapter 7 a man named Stephen, one of the first deacons in the church, full of faith and good works. Is executed by the religious leadership of the day for blasphemy. A man named Saul was over seeing this. Saul was an up and coming young Pharisee.
We know him as the Apostle Paul. Saul not only was consenting of the execution of Stephen but assisted in it. He began a time of great persecution against the church in Jerusalem.
In Phil 3:6 Paul talks about his zeal in persecuting the
church. 1 Cor 15:9 Paul talks about how much he regrets his actions in this
particular time in his life. He referred to himself as the least of the
apostles and how he was not worthy to even be called one, specifically because
of his persecution of the church. His
supervision of Stephen’s execution was just the start of it. The verse says
that Saul was consenting to Stephen’s death but when you dig a big you find the
ancient greek word “suneudoken” to approve, to be pleased with” Saul was no
reluctant persecutor of the church. He enjoyed it. We will get back to this in
a bit.
Stephen’s death was only the beginning. The floodgates of
persecution were now open against the Christians. Saul was only one of many
persecutors of Christians. This was the first persecution of the Christians as
a whole. Before, the apostles had been arrested and beaten and persecuted;
here, every believer was threatened with violence and perhaps death. It’s
important to understand how difficult things were for the church at this time.
And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great
lamentation over him. Who were these devout men? Most likely it was a
combination of Jews & Christians together. It’s important to note that the
entire city had not turned against the church. Mainly those in leadership. Back to my bank story, after the other bank came in and replaced everyone they could replace I felt like I was all alone in my department as far as people who loved the Lord went. My supervisor, a self-described, half catholic, half Jewish, Zen Buddhist, would randomly pop up at my cubicle and ask me random controversial questions mostly relating to the Bible and my take on current political events. My other co-workers either stayed out of it or joined in with him. After a few weeks of this I started praying for help. Shortly after that our shifts got re-arranged and I was put on the early one. As God would have it, the other 2 people put on the early shift were Christians as well. The three of us started praying together about the work day before the start of our shift. That didn’t make the days any easier but it was comforting to know that support was there.
It often seems like the entire world is against us, even at
the local level, but God has His people at the right place at the right time,
especially in the difficulties
It says that they made great lamentation over him: Jewish
law prohibited open mourning for someone that had been executed, Acts states
that these devout men openly mourned over Stephen as one who was unjustly
murdered instead of a criminal that was executed. You should respect these guys. During a politically and religiously volatile time they stood up for what was right. Not only were their lives at risk but also their livelihoods. They were opposing those who were in charge. There would have been calls to boycott there businesses, have them fired from their jobs, blacklist their entire families. Yet, this does not phase them because they are devout men. Men who were focused on God. When you are looking up to God you don’t have time to look down upon anyone else.
To most of us Stephen’s death might seems of meaningless at
first. Here this young minister who was gracious and eloquent had his life
abruptly cut short. His ministry, which
had just begun, seems to have ended in failure – not only was no one immediately
brought to faith, what followed was an increased persecution against the
church.
Look what happens next? Saul makes havoc of the church,
breaking down doors and dragging off men, women and children to jail. What do
you even picture when you hear the word Havoc? The Ancient Greek here is
referring to a wild animal tearing at apiece of meet. These were men consumed
by hatred for their enemies and emboldened by the perceived righteousness of
their cause. This is a dangerous mix in any day and age and a staunch warning
to us here in the United States of the Offended.
It all seems pointless doesn’t it? Horrendous and senseless
that such violence being perpetrated on God’s people. Where is God in all of
this you might ask? The same place He always is, on His Throne. In control.
They key to this whole passage is the word scattered. There are two different words in the ancient
Greek language for the idea of “scattered.” One has the idea of scattering in
the sense of making something disappear, like scattering someone’s ashes. The
other word has the idea of scattering in
the sense of planting or sowing seeds. The world looks at this and sees the
first meaning, God’s word has this written at the second one.
The resulting good of the spread of the gospel shows us how
this persecution was inside the will of God. God can and will use pressing
circumstances to guide us into His will. Often we have to be shaken out of our
comfortable state before we do what God wants us to do.
Those who were scattered went everywhere preaching the word:
The end result was for the glory of God, because the persecution served to
spread the message. We shouldn’t think that those who left Jerusalem left as
formal preachers. Most were “accidental missionaries” who talked about Jesus
wherever they went. This is our calling as well. Sure only a few may be called
as foreign missionaries or pastors but all are called to share the Gospel and
God sends us wherever we need to be. “In every church where there is really the power of the Spirit of God, the Lord will cause it to be spread abroad, more or less. He never means that a church should be like a nut shut up in a shell; nor like ointment enclosed in a box. The precious perfume of the gospel must be poured forth to sweeten the air.” (Spurgeon)
Or as another friend of mind said, “God doesn’t keep all his
tools in one shed.”
The Gospel is not an airtight philosophy of wisdom, or an
ironclad guarantee of success. The Gospel, is an airtight ironclad person to
walk with day and day out in the person of Jesus Christ. It is to Him we can
turn during the Hevel of life. Jesus: the wisdom of God, who never changes—who
is the guarantee of our inheritance, who is the same yesterday, today and
forever.