Witness While We Wait

Call to Worship

Isaiah 43:10-13 “You are my witnesses” says the Lord. “You are my servant. You have been chosen to know me, believe in me, and understand that I alone am God. There is no other God— there never has been, and there never will be. I, yes I, am the Lord, and there is no other Savior. First I predicted your rescue, then I saved you and proclaimed it to the world. No foreign god has ever done this. You are witnesses that I am the only God,” says the Lord. “From eternity to eternity I am God. No one can snatch anyone out of my hand. No one can undo what I have done.”

Sermon

This week we are beginning a new series on the book of Acts. Last week we reached the end of the story of the gospels, which we have been going through since I started here. And now for the next few weeks we will be going through the book of Acts, which continues the account of the disciples and what they do in the wake of Jesus’s ministry, and how they began the movement known as the Christian church.

Shirley Comes and Reads

Acts 1:1–11 ESV

In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Thank you, Shirley.

Right away, we are able to see what kind of book Acts is, Luke is the author, the same Luke who wrote the gospel of Luke, and he is writing to a man named Theophilus, giving an account of the things that happened to the apostles right after Jesus left. And in this passage we recall Jesus’s ascension and what He called the disciples to, right before He ascended.

As Luke tells us, Jesus appeared to the disciples several times following His resurrection, which we talked a little bit about last week, and during that time, Luke says that He continued to teach them and help them to understand Him and His mission better. Verse 2&3, He gave them commands through the Holy Spirit, and He told them about them about the kingdom of God. And what else does He say to them, they’re back in Jerusalem after their fishing trip in Galilee, and Jesus tells them to wait there because they will soon receive the Holy Spirit.

And their response is kind of funny, look at what they ask Him (v.6)… “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” They still think He has come to restore the kingdom that Israel once had, and as I understand this, even after everything that has happened with the death and resurrection, they’re still thinking that He is going to win them a military victory.

They are still confused about what Jesus is saying, and I think that their confusion is kind of refreshing for us, I often find myself confused by different things in the bible or in understanding Jesus in my life, and like the disciples, I find that I’m trying really hard to understand what Jesus is saying or doing, but sometimes it is genuinely confusing, and there are times that we ask questions about things we’re confused about, and like Jesus responds to them here, it is not for us to know the answer yet.

Think about last week, when Peter asked Jesus is John would suffer and die like Him, and Jesus’s response is ‘why does that matter to you? Your job is to follow me.’

And here He has a similar response, they ask if He will restore the kingdom of Israel, His response is “it is not for you to know [this]” and then He continues, by giving them a command as followers of Him. He tells them what His followers need to do while we’re here, until He comes back.

Now the last bit of the passage is a little bit odd when we really stop and think about it, just picture it, imagine you’re standing with the disciples and you’ve just been with Jesus for three years, and He is teaching you one last time, and then suddenly this cloud appears around Him and you can’t see Him any more and you see Him just ascend into the sky, and all of a sudden there’s these two men in white robes, who weren’t there before and they ask, why are you staring into the sky? And you’re just there with your mouth hanging open, and thinking why would I not be staring?! Jesus just disappeared into the sky, like that’s not a normal thing that happens… and what do the men say? “Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

So now the whole group of you, are here and you’re just thinking ok… Jesus has gone into Heaven, and He’s going to come back, but we have to figure out what to do without Him. I think if I were there, I would be so confused by it all, I’d have so many questions about what I had just seen, what I was supposed to be doing, why all of it had happened. Now, lucky for us, the disciples really started to figure a lot of it out, and we have the rest of the New Testament that helps us to make sense of it all.

So let’s take a look at it together, First, why did Jesus go back to Heaven? What is He doing there? And, why is there going to be a 2nd coming?

Jesus went back into Heaven in order to intercede for us, as a High Priest. During the Old Testament, Israel would have their High Priest who would offer sacrifices to God on behalf of the people, as a payment for the sins of the people. And they would go before God and ask Him for forgiveness for their sins and for the nations sins, and they would offer a payment to Him so that the penalty of death was fulfilled. And Hebrews makes it clear that in the time between the first and second coming of Christ, that is what Christ is doing.

