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?
I want to apply that toward the end of the message. I want to study how the New Testament church handled it. If you have a Bible, read along with us. If not, there is, in your bulletin, there are some notes there. Let’s start at Acts, chapter 6, verse 1. It says this, "As the believers rapidly multiplied, there were rumblings of discontent." Huh...this is the New Testament church. This is full of the Holy Spirit, and yet there are problems. Here is the principle...when the church grows, it’s not always pretty. When the church grows, it’s not always pretty.
In fact, this New Testament church, in this chapter we studied last week...you have Ananias and Sapphira who died during the offering because of wrong motives, and they were members of the church. In Acts, chapter 8, that we will study in a couple of weeks, there is this magician, and kind of a sleight-of-hand artist, and he gets saved and he joins the church and he is baptized. It says specifically he is baptized into the church. He is a member of the church, and he comes to some of the leaders in the church and he tries to buy the ability to convey the Holy Spirit because he wants to make profit on that. This is a guy in the church...in the church.
People come with their agendas from time to time. I mean, I’ve been around a long time. We’ve had some issues here. I remember, I think we were building this building right here, this part of it, and you know, people were collecting together their money. Little kids were putting coins in little piggy banks to help, and people were making sacrifices and committing. A guy called me and he said, "I want to talk to you about a commitment I’m going to make." I said, "Okay."
So he comes in and we sit down and we talk, and he said, "I want to make a significant commitment to the building fund." I thought, Well, that’s great. Significance is different for everybody, but that’s good. But I began to sense there was more than what met the surface here...that this guy actually kind of wanted to use his gift to the building fund to kind of buy influence, to be able to influence some things. I was thinking that, and it becomes pretty obvious to me, and finally the guy writes a check...six figures. Say, "Six figures," together. Six figures. Six figures will sometimes take your breath away. It’s like...Wow!
So he writes it, and he slides a six-figure check across my desk, but I can almost supernaturally see the strings attached coming out from the check. I don’t know what to do, and I’m thinking, We need the money. That’s great. I took the check, and I slid it slowly back across the table, hoping I was doing the right thing. Do you know what I mean? I said, "Do you know what? Your money doesn’t buy you any more here than a single mother who saved up and gave $10, $20, or $50 to the building fund. That’s not how we play here." It was messy. It was messy.
Another time during a Christmas Eve service, we were having Christmas Eve at the Masonic Temple. Can you say mistake? Let’s say mistake together. Mistake. Okay, so we’re having Christmas Eve at the Masonic Temple. It’s raining like crazy. People were coming in, you know. Hundreds and hundreds of people...biggest crowd we’ve ever had to that point. I’m standing in the door, watching people come in.
This lady came in with this...she had a bag, and in the bag she had a tambourine. One of the ushers brings her over to me, and she said, "I would like to play my tambourine with the band tonight at the Christmas Eve services." I said, "Well, that’s good. Have you practiced with the band? A lot of times we practice before we do that type of thing." She said, "No, I don’t need to." I said, "Really?" She said, "No, I have a gift to play." I said, "Well, we appreciate your gift, but we would like your gift to practice with all the other gifts in order to do this." She said, "You don’t understand. God told me that I was going to play tonight."
How many of you know it’s really hard to argue with God? But I did. I said, "Do you know what? God didn’t tell me, and so...we’re not doing that." She got upset. She had an agenda.
We’ve had all kinds of fun things. In the 20 years I’ve been in, we’ve had at least two (that I’ve witnessed) really good fistfights in the parking lot...really good. In fact, on one of them, a guy was harassing his ex-wife, and she sucker-punched him...bloody nose. It was awesome. It was really... I’m not into violence usually, but he needed it. But anyway...
Staying faithful to the vision as a leader sometimes has felt like pushing a wheelbarrow full of frogs. Can you get a mental on that one? About the time you have frogs going out. I didn’t think it was that good either, so we won’t use it in the next service.
In a growing church, you never reach the point of neat and pretty. There are always issues...always problems. John Piper said it this way, "A true movement of the Holy Spirit in this fallen world will always sweep some debris into the church." When the church grows, it’s not pretty. Not always. There were rumblings of discontent. Let’s see what they were about.
"Those who spoke Greek complained against those who spoke Hebrew, saying that their widows were being discriminated against in the daily distribution of food." Let’s just kind of pause on that...kind of a little background on it. Widows and orphans had a very special place in God’s heart. In the Old Testament, in Isaiah, He says that He is a Father to the fatherless and He is a defender of the widows. In this patriarchal culture, if you were widowed, you’re the poor of the poor because women couldn’t make a living and depended on her husband. If her husband died she needed to depend on her family. If her family didn’t take care of her, sometimes the government had some things, but the church, in the synagogue, kind of became the safety net for widows who fell through the cracks. There was a regular distribution of qualified widows. You can read in 1 Timothy who is qualified and who is not and all this kind of stuff.
