Philip - Dreaming of a Guide

Graduate Sunday

Before our lesson today, I’d like to take a moment to recognize our high school graduates.

Haden Fulkerson and Gideon Leach, please come forward.

For obvious reasons, we also didn’t get the opportunity to celebrate our graduates from last year, so Andrew Wells please also come forward.

*Ask for college plans*

I would like to present to each of you a new Bible, embossed with your name. May God’s Word serve as a blessing and encouragement to you as you start, or continue, your next chapter in life.

I will now ask our elders to lead us in prayer for our young graduates.

Sermon

Reading

Acts 8:29–38 ESV

And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.” And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?” And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him.

Introduction

One of the first things I try to think about to ground myself when I look at a piece of Scripture is “whom, if anyone, am I supposed to identify with in this story?”

And I think that is an important question to ask because to be quite frank, we can have a tendency to look at any Bible story and immediately want to identify with the hero of the story. But you and I are not Abraham, receiving a blessed promise from God for generations to come. At the birth of Christ we are neither Jesus nor Mary nor Joseph, at best we are like the shepherds who have heard of the miracle that took place and made haste to join in the celebration.

And I ask this particularly for this piece of scripture because this is a unique situation where we can look at Philip and this man from Ethiopia and say “ok who here am I?” and we can honestly say, “both”.

Because we have all been, and will be again where we sit and open God’s Word provided for us in the scriptures and we read it and just go… “huh”?

We all experience times where we need someone to come along side us and help us to better understand what it is God has revealed to His people. Sometimes that comes in the form of a good study Bible, sometimes in a friend, sometimes that comes right from the Holy Spirit within us.

But at the same time every one of us who follow Christ will, Lord willing, be blessed with an opportunity where someone in our lives who has heard maybe a little bit about Jesus or maybe they’ve heard a whole lot from someone who knows very little and they’re confused and they’re hurting but they know in their heart that they need to know more and so they say something like “does Jesus really love me and have a place for me in His kingdom?”

...and by God’s grace, by the power of the Holy Spirit who lives in us, by the unconditional and unstoppable love that Jesus has shown us we can take this person’s hand in ours and say, unequivocally, “YES!”

Christian as a Guide

It is this latter case that I really want to talk about today.

All around us, every day, there are people like the Ethiopian man who Philip met, people dreaming of a guide. I wholeheartedly believe that a central part of our calling as followers of Jesus is to be prepared to be the guide for whoever God sees fit to lead us to.

Philip did not pick the Ethiopian out of a crowd and decide “ok, this is the one, this is who I am going to convert.”

In fact, none of the apostles would likely have chosen an Ethiopian man to share the Gospel with. You see, at this point in Acts, Paul has not yet been converted, much less become the primary missionary to the Gentiles. Peter, also, had not yet been led to Cornelius, the Centurion, to preach the Gospel among the Gentiles in Caesarea.

At this point, this man on the road to Ethiopia is the first recorded conversion of a non-Jew!

Ethiopian as an Outcast

Beyond this, this man was a eunuch! As a eunuch, and a foreigner, he certainly would not have been welcomed in the temple.

Deuteronomy 23:1 LES

“Neither a eunuch nor one who has been castrated shall enter into the assembly of the Lord.

And yet, earlier in the chapter, scripture tells us that this man was returning from Jerusalem, where he had gone to worship.

According to Google maps, the journey from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Jerusalem, Israel is almost 2400 miles, and would take as long as four days of driving if you went today. In the first century, it’s safe to assume that a chariot on stone roads would take quite a bit longer.

But this man had traveled thousands of miles to worship YHWH at a temple that wouldn’t even let him through the door. I’m not sure whether he knew when he set out for Jerusalem that he would not be allowed to worship the Lord in the temple, or if he was shocked to be barred from entering when he arrived.

But imagine the desire of such a person, who could travel so far for so little, and spend the ride back studying the scroll of Isaiah?

I don’t know about you but… Isaiah’s a big, dense book. I probably shouldn’t admit this from the pulpit but… I have to be in a pretty good spot in my faith to dive into Isaiah. I mean I have to be MOTIVATED.

