***The following is an unedited auto-generated transcript and may contain serious errors and speakers other than Dallas Willard. It is included here to assist your study. Please check the original audio for an authentic record of the event.
Dallas: I ask you to covenant with me to take the time in the next couple of weeks to read the book of Acts once a week. That would give you at least two good readings. I’m not for sure how long, just how many nights we will have, but at least we have two more after this evening. And I would like to ask you simply to read the book of the Acts of the Apostles at least once this week and the following week. I am not going to attempt to do anything like an exposition of that book, it would simply be out of the question. I don’t think, moreover, that is what is wanted. I think what is greatly needed in our time is an understanding of what happened in the book of Acts, what kind of events are taking place, and the meaning of those events. Some verse by verse exposition is of course needed, and I’ll be doing some of that as we go along. But I want this evening to begin with a discussion of the general character of the book of Acts, and I start with the simple fact that in this book there are astounding events. Perhaps it is wrong to speak simply of the Acts of the Apostles as the title of the book does. Rather, it is right to speak of the Acts of God in the presence of the apostles. And there are astounding things which happen in this book. The dead are raised. All kinds of miracles are performed. Hands of people with hard hearts are converted. Those who are in the fellowship of the disciples are possessed, literally possessed upon occasion by a spirit other than their own, the Spirit of God. They do strange things. And as you read the book of the Acts in this week and next week, I hope that you will just simply try to notice what those strange things are.
As we look at Acts, it is difficult to avoid falling into a kind of disbelief and despair about the Bible. There are many folk who would fight you over their belief that the Bible is true. But if you ask them how much of it is in their lives, well, they might fight even to keep some of it out if it was too upsetting or too troublesome. And to believe that the Bible is true simply in the abstract is quite meaningless. And when we begin to come to look at the details of the truth that is taught in the Bible, we are apt to be thrown in a tremendous struggle with our faith. Now I mean the question is quite simply put to you. Do you actually believe that the dead are raised? Do you actually believe, in the story I just read, that the waters of the Jordan River simply parted, or do you not? Now you see, many folk who have studied the Bible carefully have been driven into what is often called liberalism, the attempt to explain away the events of the Bible, because they tried to honestly face these things and simply could not believe that they occurred. Those who have not wanted to give up the Bible as true have often been driven into a kind of schizophrenic bind by wanting to believe that they occurred on the one hand, but having to say honestly that it had absolutely nothing to do with their lives on the other hand. And that nothing like what is going on there occurs in their own life. And so they’re driven sometimes to a kind of disbelief about the Bible, which creates a tremendous bind in their spiritual life. And they know they ought to believe it, and they try to believe it, and they want to believe it, and they will to believe it, but when it gets right down to it, they don’t believe it. They don’t know what to do with it. And very often these people fall into despair and self-condemnation, and they say, what’s wrong with me? Nothing like this ever happens.
If we’re honest with the Bible, that’s one of the things that comes to tempt us, unless we actually have something of the power of God in our lives, unless we understand why these things happened, what was happening, and can understand their relationship to us today. Now that’s the main thing that I want to try to deal with in these evenings which I have with you. And the theme I’ve given out is what happened in the book of Acts, and I’m going to be talking in general about that this evening, and I’m also going to come to the passage in the first chapter of the book of Acts where we have that interlude between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension.
But now let me begin to make some general remarks. One can never understand not only the book of Acts but the New Testament unless one understands that salvation has three essential parts. One is forgiveness of sins. It is pardon through the grace of God and the merits of Christ. Second is the transformation of character. Where people come from faithless to faithful, from hateful to loving, from short-tempered to patient, from weak to powerful, there is a transformation of character. And thirdly, there is some significant power over evil which is exercised by the conscious choice and action of the assembly of the believers.
Now unless one understands that, that salvation is an exceedingly comprehensive term, and it takes in much more than I’ve just sketched here, but in its application to the life of the individual believer, it involves all of those things. And a great deal of our trouble in the church of today is an understanding that these three things are for us today. Forgiveness of sins we have no trouble with, but the other two we frankly do. And as I’ve said to you many, many times, in many, many churches in the world today, you are frankly, it’s frankly indicated to you that you needn’t really follow the teachings of Christ. There needn’t really be an inner transformation of character. And indeed it is sometimes taught that you cannot do it. You simply can’t. And the issue of power is very frightening. And it is so for many good reasons. But I’m just saying that you have to understand that those three things are part of the package. That is what you see in the Gospels and in the book of Acts. And the great task is to understand how it relates to us today.
