Can I Get A Witness? Series

ENGAGE

A man died, and the attorney said to his wife, "He did not leave a will. So we need to know the last words he ever said to you." She said, "I don't want to tell you." He said, "Look, he did not leave a will. We need to know the last words he ever said to you." She said, "I don't want to tell you. It was something between the two of us." He said, "May I beg you one more time?" She said, "Okay, I'll tell you. The last thing he ever said to me was, 'You don't scare me. You couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with that old gun.' "

One of the lessons we learn from that story is that last words are important. And it seems to me that is especially true when it comes to the last words of Jesus. So this morning, we’ll spend some time looking at the final words that He spoke to His disciples right before He left this earth and ascended to His Father.

TENSION

Those words are really important to us because they provide us with some needed insight into an area of our walk with Jesus that tends to be one of the most scary and difficult aspects of our life as disciples of Jesus.

TRUTH

So let’s look at those last words of Jesus, which we’ll find in the first chapter of the book of Acts. You’ll find the book of Acts right after the gospel accounts written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

We’re going to be spending the next 9 weeks in the book of Acts. Since that book contains 28 chapters, we obviously won’t be covering the entire book. We will spend our time focusing on some key passages that will help us to learn what it means to be a church that is gathered together not just to enjoy the kingdom of God for ourselves but in order to go and bring that kingdom near to others.

We’ll start this morning at the beginning of the book.

[Read Acts 1:1]

We see right off the bat that the book of Acts is the second of a two-part work authored by Luke. Both books are addressed to Theophilus, whose name literally means “friend of God”. There has been a lot of conjecture about who he was but frankly we just don’t have much information on him.

Most of your Bibles probably title this book “The Acts of the Apostles”, but Luke’s opening words here suggest that a more accurate title would be “The Acts of Jesus Through the Apostles”. The word “began” in verse 1 suggests that Jesus didn’t quit working when He ascended to the Father, but rather that He merely changed His method of working at that time. Up until then, He had worked in His fleshly body. From that point forward, he would work through His body, the church. This is an important concept because it reminds us that we are not doing God’s work on our own, but rather Jesus is doing His work through us.

[Read Acts 1:2-5]

I want to encourage you to read the last part of Luke’s gospel later and if you do that you will note that there is an overlap between the last section of chapter 24 his gospel account and the opening verses here in the Book of Acts. In both accounts we see that after His resurrection, Jesus spent 40 days with His disciples, teaching them about the kingdom of God. He also commanded them to stay there in Jerusalem and wait for what He had promised to them on many earlier occasions – the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

We’re going to talk a lot more about exactly what that means in just a bit, but for now, I just want to remind us that the verb “baptized” has been transliterated rather than translated into English. The Greek verb “baptizo” literally means “to immerse”. But rather than translate that into English as “immerse” almost all our English Bibles just transliterate it and render it “baptize”. A lot of the confusion that arises around the idea of the baptism of the Holy Spirit would go away if our English Bibles translated that verb rather than transliterated it. If that was done, the last part of verse 5 would read more like this:

…but you will be immersed in the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

[Read Acts 1:6-8]

The question that the disciples asked Jesus actually made a lot of sense in light of the fact that Jesus had been teaching them about the kingdom of God. Even now, after His resurrection, the disciples still failed to understand fully the nature of the kingdom that Jesus had ushered in when He brought that kingdom near to them when He came to this earth. No doubt, they were still hoping for an earthly kingdom in which Jesus would overthrow the Roman government and put all of them in positions of power.