Sermon Tone Analysis

If you have a Bible, go ahead and grab it.

We are going to be in Acts 19:11-20 and I know that I say this every week, but it is a really interesting passage that we’re going to be looking at tonight.

I’ll go ahead and say that this is one of the stranger things that happens in the book of Acts but it is still an amazing account that Luke records for us.

I’ve asked this question before but I’ll ask it again: Where does a Christian’s power and authority come from?

Does it come from himself or are they empowered by something or someone else?

A Christian is powerless without Christ and has no real authority apart from Christ.

Matthew 28:18-20 makes this very clear: “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”

What we see is that there is a clear progression of power and authority that is bestowed to Christians to do the work of Christ and that power is given solely by Christ through His sovereign authority and His sending of the Holy Spirit.

Apart from Christ, we are totally powerless and we are going to see that in action tonight as we look at people who appear religious but really aren’t.

The next thing I want to know is do you think that it is possible for us to learn positive lessons from negative examples?

What is a time that you learned something through a negative example?

We tend, or hopefully tend, to learn from our mistakes right?

Have you ever learned a lesson from someone else’s mistake?

Have you ever seen someone make a mistake and then go on to not make that mistake because you saw the outcome for that other person?

We’re gonna attempt to do that today.

We’re gonna try to bring some positives out of negative examples for our own spiritual benefit and I think in a way, that is why Luke records this event for us and why the Lord decided to include it in the book of Acts.

We’re going to look at the negative example of these Jewish exorcists that are only known to us as the sons of Sceva and see how we can make better decisions in our own walk with Christ.

Let’s pray and then we will dive into Acts 19:11-20

What Is Happening?

Let’s talk about what is going on in these verses and then we’ll sort of go in order of the positive lessons that we can learn as we come to them.

So, we’ll look at it through a wide lens and then we will narrow our focus.

In Acts 19, Paul comes to the city of Ephesus and he decides to spend 2 years there because he is having a great amount of success there and he loves the church in Ephesus!

Paul loved all of the churches that he founded or pastored at but he really cared for the church in Ephesus and we will see this even more so next week.

He cares for them so much that he makes a purpose to say goodbye to them before he makes his final trip to Jerusalem in the next chapter.

The church in Ephesus has an incredibly rich history and we know this from the list of pastors that they had in their early years.

Paul, Timothy, and the Apostle John would all pastor there at one point.

As Paul is here ministering, he is not just having a successful preaching ministry, he is having a successful healing ministry.

Holy Spirit power is just radiating off of him it seems like and God is doing such an amazing work through Paul that people are basically taking tissues that touched him to people that are sick or possessed and it’s healing them.

This obviously doesn’t go unnoticed and these seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva decide they are going to attempt to do the same things that Paul does.

These sons are itinerant, or traveling, exorcists that I believe basically go around and try to make money off of alleged miracles that they perform or at the very best, they are just some people that travel around attempting exorcisms.

When we come to verse 13, these exorcists find an evil spirit and they attempt to exorcise this demon by saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.”

The demon replies to them by saying, “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?”

And then in what is probably the most lopsided fight in history, this one guy beats up these 7 grown men so badly that they run away naked and bloody.

Here’s the thing, I’ve been in 1 fight in my life and it was when I was in preschool so it totally counts but I don’t know much about fighting.

What I do know is that if you get beaten up so badly that you leave that fight naked, you didn’t win that fight.

All of Ephesus hears about this and many of them praise God for what He is doing and an even larger number of people in Ephesus become Christians.

So, that’s what happens and now let’s quickly look at the positive lessons that come from these verses and from the negative example of these exorcists.

God does the Miracle (V.

11)

Let’s start with what may be the most important element out of this entire narrative: it is God alone that does the work and performs the miracle.

We see this right away in verse 11.

While Paul may have been the instrument of the miracle, God alone is the source of the miracle.

Let me put this to you bluntly, when it comes to miracles in your life, you yourself bring nothing to the table.

You are not the source of God’s miraculous workings or His blessings.

You didn’t save yourself.