The young man said to me some time ago as we were discussing these matters, he said to me, you know the idea of power just scares me to death. What do you think I’m supposed to do, go around casting out demons and healing people? Well I didn’t say it to him, but I thought of saying to him, well what about the idea of power less than us, doesn’t that scare you worse? Or is it just that we’re so used to that, that it’s not frightening?
Now you and I are sent forth into the world to do the works of Christ in his power and in his spirit. And you cannot separate that from exercising the kind of power that Christ had. The question now is to see how it comes upon people. And that’s what we see in the book of Acts.
The book of Acts is the only book of the particular genre of Acts which was reserved to the canon of the Scriptures. You may or may not know that in the New Testament Scriptures you have a number of different kinds of literature, you have Gospels. But I’m sure you do know that the four Gospels which are selected in the canon of the New Testament are not the only Gospels that were written. You may not know that the Acts of the Apostles is not the only Acts which was written. It was the one which was selected in the experience and the guidance of the church in later centuries to be the one which entered the canon of the New Testament, but there were many, many Acts which were written. There were Acts of Peter and there were other Acts of Paul, various kinds of Acts written about various kinds of apostles and leaders. And this one was chosen somewhat as the book of Revelations. There were many revelations. This one we have as the final book in the New Testament is the one which was chosen by the early church under the guidance of God to enter the canon of Scripture. Of course there were many letters to churches and to individuals, and again we have a selection of those that have been preserved and put into the Scriptures as the standard of faith and practice. If you’re interested in those issues about literature, you might look at Goodspeed’s little book entitled A History of Early Christian Literature. I don’t know that any of you are interested in those things, but this is a simple little piece of work which just sort of lists the various kinds of books which were made available in the early church.
The Acts of the Apostles were stories of what was actually happening in the church after the ascension of Christ. And some of them are quite romantic. You may know the story about the apostle Paul being thrown in the Colosseum in Rome, and I believe it’s in the Colosseum, and they put in a lion to eat him, and it turns out that this lion was one whom the apostle had met earlier in his travels and had removed a thorn from the lion’s foot, and the lion refused to eat the apostle Paul. That actually shows up in one of the Acts of the Apostle Paul, and rather whimsical stories in many of these, but in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, all of them, you have an attempt to account for the history of what happened to the disciples and the apostles of Christ after his ascension.
Now in order to turn from the literary to the theological and the historical significance of the book, we have to understand that the book is an attempt to portray a major shift in the kingdom of God which Jesus prophesied. Jesus told the Jewish people in the 21st chapter of Matthew and the 43rd verse that something was going to happen to them. They had been the repositories of the kingdom of God. Jesus had come as their Messiah, and he had offered to make them what they were supposed to be in the will of God and had been supposed to be all along. That is a kind of theocratic kingdom which God directly ruled in the presence of the earth through which everyone in the world would know the righteousness and the power of God and his goodness for the whole world. That was their function. They were to be a theocratically governed people in the midst of the earth.
