It’s a strange thing how easily we gravitate back to the law
when Jesus came to set us free from the law of sin and death through His grace.
Recently I was leading a class on discipleship and I
mentioned a quote from Dr. Douglas Kelly of Reformed Theological Seminary, “If
you want to make people mad, preach the law to them. But if you want to make them really, really
mad, preach grace.” And he’s right, just
look at Jesus! Just look at Stephen!
The law offends because it tells us what to do – and most of
the time, we hate anyone telling us what to do.
But grace offends us even more, because it tells us that there’s
absolutely nothing we can do, that everything’s already been done for us. And if there’s something we hate even more
than being told what to do, it’s being told that we can’t do anything; we can’t
earn anything – we are absolutely helpless and hopeless without divine
grace. And that’s exactly what we see in
Acts 6 & 7.
A few weeks ago we mentioned that Luke is famous for his
transitional sentences or paragraphs. He
uses them to move the reader (or listener) from one scene to another. But here he used two whole chapters – 6 &
7 – as a huge transition. His story of
Stephen is the story of the one the Holy Spirit uses to move the church out of
Jerusalem and into the rest of the world.
Without Stephen, the church of Jesus Christ would have remained an
obscure sect of the Jewish religion. According
to Luke, without Jesus there’d be no Stephen.
And without Stephen there’d be no Apostle Paul. And without the Apostle Paul there’d be no
ministry to the Gentiles. And without
Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles, there’d be no Hebron Church.
For eight weeks we’ve been examining what it means to
fulfill Micah 6:8 – “…to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with
our God.” And we’ve seen that when the
power and presence of the Holy Spirit is poured out on the church, men and
women begin exhibiting the signature of Jesus which is the fulfillment of Micah
6:8.
Of all the people Luke introduces in the Book of Acts, no
one bears the signature of Jesus more clearly and more indelibly than
Stephen. Every Christian who seeks to
know the meaning of Micah 6:8 would profit from looking carefully at Stephen,
and so we do this Sunday.
In preparation for Sunday’s message you may wish to consider
the following:
1. What
is meant by the phrase, “I was seized by the power of a great affection?”
2. Why
do you think the Iroquois attributed divinity to intellectually handicapped
children?
3. What
do you think it means to say that Jesus loves you for who you are and not for
whom you should be?
4. Why
would Dr. Luke devote two chapters, 7% of the Book of Acts, to a man named
Stephen?
5. What
does “Stephen” mean in Greek?
6. How
does he live up to his name?
7. What
does the description of him in verse 8 mean?
(i.e. full of grace)
8. Who
else in Scripture is described like that?
9. Who
is behind the opposition to Stephen in 6:11?
10. How
is Stephen a perfect fulfillment of Jesus’ command in Matthew 9:13?
See you Sunday!