They had kind of a social justice within the church reaching out to the poor and the widows. In this case, the Greek widows, some of their Greek friends who had come to know Jesus, felt like they were being discriminated against. That wasn’t their home. They didn’t have family there, and yet they were living there. They didn’t understand the language. Maybe they didn’t, you know...just a lot of things. It’s a multicultural church, and so there are just a lot of issues...lot of stuff going on.
So there were rumblings about what was happening. It’s threatening the unity of this brand new church. Now, as I read this, I saw two threats to the church. The first one was disorganization. The success of the gospel, as they preached the gospel hundreds and thousands even at a time are being added, so the success of the gospel leads to an overload for the apostles in their administrative skills.
Now that happened fairly early on for us at Seacoast. We outgrew my administrative capacities on day two...day two of the church. I do not have very many administrative capacities. We told the story before of the first week we had a lot more people than we thought were going to be here. It kind of, you know, leveled out after that. I called one of my friends from Denver who is in ministry after the first week, and I said, "Terry, you have to come help me." So Terry moved his family out here to help.
Here was the problem. Terry was just like me. How many of you like hanging out with people like you? Well, we need more people like me to kind of help with this thing, and he didn’t have any administrative gifts either. Both of us were mess-makers, not detail-people. Anybody else normal like that in here? Okay. The only kind of detail-person we had around us was my wife, and so really quickly the messes we made, which we called vision, overloaded our capacity and her capacity to kind of handle them, and it was putting a strain on the church and on my marriage.
Fortunately, in the church, one of the guys, Glenn Wood, was a volunteer at that point. He said, "You know, I like structure. I like all that. You think I might be able to help?" We said, "Absolutely." He came and helped, now he’s on staff, and helped through the administrative process because we had a disorganization problem. Any growing church or any growing organization will face disorganization threats.
Somebody says, "Well, just how organized should a church be?" Some people believe the church shouldn’t have formal organization at all. It shouldn’t own property. It shouldn’t have staff members...ought to just kind of be a home church kind of a thing with really small and no organization. We love home churches. We have several of them that follow, kind of...track with us every week, just like you’re doing right now.
Some people in that movement would say, "That’s the only valid model of a church. When the church gets overly-organized, it programs the Holy Spirit out." There can be some truth to that, but if you look at the other end of the scale, there are some churches that are so business-like they look like a well-oiled business. They have a complex organizational structure. They have boards, committees, subcommittees. You know, if God wants to speak in the church He has to get on the agenda two weeks in advance or else we don’t listen, you know, to whatever the Holy Spirit is saying.
Well both extremes are wrong. If you look in the Old Testament, God is highly organized, and you see all the systems that are involved in taking care of the people. When you have large groups of people you have to have systems, but at the same time, God is also highly fluid. The Holy Spirit is referred to as the Wind. He goes where He wants. We’ve all been just surprised, at times, with how when we listen to God, He speaks in a variety of ways.
The size of the church determines the need for organization. The Acts church is huge, and they need more organization, and it’s a threat to the church, but the bigger threat is not disorganization; it’s distraction. Here it is. Here is where they could have chosen the wrong solution to the problem.
The apostles are tempted to solve the problem in the wrong way, causing, no doubt, a far bigger problem that would have impacted us today. That’s of being distracted. Here is it, verse 2, "So the Twelve called a meeting of all the believers." Why? Because they have a problem with the widows...the Greek widows. There is rumbling. "We apostles should..." Circle the word should...should. "We apostles should spend our time [preaching and] teaching the Word of God, not running a food program," they said. Food programs...important, but they said here is what we should be doing.
I think, if you read between the lines, I think they were responding to somebody else’s should. Think about it like this. What do you think the rumblings were? How many of you can just hear the rumblings? Do you know if the apostles would get out from behind the desk, you know, if they would spend more time hanging out at the soup kitchen, they’d understand the problems. That’s what they should be doing. These guys are working full-time. I mean, how much time does it take to study and pray and give that little message they do at the synagogue or at the meetings? They should be doing something else.
How many of you know should be’s will kill you? Should be’s will kill you. Have you ever had somebody fired up about an issue? They are passionate about it, and they think you should be equally passionate. You should be involved. I get that all the time.