They rejected it. And when they rejected it, they removed themselves in a very important way. They removed themselves from the plan of God to bring all of the earth, all of earthly creation into subjection to himself through the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. See the object of God in human history is to create a loving community of human beings of all kinds, all over the world, who are in direct and indirect contact with God, who are directly governed by him in a conversational relationship between themselves and God. Again, the model of Adam in the Garden of Eden where there is a direct conversational relationship is the model of the human relationship to God. That’s what it is supposed to be. That’s for you and that’s for me. We are supposed to be led into that and brought into it and that was present in the history of Israel. I don’t have time tonight to go into the whole doctrine of the word of God as it functioned in the history of Israel. But God spoke to the people through the prophets because they were in general a rebellious people from the word go. And consequently God had to grab in that set of people like he did Abraham out of mankind in general. He selected a particular family and out of Abraham’s family he continually had to pull out prophets and leaders and judges through whom he would speak. And there were many times in the history of Israel when, as the scripture says, the word of the Lord was precious and there was no open vision. God wasn’t speaking. There was no word from God. And they blundered and struggled on in their own stiff-necked and spiritually dim-witted way and God kept working with them because he never gave up on his plan to create in the earth a loving community of human beings in which he dwelt, in which he governed. And when Jesus came there was for that time a final rejection of the people of Israel as the repository of the kingdom of heaven. And in verse 43 of Matthew 21 we have a statement of what happens in the book of Acts. Jesus says here, Therefore I say unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation, bringing forth the fruits thereof. A nation here does not mean what we ordinarily call a nation today, it means a people. Given to a people, bringing forth the fruits thereof. The kingdom of God had been given to the people of Israel. They had rejected it. And now Jesus tells the final word over them. It’s taken from you. Just as you remember on another occasion, the kingdom of Babylon that was written on the wall in a night of revelry, thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting. The kingdom is taken from you and given into the hands of another.
Apply that with Acts 28, 28, Acts 28, 28. Now this is the conclusion of the transition which is recorded in the book of Acts. And if you wish you can view this transition very simply as by calling it the transition of the kingdom of God from Jerusalem to Rome. And here we have Paul sitting in the middle of Rome, ministering the kingdom of God and he’s talking to a group of Jews. They have come to hear him and as was their custom they fell into disputes and trying to persuade one another and quarreling with Paul. And Paul simply says in the 28th verse of the 28th chapter of Acts, be it known therefore unto you that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles and they will hear it. Now the Gentiles, who is that? Well that’s most of you. The Gentiles are simply the non-Jews. This is something the Jew could not conceive of, but Paul had had to learn it. He could not have conceived of it himself, but he went through a process of experience which enabled him to know the reality of it. And now as far as the New Testament is concerned, at least for this age, this is the final sentence of the Jewish nation. And so we see Paul, verse 30, dwelling two whole years in his own hired house, receiving all that came in unto him, and look what he preached. He preached the kingdom of God, teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him.
Now I don’t know what you think of this, but I believe it and that’s my job is to tell you what I believe. It’s not your job necessarily to believe what I believe, but we’re here to share. And I think if you simply look at the history of the Western world, since that time the one thing that will strike you is that for most of that history, the center of Christianity was Rome.
Now it had its own failures, and I don’t hesitate to say that the kingdom of God went from its captivity in Jerusalem to its captivity in Rome. And to understand the principles of that captivity is very important for us today, lest we abide in that same captivity. We are apt to think, just as they are apt to think, that because we are who we are and we do the things that we do, that somehow this is exactly the way God wants it. That’s exactly what they thought. But the principles upon which they received and held the kingdom of God in bondage caused God to move them aside. When he was ready to move, they were not ready to move. And this is one of the interesting things about the book of Acts. Not a person in the book of Acts who plays a prominent role other than God and the Holy Spirit himself planned that these things would happen.
The most remarkable thing about the book of Acts is no one expected it. It was contrary to all expectation. It was a process of preparation, of change, which they could not foresee and go through. Jesus told them ahead of time what was going to happen so that when it happened they would be able to say, oh, I see. That’s what he was talking about. Doesn’t just begin in the book of Acts, does it? It begins with his death. It begins with his resurrection. And all of this while he’s going in one direction, they think it’s got to go in the other direction. And the book of Acts is a story of dashed expectations. It is a story which would never have happened if it had been left to human planning. It is the story of God dragging his very best people, kicking and screaming, in a direction which they thought was all wrong. That’s the story of the book of Acts.
And in that process we see a people called out, a transformation of the basis of the Kingdom of God from a racist concept, we must use the word, to a non-racist concept. We say so easily today that it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re a Jew, a Gentile, a man, a woman, a bond, slave, or free, but my friends, it made all the difference in the world then. And what we see happening in the book of Acts was literally inconceivable.
That’s for me and you today. We are apt to have in our minds that what we have and what we have been is what God wants. He may be standing and saying to us, no, it’s something very different. Are you ready to follow me?
