Stephen Series

If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, we are going to be looking at a lot of scripture today starting with the sixth chapter of Acts, verse 1. Acts 6:1. Before I start, I have the opening question of the day. How many of you know the name Jon Gosselin? A few of you know him. Jon Gosselin was basically somewhat of a celebrity whose claim to fame was the fact that he had eight kids. He started out with two twins and then sextuplets. People were so intrigued by the birth of these children to Jon and his wife Kate that they decided to film this reality show around their lives. The show was Jon and Kate Plus Eight. It was a good show that at its height reached about 10 million viewers. At that point, they were living the life of luxury. They had a mansion, all sorts of cars, and all sorts of luxuries and living really the high life. Then fame and fortune got the better of the couple and in 2009 they filed for divorce, and poor Jon was left with a payment of $22,000 dollars a month of child support to Kate. I recently heard this week that now Jon is actually waiting tables in a restaurant in Eastern Pennsylvania. He is behind on his child support and basically working for minimum wage. Considering all this, when you think about celebrities who get their start waiting tables and rise to some sort of celebrity status. Jon chose a different path. He decided to be a celebrity and now because he didn’t manage his money well he is waiting tables. As we consider this series of extraordinary people, what I want to do is look at the character of Stephen. Stephen is a New Testament character that started out waiting tables but instead of moving up to the status of Hollywood celebrity, he went on to become a celebrity in the kingdom of God; the first martyr for the church. We are going to read through starting at Acts 6:1 and read a number of verses.

Before we do that a little bit of background on where we are at in the Bible. Acts follows the gospels and in the end of the gospels we see the crucifixion of Jesus Christ but ultimately we see the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Then we see the ascension of Jesus Christ. Before he ascended into the heavens, he told a group of disciples, the 12 plus about 100 or so other ones, to not immediately go out and start sharing this good news but to wait until Jesus would send the Holy Spirit upon the church. We see that happening very clearly in the first chapter of Acts. The spirit of God came down upon the church. The church them immediately experienced explosive growth; 3,000 people were baptized and converted that particular day. The growth just continued to go. We see in the early chapters that, at least on the surface, everything seemed to be going well in the churches. A lot of the churches were actually just people meeting in homes. We saw in Acts 2:42 that all the disciples gathered together in fellowship and prayer and worship and they sat under the teaching of the apostles. They even sold their stuff and made sure that everybody’s needs were taken care of. As we know, sometimes growth brings problems. The first internal problem we encounter is back in about chapter 5 and is the story of Ananias and Sapphira. They were early believers who sold a large piece of property and for whatever reason they decided to hold back some of the proceeds. They were slammed very early on for basically lying to the apostles and ultimately lying to God. In this situation in this portion of Acts, we see another internal strife happening. We see a situation that, on the surface, doesn’t seem that bad. It basically involves a dispute about how certain widows are handled in the daily distribution of food and material items. It is a problem that if it is not dealt with in an efficient and timely manner, it is a problem that can really bog down the growth of the church. So we are going to read through the first seven verses there and then we are going to go back and discuss those and then continue on with a few more. Reading from Acts 6:1. (Scripture read here.)

So again the situation is not that complex. You had a large number of widows in the area and it looked like there was some favoritism going on. We really don’t know why there were so many widows in that particular area at that time, but the suspicion is that when the church began to expand and some of the apostles began to go out into the outlying areas of Jerusalem, there were a number of widows that were converted, and they would make their way into Jerusalem because they felt that they would be cared for in Jerusalem. On a daily basis, they would be given food, clothing, and money that would help them survive. But we also know there were limited resources. When you have limited resources and a diverse group of people that are meeting together. We have the Greek Jews and the Hebrew Jews who really didn’t get along, and they are competing for a minimal amount of resources. What often happens is you have strife. That is what happened in this situation. Somebody complained that the Hebrew widows were being shown favoritism. That was a problem. But rather than the apostles panicking and freaking out or whatever and deciding we will just roll up our sleeves and get in there and solve this situation and make sure all the widows are taken care of, what they said was you guys figure it out. They put it back on the congregation. They go on to say that it would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. “Brothers,” he is speaking to all the disciples out there, “choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibly over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.” What we see in this little section here is really the first evidence of a church structure being formed. Some sort of an organization being formed. Prior to that you basically had the apostles. Now they are creating another layer of servants that are meant to take care of more the administrative tasks so that the apostles and the other leaders of the church can focus on the ministry of the word, the preaching, the teaching, and discipleship and those sorts of things. Basically, what some believe, this was the picture of the first deacons of a church. It has to do with the idea of waiting on tables. The underlying word is the Greek word for deacons. That is where some would say this is the first appearance of deacons in the church. They were beneficial because they were caring for the administrative tasks so the leaders can go on and continue to do the teaching and the preaching and carrying out the message.