You should be more interested in the Middle East, or you should be more involved in politics, or you should care more about abortion, or you should care more about the poor. You should care more about...you just fill in the blank. You should be...because somebody is fired up about it, and that’s good. We need to be fired up, but we need to understand the Holy Spirit gives us passions and you need to find people who have the same passions. Don’t put your shoulds on somebody else. I won’t should on you. You don’t should on me. Does that make sense?
So the apostles... (I did not say that, okay?) The apostles have some guys saying, "You should be doing this." They said, "No, no. Time out. That’s not who God created us to be. It’s a good thing we all don’t do the same thing. That’s not the way to fix it." They could have made the problem worse by caving into pressure, changing their priorities to fit the current crisis. The church would have suffered. Doctrinal error would have come in, and it may not have even come as far as it has today. Our lives maybe would not have been changed.
Instead they say, "We should be..." That’s God’s should be. "...spending our time preaching, teaching, and not administrating the food program." So, there is a threat of disorganization and distraction. How did they solve it? Verse 3...they released the church to solve the problem. "Now look around among yourselves, brothers, and select seven men who are well respected and full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom. We will put them in charge of this business. Then we can spend our time in prayer and teaching and preaching of the Word."
They said, "We can fix it, but we don’t have to do it. Look around you. Find some guys who are passionate, who are close to the issue, who are men of good character and full of the Holy Spirit, and who have wisdom...have wisdom." Then we can fix this together. So they released the church.
Verse 5, "This idea pleased the whole group, and they chose the following: Stephen (a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit), Philip..." You’re going to hear about Stephen and Philip in other roles as we go on through Acts. Then they named five other guys that I cannot, for the life of me, pronounce their names, but they’re good guys...great guys. They’re full of good character, full of the Holy Spirit, and full of wisdom.
How many of you know you need all three of those...all three of those? Because how many of you know people who are full of character and full of the Holy Spirit, and they’re just weird? Okay, anybody know anybody like this? You have to have wisdom, too. You have to have all of that...all of it together. They’re men who are ready.
Verse 6, "These seven were presented to the apostles, who prayed for them as they laid their hands on them." It’s kind of like conveying, "You’re going to do this part. We have this mission together. Our role isn’t more important than your role. All the roles are important, but we don’t need to be doing all the roles individually. This is what your gift is. This is what you’re called to. We’re going to lay hands on you and we’re going to do this all together."
"God’s message was preached in ever-widening circles. The number of believers greatly increased in Jerusalem, and many of the Jewish priests were converted, too." That’s interesting. They solved the problem in the right way, and as a result, it didn’t stop the gospel. It didn’t distract them. They didn’t continue to be disorganized. They were more organized. They were able to preach the gospel, and it says they continued to grow and they even reached some hard cases...the Jewish priests.
Okay, so that’s the story. Now, I want to make application to us. As I was reading that, I thought, What are the principles? Some of us have challenges right now. We have challenges in our ministry. There are challenges in the church. There are challenges on teams we’re a part of. There are challenges. How do we make the right choice, not the wrong choice...the choice that not makes the problem worse, but makes the problem solved? What do you do?
Let me give you four leadership principles. Then I’ll ask you to apply it to your life. Growing through a crisis...
1. See every crisis as an opportunity to get better. Verse 1, "There were rumblings of discontent." What do you do when you hear rumblings of discontent? How many of you really enjoy that? Not doing the rumbling, but when somebody is rumbling against you? I mean, you say, "I live for those days that people rumble and complain." Anybody here? Ushers...would you take them away? We don’t like that, do we? Because it threatens peace; it threatens unity. What do you do when something is not working or maybe people are complaining, customers are leaving, whatever it happens to be?
There are different ways people react. Some people do nothing. They just ignore it and hope it will go away, or sometimes they’re frozen by fear. "This is the end!" ...worst-case scenario and they do nothing. Other people shoot the messenger. Do you know anybody like that? You don’t want to bring bad news to the boss because the boss will shoot you. You know there is a culture and a climate that says, "The beatings will continue until the morale increases." You know, that type of thing. Some people are like that. Some people rush to a knee-jerk reaction. They make things worse. Other people quit. "I didn’t sign up for this. This is too stressful for me." Problem comes...they quit.
The apostles didn’t do any of those. In fact, there was a sense that the problem of the widows was to some extent a grace of God...a gift of God because it highlighted the need for greater organization for the church. If the church was going to grow, and was going to accomplish the mission it needed, it was going to have to go to a whole other level in organization. The problem with the widows just highlighted that, so it’s like the disciples are saying, "This is a legitimate issue. Let’s use this to make our care for widows better."