Are you ready to go in a different way? Are you ready to be open? Are you ready to see what I can do? Or are you sitting like Samuel after Saul was dead? Samuel had anointed Saul, didn’t want to do it in the first place. Undoubtedly he felt like Saul was sort of his baby and Saul had failed. And so when Saul went down the tube, Samuel just sat around and griped and moaned and took on. And finally God had come to him and he said to him, Samuel, how long are you going to mourn for Saul? Get up and anoint somebody else. Expect something different.
If there’s anything we know about the working of God in history, it is that he does not stand still. He changes. He moves on and slowly he pulls us from where we began in the mire along through a history both individual and social in which we become something different than we ever dreamed of. That’s the story of the book of Acts as God moves the kingdom from its basis in the Jewish people unto a nation, a group of people that would bring forth the fruits thereof.
That’s the final word now on this point. The test is do we bring forth the fruits of the kingdom of God? If we want to know whether our particular form and our particular vessel, whether it’s individual or corporate, is serving God acceptively, we have to look at the fruits. And if the fruits amount to nothing or if the fruits are the fruits of the world, then we have to say God is calling us in a different direction. God is moving us toward something.
It’s so hard to get this done. You know, you may not know, you may that, for example, we have a common custom in our evangelical churches of calling people forward for a decision. Why do you know that ministers who introduced that nearly lost their heads over it? When Charles Finney began his ministry in the great evangelical awakening at the middle of the last century, they didn’t have that and he didn’t try to introduce that. He tried to introduce what he called an anxious seat, and an anxious seat was simply a place that was marked off for those who were anxious about their souls to come and set during service. And the ministry was offended at this terribly. They thought that this was taking measures, which God should take, that we should leave this entirely alone. Finney got burned in effigy in places because he took measures, as they would say, that were not the ones which we’ve had all along.
Now we have to remember that. And as we read the book of Acts, and as you study it in this week and next, I hope that you will above all consider the fact that in this story people are constantly being thrust into what many times they never, it isn’t just that they didn’t dream of, they thought it was totally wrong. Totally wrong. And one of the things I will do in Sunday or two is just go over the story of Peter’s going to the Roman centurion in Caesarea. This was regarded as something totally wrong, immoral, ungodly. And I will show you how Peter has to apologize forwards, backwards, sideways, up and down to get his brethren to accept the fact that he went in to talk to a Roman centurion. That’s characteristic of the book of Acts. And if you’re going to read it, please, I beg you, read it with an open heart to see what it means for us today.
Now there’s one final preliminary remark that I want to make. And with that I’m going to lead then into just a reading and comment on the first verses of the first chapter of the book of Acts. I hear many people today speak as if somehow the day of Pentecost transformed these people into what they became. And what I want to say to you is a very simple word. The book of Acts does not begin at Pentecost. Those people do not begin at Pentecost. The essence of understanding what happened with these people is preparation. They were a prepared people. If all that was needed was that the Holy Spirit would just come along and zap people, then it could just have happened to anyone walking down the street. It could have happened to the members of the Sanhedrin. It could have happened to anyone at all. Very as it may sound, what we have to understand is that while the initiative as I have said is clearly on God’s side, it never happens except to a people who are prepared. And the people who were together in the upper room on the day of Pentecost did not begin in the upper room on the day of Pentecost. These were a group of people who had heard the call of Jesus to discipleship and had answered it in his terms. Look for example at the ninth chapter of Luke. Jesus never begged anyone to follow him. He did upon occasion command some people to follow him, but he never begged, he never asked. And indeed many of the people who wanted to follow, he turned them away. And if you look at the end of the ninth chapter of Luke, you’ll see this happening. He discourages them. Verse 57, And it came to pass that as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. Jesus of course understanding that the man didn’t know what that meant, said to him, Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head. You’ll follow me whithersoever thou goest? You’ll follow me to the cross? You’ll follow me to the judgment hall and the tomb? You see, he had to say to the man, if you’re going to follow me, you have to understand that it’s not going to be an easy way in worldly terms. Again he said to another, follow me, verse 57, and the man responded, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. Jesus said to him, let the dead bury their dead. But go thou and preach the kingdom of God. And another said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee, but let me first go bid them farewell which were at home at my house. And Jesus said unto him, no man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God, is fitted for the kingdom of God. In other words, if you’re looking back, if you’re thinking about the other possibilities, you are not fitted to the kingdom of God.