Hebrews 7:25-28 (NLT) “Therefore he is able, once and forever, to save those who come to God through him. He lives forever to intercede with God on their behalf. He is the kind of high priest we need because he is holy and blameless, unstained by sin. He has been set apart from sinners and has been given the highest place of honor in heaven. Unlike those other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices every day. They did this for their own sins first and then for the sins of the people. But Jesus did this once for all when he offered himself as the sacrifice for the people’s sins. The law appointed high priests who were limited by human weakness. But after the law was given, God appointed his Son with an oath, and his Son has been made the perfect High Priest forever.”

Jesus is in heaven right now, going between us and God, and when we pray that’s why we pray “in Jesus’s name” because He is the one that goes between us and the Father. He paid the ultimate price with His own death, and now in heaven He is not only the sacrifice for sin, but also the High Priest who goes before God on behalf of the people.

But… if He’s doing that, then why is there going to be a second coming? There are two phases to God’s plan of redemption, and getting rid of sin. A man named A.W. Pink wrote about how God’s plan for salvation from sin works in 4 distinct ways, and they all start with P which makes them easier to remember. When God saves us from sin, He saves us from the penalty of sin, the power of sin, the pleasure of sin, and the presence of sin. And God’s plan involves taking care of these in two phases, the first, when Christ came and died, and the second will be fulfilled when Christ comes again.

When Christ died, He saved us from the penalty of sin, by dying in our place. When we choose to follow Him, and the Holy Spirit becomes our helper and guide, we begin to have freedom from the power of sin, the way that sin affects our nature, and the way that we think and act, the Spirit begins to work in us and show us the distinction between the power sin had on our old nature as it gives us a new nature and allows us to understand how to live more godly lives. The Holy Spirit also gives us the ability to understand the pleasure of sin, and to fight against it. The pleasure of sin is the temptations in front of us that makes evil things seem good to us, and the Spirit allows us to fight those and to desire good and holy things instead.

The penalty for sin has been completed, however, the other two, the power and pleasure are things that will continue to be a fight for the believer until they die or Christ comes again.

This leaves us with the presence of sin in the world is the affect sin has on all of creation, which allows for things like floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, cancer and global pandemics which kill thousands. They aren’t a result of one invdividual persons sin, but they are a result of sin in the world in general, and when Christ comes a second time He will restore all of creation, reclaim dominion over all of it, and all of sin will be eradicated.

And so for the believer we are to look forward, expectantly, to the day that our Lord and Saviour returns to set all things right again. But at the same time, we also have a role while we’re waiting. We are to be witnesses.

That was the command that Jesus gave to the disciples, to be His witnesses. And I believe that this command requires us to look into it thoroughly.

And I think that it’s worth asking the five Ws to learn more about it, who, what, where, when, why, and how.

So first, what is a witness?

A witness is someone who gains knowledge about something through having a personal interaction with it, and then tells the truth about it others. So to be a witness of Jesus, is to have personal encounters with Him, and then to share the truth of that encounter with others. Think about the story of the woman at the well, she had an encounter with Jesus, and then ran to tell her whole town about the man who told her everything she had ever done. She was a witness about Jesus.

Which leads us to who, who is called to be a witness?

The short answer, is that all followers of Jesus are called to be His witnesses, when we are followers of Him, we have personal experiences with Him, ways that He has changed our lives, given us hope, redeemed us from our pasts, provided for us, taken care of us and saved us. And we are called to tell others about those experiences. To tell others about how Jesus has changed our lives and tell them about what we have learned from the bible about what He has done for each one of us.

Another question people often have is who should we tell about Jesus? This is a question that a man named William Carey answered a few hundred years ago, William Carey is now known as the Father of Modern Missions, but He started as just a shoemaker in the 18th century, during His time as a shoe maker he had a lot of time to think and grow close to God, and he began to learn of place in the world where the gospel had not been preached, and where people did not know God. And he began to preach and to tell other pastors and elders in his church about his dreams to go and tell the lost people groups about the gospel, and on one occasion as he was sharing this, another minister got up and said to him, “Young man, sit down! When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your help or mine!" But Carey could not disagree more, and so shortly afterwards he ended up going to India where he preached the gospel to many people who had never heard it, and over 700 people converted, and thousands upon thousands more were preached to by these 700, and trace their conversion story back to Carey.

The lesson I think we get from Carey’s story is that it doesn’t matter who we are, we’re called to bear witness about Jesus. Carey was a simple shoemaker, who God gave a dream, and he simply followed God’s leading. And we can also see from his story, that all people need to be reached, often times we can limit our view to just people who are in the same area as us, or just people who are like us already, but we need to be sharing the gospel with everyone. Another trap some people end up in, is thinking that we need to travel to the other side of the world to be on mission for Jesus and to share Him with others, but the truth is, we can do it right here in our own hometown, there are hundreds of people in the Annapolis valley who need to hear about Jesus, and we are the people who need to go and tell them.

