Growing Pains Series

How many of you have ever had a problem? Let’s just stop there. How many of you have ever had a problem? Okay. All right, good. We’re all in. We’re all in. How many of you have ever had a problem, and it was urgent, and because of the urgency, you came up with a solution, and it ends up the solution to your problem was worse than the problem itself? Any testimonies there? Okay. A few of them. Some of you...that’s why you got married. Really quickly, right? No, no. I didn’t say that. I am so sorry!

All right, Debbie and I were teenagers. We were in love. That’s my wife. We were in love. We weren’t married...both lived in Denver, and my parents were getting ready to move. So we were cleaning up the house. We were going to sell the house. We had showings of the house, and we painted the walls and all that kind of stuff.

So Debbie and I were having a date, and our date was babysitting my little brother, Chris. Mom and Dad were at the church. He’s a pastor, and they were at the church doing something. I don’t know what they were doing. So anyway...we were watching TV. Chris goes into the other room, and he spills a can of paint on the carpet...house we’re getting ready to sell. I don’t know what to do. We have a crisis right now. So I called my dad...get Dad on the phone.

Now I don’t know what your dad is like. My dad tends to overreact at times. Anybody have a dad kind of like that? So I explained calmly the situation. I said, "Dad, what should we do?" To which Dad replied, "You might as well rip it up and burn it." Boom...slammed the phone down. So I’m left to my own devices. I have to fix this. This is urgent. Dad will come home. I’m in trouble. What do I do? I have no idea. I had no idea what paint was made out of. I had no idea how you clean up paint off of a carpet.

I did know my mother is a clean freak. She had one of those Cleaning Demons. Anybody like that? You have to clean everything. So Mom always, when she cleaned, she always used this right here...Pine-Sol. Pine-Sol will do anything. I ran to the cabinet and got a bottle of Pine-Sol about like this. I thought, Lots of paint, lots of Pine-Sol. We dumped the whole thing onto the paint. About that time, my father came in and saw what was going on. I won’t tell you what he did.

What ended up is they dumped a bunch of water on the paint because paint is what? Water-soluble. So good news...we got all of the paint out of the carpet. Not so good news is the Pine-Sol faded the color out of the carpet. Okay? So the solution was worse than the problem. Top that story, will you?

Well, we’re going to study Acts, chapter 6. In fact, we’re kind of concluding a mini-series, just kind of a little six-week series on the first six chapters of Acts, and we’re going to move onto another mini-series, Acts 7-11. We’ll tell you about that later.

In this series, it’s been kind of fun because it’s the beginning of the church. It Starts With One. It started with Jesus who died for our sin. Who rose again, proving He was God. Then He left to be ever our Intercessor with the Father, and He left the Holy Spirit with the church, and that’s the beginning of the church. We studied that in Acts, chapter 1, and Acts, chapter 2, and said, "Be filled with the Holy Spirit." We’ve talked a little bit about that.

Then the church encounters some issues...some problems, both from outside and from inside. In this chapter this week, in Acts, chapter 6, they hit another potential problem in this brand new church, and almost...almost chose a solution that could have been worse than the problem, which would have side-tracked the church and we might not have what we have here today.

I want to study it, and here’s what I want to do. As we study it, I want you to think about, in your life right now, maybe a challenge. It might be a personal challenge. It might be at business. It might be on a team that you play on, or a team that you lead. It could be in a ministry area. It might be something that keeps you awake at night right now, okay. It’s a challenge. It’s a problem. How do you handle that, and what if you chose the wrong solution that ultimately became worse than the problem? How can you avoid that?