They had heard this message. They had heard that unless a man despised his mother and father, sister and brother, his wife, his children, yea, in his own life also, he cannot be my disciple, and they’d accepted it in those terms. And having accepted it, they stayed to learn. They walked the way with Christ.
I don’t know what you think about this, but let me just suggest to you that two and a half years spent in the company of Christ and seeing what he went through was pretty good preparation for the filling of the Holy Spirit. And it was upon those people that the Holy Spirit came. These were people who walked with him, who listened to him, who stayed to learn. They began to partake in his ministry. Chapter 10 of Luke, after these things, the Lord appointed other 70 also, and sent them two and two before his faith. Do not go your way out of the streets of the same and say, even the very dust of your city, which cleaveth unto us, we do wipe off against you, notwithstanding be you sure of this, that the kingdom of God has come nigh unto you.
Now look at the results in verse 17. And the 70 returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name. Do you see, do you understand that what they were engaged in was what we would call apprenticeship? Do you understand that? These were people who had been in apprenticeship. They were not yet journeymen. But they had been in the presence of the Lord while he did his work. The kingdom of God was present in power in his life, and it moved. And now he gives to them the same work and says, go do it. Go do it.
And they had followed along with him, even in this, their expectations were so great that they thought that very surely Jesus was going to do what it was that they had hoped for. They were going to institute a kingdom, and in that kingdom, they would have offices and positions. And they kept badgering him. When are you going to do it, Lord? When are you going to take over? And of course, he knew that there was no way he could explain to them, and he didn’t try beyond very small words. He led them step by step through his betrayal, through his crucifixion and death. He dashed every expectation that they had. They were hopeless.
Now, you must understand this if you’re going to understand the Book of Acts, because the Book of Acts presupposes a group of people who have gone through these kinds of experience. Many times people will say to me, they will say, why does not what has happened in the Book of Acts happen today? I always reply to them very simply, show me a group of people who went through that preparation. I’ll show you a group of people in whom what is happening in the Book of Acts is happening today. This was a prepared people that had their hearts broken and run through the ringers. They’d been crushed out. All their ideas of what it was like to do the work of God had been so completely torn up and shattered and handed back to them in pieces. Who am I, Peter, thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonas, for flesh and blood have not revealed this unto thee. Then he begins to tell Peter, now I’m going to go up to Jerusalem, I’m going to be betrayed, I’m going to die. And Peter begins to rebuke him. The scripture says Peter took him and began to rebuke him. You can almost see him taking him by the shoulders and saying, far be it from thee, Lord. And what does Jesus say to Peter, get thee behind me, Satan? Because thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of man. Now the only thing that can iron out the crooked places and the rough places in our spirit and in our mind and the accumulations of sin that has built up in us through the ages and have come into us through our own choice is a course of experience, of discipleship to Christ through a period of years in which we experience a comparable crushing and death as those who went through it with Christ. They killed him. Peter said, I go fishing. What did the others say? We go with you, right? We go with you. I go fishing. There wasn’t much else to do. And the Lord knew that that is what they would do. He told them all, you know, that they would run. And they all said, oh no, we won’t, we’ll die for you. You see how little we know about our own spirit. That is why you can never trust a religion of mere resolve. You can never trust a religion of mere sincerity and intent because sincerity, intent and resolve have to draw their strength from what is in the depths of the soul beyond the conscious level. And that’s worked in there by experience and by the grace of God. Jesus said to them, you’re all going to betray me. Why they just almost had apoplexy over it. And you know the story. They ran, they ran. Peter turned after he had run a certain distance and came back. And at times we think that he was pretty bad off because of his denials, but I should point out to you that the rest of them weren’t even in a position where they could make a denial. They were somewhere over the hill heading south, north, east and west at 40 miles an hour, their coattails standing out so straight you could play marbles on it. Peter at least had come back where someone might say to him, you’re one of those. At least he was that close and that’s why the Lord dealt with Peter in a special way. Very like John was close by too, I think that is probably so, though it is difficult. Perhaps John ran several miles further before he stopped. We know from the resurrection stories that John could outrun Peter. And so he perhaps had overdrive and he got on down the road a little further before he could get things in control and begin to put on the brakes and go back. But you see the point is these people were prepared and they were crushed in the preparation. And I want you to know that when you get down to that upper room, you have got a prepared people. You’ve got a people, among other things, that have nowhere else to go. And I want to give you in just this one word the result of that preparation and then we’ll look in our final moments at just the last days of that preparation. The result of that preparation was this. When those people were in that upper room, there wasn’t any place else they wanted to be. They weren’t worrying about how their lettuce was growing or how their business was doing or what was happening to whoever. They had been put through a preparation such that there was only one place they wanted to be and that was in that upper room.