This is also what Jesus meant when He listed Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth. For the disciples that’s just the broader geographical context they were in. When He was speaking to them, they were in Jerusalem, and Judea was the region right around there, Samaria wasn’t too far away, and for them anything past that would be the edges of their known world.

In our case, it would be like me saying, we need to preach the gospel in Canning, and in the rest of the valley, and we need to preach it in the HRM, and the rest of Nova Scotia, and Canada, and to the rest of the countries of the world.

Now, obviously that would be far too much ground to cover for 12 people to do alone, but that’s why we also encourage others to come alongside us. The twelve disciples all mostly went to different areas, and shared the gospel with others in those areas, and then the people they had shared it with had a chain effect.

I remember playing a game once in a Sunday School class and we were thinking through what it would be like if we just told two people about Jesus; and then if they did the same, and so did the people after them. And so I went and told two friends, and then they told to more, and so there were 2, then 4, then 8, 16, 32, 64, so on… and the point was to show us how quickly the gospel can spread if all of us do our job as witnesses.

There’s ____ of us here this morning, if each of us told two people who we knew who didn’t know Jesus about Him, and then they did the same think about the affect, there would be ____, and then _____, and what if it kept spreading… that’s exactly what happened with the disciples. But they didn’t stop at just 2 each, and that’s why the message of Jesus Christ spread so far and so rapidly.

Because the disciples answered one of the other questions; when should we share the gospel?

They showed that for believers we should always share the gospel with urgency, recognizing that we don’t know how long a person has left to live, King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, that no matter who you are, death eventually comes. And this applies both to us and to others we know, it can make life really sad, and it can hurt our hearts, but it can also give us a sense of urgency and purpose, to know that anyone could die at any point and not know about God is a really tragic thought, and I know that I don’t let it affect the urgency that I feel nearly enough. I very seldom feel like I have done a good job at urgently telling people about Jesus, and so as I urge you this morning to urgently share your faith, I’m preaching to myself as much as I am to you.

The only hope an advice that I can give is from what I have read and seen, about how we can be effective witnesses.

And even among those, I only really have two things. The first, to build relationships with people. The pastor who I grew up hearing preach every Sunday is fond of the phrase, people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. People need to feel loved before they want to hear the good news, and so look for ways to build strong relationships with people, and then once those are built don’t hesitate to share the good news with them. There’s people who I think about in high school, who I had built good relationships with, but I never really told them about Jesus, and even today that’s still something that I really regret, and that I wish I could go back and do things differently. Building relationships is important, but we also need to get to the part where we share our faith with people.

Which leads to the only other piece of wisdom that I have about being a witness, and that is to seek every opportunity. There’s an old quote that I would hear my parents use sometimes as I was growing up, and I couldn’t find the source of it, but there’s a lot of pastors who have said it, and it’s this: “Always be ready to preach, pray or die”. As we just covered, we must wrestle with our mortality and at all times be ready to leave this world and go and be with Christ. We must also, always be ready to preach the gospel to others and to pray for others; and a beautiful example that I have seen of this is my Grandfather, he’s gotten older now, He’s almost 87, and so he hasn’t done it as much since the pandemic, but pre-pandemic, he would go multiple times a week to Value Village and he would just go to the book section and start up a conversation with anyone that was there, it didn’t matter what age, race, ethnicity, status, or anything else, he would just start talking to them, and he would find a copy of the bible, because in the book section there almost always was one, and he would ask them a simple question, have you read this book? And it would almost always lead to conversation where he got to know the person’s story and he would just share the gospel with them.

It’s about as simple as you can get, and that doesn’t mean it’s not hard, I find it really scary sometimes to share the gospel with people, especially people that I haven’t met before, but that’s what Jesus has called us to do. But He didn’t just leave us to sort it out on our own, He gives us the Holy Spirit as a guide, and He says that we will receive power from the Holy Spirit. We receive the power to have boldness in our faith, and to share it with others. It can be difficult, but it’s also worth it, and it’s what we’ve been called to do. And with Christ as our leader, and the Holy Spirit as our helper, we are called to go and to tell others about the good news that we have found in Him.

Let’s pray.

Benediction

John 20:21 “Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.””