When you’re faced with a problem, usually it’s an opportunity to grow and to get better. I met with a businessman who is a friend of mine recently, a few months ago. We were having lunch and were going to talk about something else. So I just asked him, "How is business?" I could tell by the look on his face I had asked the wrong question. This is not going to help lunch or dinner or whatever it happened to be at all. I said, "I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about that." He said, "No, no. We should." He said, "Business is terrible. It’s just falling off the table right now."
I said, "Well is it the economy?" He said, "Well, it’s more than that. It’s more than that. It’s just like morale is bad. Our very best person quit. I don’t know what I’m going to do." So we talked about it for a few minutes. I kind of felt like Peter and John when they were going out from the temple and a guy said, "Can I have some silver and gold." They said, "Well, we don’t have any money, but what we have we’ll give you." I was like, "I don’t have business advice, but what I have I’ll give you. Let’s just pray." So we prayed about it.
We met a few weeks later, and I said, "How is that problem?" He said, "Do you know what? It’s the best thing that ever happened to us. If we had continued like we were, I think we would be closed by now. It forced me to take a look at how we were operating. We had people in the wrong place, and I brought in a manager who knows how to manage who is not just like me." He was a mess-maker too...visionary. He said, "My top performer came back. This person said, ’I like the people here, I just couldn’t live with the chaos.’" He said, "Things are good."
So whether it’s in the church or our families or business or wherever it happens to be, every crisis is an opportunity to get better. The quicker you see it that way, the sooner you can move ahead toward a solution.
Second lesson I learned in here, a way to react during a crisis is...
2. Spend your time doing what you’re good at and you’re called to. They said, "We should spend our time preaching and teaching, not administering a food program."
I met a pastor recently for lunch. I do that quite a bit. I love it. Guys will call and say, "Can I have a few minutes?" I’ll say, "If you buy my lunch, you can have an hour." Because that’s my spiritual gift...eating. If you have the gift of paying for lunch or cooking, we can get along. We can do our thing. So I sat down and he was sharing. I said, "What’s your vision?" He was sharing his vision. I got excited. I don’t get excited very much these days about things I hear. I got totally excited. I thought, This is awesome! I thought, I should have thought of this. This is incredible.
Then I began to think, I should be doing this. I should...I should... I wasn’t taking somebody else’s should. I was laying my own should on myself. It was terrible. I’m feeling about this big, and then I began to think, No, no. God created this guy. God created me. God created him with personality, gifts, talents, passions that he has, and he’s just leaning into them. He’s just leaning into who God created him to be. If I lean into who God created him to be, it won’t work for me because God doesn’t want me to be like him, God wants me to be like me. In fact, God wants me to be the best me that I can be by being not in my effort, but by being filled with His Holy Spirit. Just by following Him and listening to Him, and responding to Him.
Who has God created you to be? Take some time figuring that out. What are you good at? What brings a sense of fulfillment? What do other people say that God seems to just really use you when you do that? When what you do fits who you are, everyone wins. So when a crisis comes, don’t just default into...I have to do everything. I have to be the one who fixes it. Don’t let others guilt you into taking on a role that’s not the best solution. If you spread yourself too thin, you’ll end up not getting anything done. The solution may end up being worse than the problem. Okay?
Third thing that I learned is this...
3. Choose the right people to tackle the problem. That’s so big in this passage. He says, "Select seven men." It’s a patriarchal society. You know, it’s men, men, men. Today we would say, "Select seven men and women," because God uses us all. He says, "Select seven men who are of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit, and full of wisdom."
Here is a lesson I’m learning. What is a burden to me is probably a blessing to someone else. What is a burden to me... When I feel like I’m just overloaded, I can’t take on one more thing, and here is another responsibility...well, you know what, what is a burden to me may very well be a blessing to someone else. See, what would have overburdened the apostles...administering a food program, which is necessary, and it’s good, but we can’t do it. We don’t have the gifts and we don’t have the time. What would have been a burden to them...
Listen, there are seven guys, new guys, waiting in the wings that "If you’ll just let me do it, I could feel like I’m a part of the action. Hey, by the way, administering stuff...I get charged doing that. Let me be a part of it. Let me do it." There is probably somebody in your arena of influence right now who would be honored to tackle the problem that is stressing you out. In fact, moms, it may be that the kids could do more than what you’re giving them credit for. Or at work, there are probably people who work for you who could do more than what you’re giving them credit for. It would be a blessing. They would say, "I want to be a part. I can be a part. It would give me a chance to contribute." Choose the right people.