But I think there’s a really simple reason that the eunuch was seeking in the scroll of Isaiah, turn to Isaiah 56:3-7. You see in Isaiah 56 starting in verse 3, just 3 chapters after the section that he asked Philip about, it says:

“And let not the foreigner say,

who joins the Lord, saying,

‘The Lord has kept me apart from His people,’

nor let the eunuch say, ‘Why, am I a withered tree.’

for thus said the Lord:

‘of the eunuchs who keep My sabbath,

and choose what I desire,

and hold fast to My covenant,

I will give them in My house and within My walls

a marker and a name better than sons and daughters,

an everlasting name will I give them that shall not be cut off.

And the foreigners who join the Lord

to serve Him and to love the Lord’s name,

to become servants to Him,

all who keep the sabbath, not profaning it

and hold fast to My covenant,

I will bring them to My holy mountain

and give them joy in My house of prayer.

Their burnt offerings and sacrifices

shall be welcome on My altar.

For My house a house of prayer

shall be called for all the peoples.”

Gospel is hope for the outcast

And so this is very likely why the Ethiopian man is pouring over Isaiah, because it is the very lamb that he was reading about who would deliver the promises to the foreigner and the eunuch in Isaiah 56!

This is the situation the was presented before Philip, a man who had felt rejected, who had been denied a place in God’s kingdom until it came in its fullness through Jesus.

A man who knew he desperately needed someone to make him whole again, so when Philip came, asking if he understood the prophesy he was reading, the Ethiopian man cried out “how can I? unless someone guides me? Please, sit, and show me who this lamb is.

So the first thing I want you to know about being a guide is simply this: we are called to guide people who we don’t expect, who don’t fit our expectations, who we may think don’t belong in the kingdom of God. They are who Jesus came to save. Like it says in Mark 2:17:

Mark 2:17 (ESV)

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

And so it is sinners who we are called to guide to Jesus, and it is sinners whom Jesus forgives and whom the Holy Spirit sanctifies. Sinners like the eunuch, sinners like us, sinners who need a savior.

Guide to what?

Ok so we looked at Philip and the Ethiopian man and we kinda properly set our expectations for who we are called to guide. But what does it mean to be a guide like Philip was, like Christ called us to be?

One of the most critical things to know about being a guide is also one of the hardest to accept: a guide is not, and cannot, be the savior.

It is not our job to save people’s souls, and thank God for that. If it were the job of the church to save people from their sin hell would be more overcrowded than the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic.

In fact, as He explained the parable of the sower to His disciples, Jesus explained how some would not come to Him by quoting Isaiah 6:9:

“Indeed you must hear but you will not understand,

indeed you must see but you will not know.

Make the heart of this people obtuse

and block its ears and seal its eyes.

Lest it see with its eyes

and with its ears hear

and its heart understand

and it turn back and be healed.”

So we know that there are some who will hear the message that we share and will not decide to follow Jesus, and that there is nothing that we as the messengers can do to change that.

This can be so hard because we all have people in our lives who we wish we could just drag into the waters of baptism and push them down a path of Christian living. Children, siblings, parents, a spouse, a friend, a treasured aunt or uncle, that one neighbor who just needs Jesus so bad so that maybe they’ll become tolerable to live beside...

But we can only be effective guides when we understand the journey.

I was heavily involved in boy scouts growing up. So were my dad and my brother. Some of my closest friends were in my Scout troop and some of my most treasured memories were made during our monthly outings.

There was one trip in particular, in the Shining Rock Wilderness area back in North Carolina, where there were two options for our hike. One group, would take a valley trail through meadows and under tree coverage about 10 miles to our camp site. The other would take an 8.3 mile trail over - and I promise you this name is not made up - over Old Butt Knob.

This trail, while slightly shorter than the trail through the meadows and valleys, included almost 3,000 feet in elevation gain. For the uninitiated, this means that over the course of our 8.3 mile journey we would climb about 2/3 of a mile straight up.

I, of course, being the wise decision maker that I am, opted to join this group.

Now, all of this elevation gain was in the first half of the 8.3 mile trail, after which we would descend down from the knob to meet the other group of scouts at our campsite for the evening. What would mark the beginning of our descend was a semicircle in the trail that would take us around the summit of the mountain and to the side we would descend.

One of our scoutmasters was carrying the map and acting as navigator for the trip. He was, for all intents and purposes, our guide. It was very kind of him to volunteer to act as our guide as the navigator must be constantly checking terrain and landmarks and comparing them with the map, especially in a wilderness area like Shining Rock where trails are not overtly blazed.