I don’t know what you think it would be like to take this group of people and spend ten days in the upper room with them. But until you are beginning to think about that kind of intense relationship with other people, you’re playing church. That’s what you’re doing. You’re playing church. And you’re not going to see the power of God as it is expressed in the New Testament in the life of Christ and his followers until you begin to think about personal relationships of that degree of intimacy.
These people upon whom the Spirit of God came had been put into a spiritual pressure cooker together, and the heat had been turned up and the pressure had been put on. And if you’re not willing for the preparation to get the fruit, you’re playing church. I’m playing church. And God knows we’re not serious. And just as the man who was looking back thought it is more important that he should go say bye-bye to the folks at home than that he should follow the Lord now, we are not fitted for the Kingdom of God. May be fitted for church. Because as we all know, the conditions of being in a church are much different than those laid down by Christ as being an operative and active member in the Kingdom of God. And I’m not saying church is bad. I’m just saying there are two different things now. You can be in many churches. There are many churches that will take you if you just sort of look clean, you know, and talk right. You can be in a church. But we have to understand that we’re talking about something altogether different. We’re talking about life. We’re talking about death. We’re talking about power. We’re talking about responsibility before God and living in his presence when we come to the Book of Acts.
Now I want to just read the first few verses of the first chapter to show you the final stages of the meticulous preparation through which God took his people so that when they got in that upper room, they would be happy to stay there. They would thank God they were there. When Jesus had risen from the dead, he entered into a new type of relationship with his disciples. And for about a period of 40 days, as you will see in the first verses here of Acts chapter 1, for about a period of 40 days, he dealt with them in an unusual way. Verse 2 you need to look at rather carefully. Jesus began both to do and to teach until the day he was taken up. After that, he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen.
Now I want to suggest to you what that is saying is that in this interim period, Jesus was giving commandments and teaching his apostles through the Holy Ghost. He was teaching them to communicate with him without him being bodily present. That’s the significance of saying through the Holy Ghost. If you look at what he was doing in that period of time, you’ll see he was not always with them. He would be with them and then he would be gone.
He showed himself alive, verse 3, after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them 40 days and speaking. He also taught them while he was with them. Again, notice what he speaks of, by the way, speaking of things pertaining to the kingdom of God. He continues his topic, which he opened his ministry with. He continues to teach and they learn to maintain a conversational relationship with the risen Christ.
He leads them step by step. He doesn’t take them rapidly. He knows they cannot grasp what is happening. Step by step, he leads them. He teaches them death is not all they thought it was. Now they know it isn’t, but he has moved them into a strange new world, because once we move into the world beyond physical death, how do things work? Well, of course, that’s where the kingdom of God is. The kingdom of God is precisely a realm which is beyond death, and he’s moving people into that relationship which constitutes the eternal life with God, the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, his Son.
And so he communicates with them. They hear him. They get messages from him. Now, that may have already spooked you completely out, but if it does, then you’re not going to understand the book of Acts, because that’s what it’s all about, a conversational relationship with the risen Christ. And he talks with them, and then he shows up, comes through a wall, enters with the doors closed, disappears. Sound like Star Wars? Sound like Star Trek?