When it comes to what you have contributed to your salvation, the only thing that you have contributed is the sin that makes it necessary.

God does all the work of salvation, beginning, middle, and end.

You have yet to be the source of a single miracle and you never will be the source of a single miracle.

Now if you are Christian, a miracle has been done in you.

You have been spiritually resurrected from spiritual death to spiritual life.

You have been born again.

You really are a walking, talking miracle that testifies to the healing and miraculous powers of a Sovereign God.

Let’s address 2 realities of God’s power working in us as Christians.

If God were not empowering what we as Christians did when it came to evangelism, I wouldn’t want to do it.

How could we go against the forces of darkness if the all-powerful God was not empowering what we did and working through us?

How could we do anything with confidence and certainty if God wasn’t working miracles through His Spirit?

If God has called you to something, He will give you the strength and joy to do that something.

Paul praises the God who is able to do this when he says in Ephesians 3:20-21

Ephesians 3:20–21 (ESV)

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.

Amen.

We do not serve a God that just hits the bare minimum of what we think He is able to do.

We don’t serve an underwhelming God, we serve a God that surpasses all possible expectations.

Paul says that God is able to do far more than we could possibly ask or think according to the power that is at work within us.

And who’s power is it?

It is the power of the Lord our God.

The second thing that I will say on this is that because God is the one that does the work, He is able to use the weak and the strong, the wise and the foolish, to accomplish His will.

You don’t have to be Superman to make a difference.

You don’t have to be a perfect speaker to tell someone the Gospel.

Look at Moses.

The dude was a loser when God came to him but God did incredible things through Moses.

If you are faithful now in the little things, you will see God continue to work out the big things.

One of the great rewards of faithful Christians within this world is that they get to see God do amazing things.

R.C. Sproul said, “The kingdom of Christ is a kingdom of power.

We do not need any more power than what we have right now in the person and work of the Holy Spirit, who always works according to Scripture and never against it.”

It is such an exciting thing for me when I see the Spirit of God bring someone from death to life and when I see someone get saved, I know that it doesn’t have anything to do with our own empowerment.

It’s God front and center and that is exactly what we see happening here in Paul’s ministry.

Let’s look at our next lesson by going back to verse 13.

Christ’s Name must be used properly (V.

13)

Acts 19:13 “Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.””

What’s our lesson here?

The name of Jesus must be used appropriately.

If we are going to claim the name of Christ, we must first be made right with Christ.

I think that as Luke records this, he wants us to think back to a moment in his Gospel where he writes in Luke 10:17, “The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!”

In this section of Scripture, Christ sends out 72 of His followers to heal and to preach and they return back with this great report.

Here in Acts 19, we see this similar proclomation of Christ’s name but it has the opposite affect.

Whereas the 72 went out and proclaimed the name of Christ with faith, these 7 sons go out using the name of Jesus because they hear Paul use it and they assume that there is something special solely in the name of Jesus and in a sense, there is!

But the Kingdom of God is advanced through the proclomation of Christ’s name when it is done properly through faith.

Simply attaching the name of Jesus to any thought or action doesn’t give it Holy Spirit power.

The demons shudder at the power of God, they know who Christ is, but we are not to use the name of Jesus to vindicate just any action that we do and we can’t assume that Christ will empower those actions just because we use His name.

There is a loss of holy reverence for the name of Christ.

We use it as a swear word or we don’t even recognize exactly what we are saying but this name of Jesus is the name that is above every name as Paul says in Philippians 2. I’ll say it again, if you are going to claim to be a Christian, you better represent that name properly.

You’ve heard me say before that when we go out as a group to places, I don’t care how you represent me or how you represent Olive Branch Baptist Church, but you better believe that I care how you represent Christ.

When we leave in 2 days for Great Wolf Lodge, you are going there with the name of Christ attached to you and you better live with that reality.

Or if you aren’t a Christian, I hope you understand why we see the name of Christ as so important because we are not saved by any other!

Remember what Peter said in Acts 4:12

Acts 4:12 (ESV)

And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

We as Christians have a great deal of respect for the name of Christ for this very reason and because of His holiness.