However, he struggled to translate the physical terrain that surrounded us to the terrain marked on the map. What resulted from this was that about 45 minutes into our climb up Old Butt Knob he calls out to us “this is the loop boys! around this bend and it’s all downhill from here!”

There’s just one problem with that declaration, this four mile section of the trail, with about a 3000 foot climb, according to the most recent edition of the Boy Scout Handbook should take approximately 5 hours.

So needless to say we hadn’t quite made it to the top yet! Which we found out as we rounded that bend to find another steep climb.

So one mistake isn’t too bad right, that can be forgiven, we can get back on track, right?

No less than 8 more times were we told we were at the top before we finally reached it.

When we returned to our cars the next day, both groups took the trail through the meadows.

Having a guide who doesn’t know the way can make an already hard journey feel absolutely impossible. And we can inadvertently do that as well intentioned Christians as we try to guide people to Christ.

Do any of these sound familiar?

Get yourself right with God first

Until you stop x sin, you can’t be a Christian

I’m just not sure that you’re ready to follow Jesus

Oh, no, those clothes/that hair/those tattoos are inappropriate, please come back when you’re dressed appropriately

I’m sorry, we couldn’t baptize someone who is homosexual.

And hear me church because I’m not saying that the Christian life doesn’t include acknowledging and dying to sin and striving to live a life free from sin with the power of the Holy Spirit.

I’m saying that if we tell people to GET WELL before we bring them before the PHYSICIAN than we are missing the point of a hospital!

Being a guide to Jesus simply means meeting broken people, and sharing with them that when we were also lost and hurting and broken, we were led to one who put all of that behind us, and made us brand new.

Prac App

But what does that look like, actually? I mean, practically, what are the important things to cover as we guide people who are seeking Christ that they may come to Him?

In our primary example of Philip and the Eunuch, there’s one important practical application.

Acts 8:35 ESV

Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus.

Notice that Philip did not jump straight to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John 1:1. He did not begin with Jesus’ geneology or that “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”, he did not begin with John in the wilderness. Philip began his explanation meeting the Ethiopian man exactly where he was, with the questions that he had.

But what accounts to a real guide? Acts offers several examples, and is worth reading while just looking for how the church acted as a guide to Christ. The basic minimum “guide” includes the following:

WE, all of us, every one of us, have a sin problem that separates us from God, the creator of the universe.

His only Son, Jesus Christ, came to earth and did what He did, giving His own life and raising again to free us from that problem of sin.

God freely offers the remedy to each of us, that we can do nothing to earn, but accept by faith in baptism

Finally, as a guide, I have always found it important to share this: the “minimum” is never enough, and baptism and forgiveness are not the end, they are only the first step.

Once we have accepted this gift, freely given at great cost by Jesus, the real journey begins. We then get the chance to follow Him anew every day of our lives, and as Paul said to the Philippians:

Philippians 1:6 ESV

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

Harvest

The time is ripe for the harvest, it has been for some time. I want to offer you some encouragement, and share a short video from our time at camp where God provided for 11 young men and women who chose to accept His gift.

Camp Video

Conclusion

Today, more than half of Ethiopia identifies as Christian. In a nation surrounded by Somalia, Sudan, just 70 miles from Yemen, all strongly Muslim nations.

Just 2 years ago, in 2019, a church was found in Ethiopia that dated back to about 313 BC, among the earliest examples of an organized church in the world.

All of this began because Philip was willing to trust the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and be a guide to a stranger on the road.

A week ago we had 11 young people come to Christ.

God has not stopped providing the harvest.

I want to encourage you, my brothers and sisters, be ready to be a guide. Pay attention to the guidance of the Holy Spirit as you are led to those around you in need of one. Guide humbly, guide patiently, guide truthfully. And above all guide while showing the love of Jesus Christ to His scattered sheep.

If you, like the Ethiopian man in the story, know that you need the lamb, the Son of God, to make you whole again, we would love to help guide you to that.

If you need the prayers of this church, if you need to be restored to Christ so that you can be a guide to others, or for any other reason, we would love to have the opportunity to pray with you.

Whatever your need, I pray that you’ll make it known by coming forward.

While together, we stand, and sing.