Being assembled together with them, he commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem. They had done that before. He had gone to Galilee and rounded them up and brought them back. And now he says don’t depart, because something is going to happen to you. See he had been dealing with them, frankly, on a spooky level. And it’s going to get spookier yet. See this word spirit falls off our tongue like nothing. We just say spirit. That’s why I’m saying spook to you. I want you to think about this. It is spooky. Jesus scared people. When he cast the demons out of the wild man of Gadarenes, he scared those people to death. And they came begging him just to get out of the country. And let me tell you, they weren’t just worried about their hogs. They didn’t know what was going to happen next for this fellow around. Are you ready for that in your life? Now God is merciful to us and he doesn’t pour this stuff on us so fast that we can’t use it. And if we’re not really ready for it, he won’t bother us with it. By and large, that’s the rule. There are some exceptions, but that’s the rule. Also of course, we have to grow to the point to where it isn’t the big thing. We don’t go around doing spiritual stunts, right? Like watch me, I’m going to disappear now. Suppose I were to do that. Now think about this a moment. Suppose I did that. What would it mean? Or suppose I were to raise someone from the dead here this evening. What do you think would be in the newspapers tomorrow? That’s one of the things we have to understand about the book of Acts. It is not a spiritual sideshow. It is not for amusement. It is not to give your life a little spit, see. That isn’t the function of this. It isn’t to make you feel like you’re okay no matter how neurotic you are. It isn’t to place its stamp upon you and say somehow, well, because you can do some big trick. You really got it. There are lots of people who can do big tricks and they’ve really got it. You see, when Jesus was here, he never performed signs to prove anything to anyone. That’s not the point of these things. The point of these things is the growth of men and women to the point to where they can live and act as co-laborers in the kingdom of God. And you see with reference to what happens in the book of Acts, we have generally two classes of people. Those who really don’t believe it wouldn’t enter into it if their lives depended on it. And those who think that somehow the spiritual monkey shines is really the real thing. And for those two groups, it’s a closed book. But when you begin to understand the book of Acts is an expression of the power of God for the purposes of God in a prepared people, then it begins to make sense. He leads them step by step by step. Tear Jerusalem what’s going to happen. The promise of the Father which you’ve heard of me, verse 4, will come to you. For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence. Now that was the prophecy of John. And Jesus himself taught that promise.
When they therefore were come together, they asked him saying, Lord wilt thou at this time, I think that is referring to the time when the promise of the Father is coming that they’re referring to, will thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel. They had in mind that the people of Israel were going to be returned to an independent political entity which would govern the earth. That’s the only way they could think about it. And in that kingdom they wanted to be the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, the Chancellor of the Exeter, and whatever else. They wanted to be it. And that’s what they fussed about, you know. Right up to Jesus’ death they were saying, Lord, who’s going to get to sit on your right hand? Who’s going to get to sit on your left hand? And they’re still thinking about this. And you can just imagine, listen, what if you had someone who could do what Jesus did and you wanted to take over the United States government? Think about that a moment. Just think about it, see. From a human point of view they would think, wilt thou at this time?
Jesus simply brushes them off. It is not for you to know the times and the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power, but ye shall receive power. You see, they had asked for a position. He’s going to teach them about power which does not depend upon position. Human beings understand power in terms of position. You don’t have power unless you’ve got position. But this is the secret of the kingdom of God, is power without position.
And ye shall be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and into the uttermost parts of the earth. One of the ways of dividing up the book of Acts is to see how that works, and we’ll talk some about that next time.
And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight. Jesus went to a place which they saw. They saw him go. Now they knew where he was. They’re going to see that that is very much in their mind in the second chapter of Acts, when the day of Pentecost has fully come. Until that time, they wait. They’ve learned their lesson, somewhat like the bear cub that has been hit enough times, so that when the mother bear says, stay, they stay. They have been weaned. They’re now ready for something.
Let’s pray. Lord, teach us from thy word. Help us to hold our plans loosely, but if we do not, crush us until we come to the place where we can wait upon the Lord. We’re going to have a hymn now, what’s the number about, 273. Any of those who wish here this evening to come forward for counseling, we’re going to be here. The Lord moves you with concerns or confessions or questions, or if you feel tonight is a night when you need to commit yourself to Him in a new or in an original way, tonight is your opportunity. We will sing the first and second stanzas, please.