Just a couple of thoughts about who the right people are. First thought is the right people were already in the house. In this situation, the right people were in the house. The apostles had not been looking for them, or maybe just because the situation wasn’t that hot, or that passionate before this point nobody ever thought about it, but right there in the house...they didn’t have to look very far. There are men and women who could deal with this...people with a passion.
They share the vision of the house. Often times we look outside of the house. Well, there is nobody who could do this. I had the privilege recently of meeting with Brian Houston who is the pastor of Hillsong Church. Some of you have heard of Hillsong...great church in Australia. Their worship music you probably have heard. We sing a lot of their stuff here.
I asked Brian, "Brian, how did you find these people, and how do you motivate them and all this kind of stuff?" Brian said, "Do you know what? You wouldn’t have recognized them if you saw them when we found them. In fact, you wouldn’t have wanted them because they weren’t who they are now. They were in our house. They shared our vision. We were able to look at them through God’s eyes and see how God saw them. That is something you have to develop...seeing people, not for who they are, but who they can be through Christ in the house."
Second thing I know is they were probably somewhat passionate about the problem because the seven names...remember the ones I couldn’t pronounce (the last five)? Well you throw Stephen and Phillip in with that, those are all Greek names. So all these guys are Greek guys, probably, who are kind of close and passionate to the situation.
The third thing I’ve thought about the right people is they weren’t necessarily experts in the problem that need solved. It’s not like the disciples said, "We have to administrate a food program for widows. Send us your resumes. Those of you who have experience in administrating food programs for widows, you’ll be at the top of the list." There is wisdom in doing that, but that’s not what they did.
Here is what they did. They said, "Give us people who are full of character," because character trumps talent every time. Well-respected...character trumps talent. How many times have you made a wrong decision because you went after talent rather than character? If you’re in the hiring practice you’ve done that. Well, character trumps talent because talent fades, but character lasts. Being Spirit-filled trumps experience. They said, "Have them be full of the Holy Spirit." Experience is helpful unless experience keeps you from trying something. People who are full of the Holy Spirit believe nothing is impossible. Someone filled with the Holy Spirit has access to supernatural power every day of their life. Someone filled with the Holy Spirit gets along with people.
You say, "Well, I know people who are filled with the Holy Spirit, and they don’t get along with people." They weren’t filled with the Holy Spirit because if you’re filled with the Holy Spirit, here is the evidence. There is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Okay? So when somebody is full of the Holy Spirit, all the fruits of the Holy Spirit are in operation. Now you might be full one day and kind of not full the next day. You leak. Remember that? You need to get before God and say every day, "Help me to be filled with the Holy Spirit."
Wisdom trumps resume. What you learn and have done is not necessarily as important as the wisdom to respond properly to changing circumstances. All three are important. You can’t just have two.
So when faced with a problem or crisis, see it as an opportunity to get better. Spend your energy on what you do best. Enlist the right people to help you.
Here is the fourth thing the disciples did...
4. Trust the team to come up with a solution. Trust the team. Look at what they said, "We will put them in charge." We will put them in charge. Let’s say that together, "We will put them in charge." What does that convey? Trust...trust. What do you do when you don’t trust somebody? You micromanage them. Right? You tell them exactly how you want it done. You check on them every five minutes. What does that do? That devalues them.
Let me tell you two things it would have done in the church. If they would have micromanaged what was going on rather than trusting the people they had and let them do it, it would have taken the apostles away from what was important for them, and ultimately what was important for the church because they would have then, instead, been doing that. They would have been micromanaging this over here.
The second thing it would have done...it would have discouraged the people...the seven guys who stepped up. They would not have been able to come up with a solution because sometimes we feel like when we’re delegating something, whether that’s as a parent, or whether that’s as a ministry leader or a work person or whatever it happen to be, we feel like, Hey we know the right way. Ours is the only way. Guess what? There are smart people out there who might have a better solution to whatever the problem is. They said, "We will let you do... We will put them in charge." It comes down to trust. Either you trust them or you don’t. If you trust the people you have, or get people you can trust. But let them go. Let them do it.
The results...verse 7, "God’s message was preached in ever-widening circles. The number of believers greatly increased in Jerusalem, and many of the Jewish priests were converted, too."
So that’s the message. You might be facing a challenge right now or a problem right now, maybe in ministry, like I said, family, team, personally, whatever it is. Let’s learn from God’s Word. See every challenge as an opportunity to grow. Be willing to be clear about who God has called you to be. Pick the right people and then release them to solve the problem.
Let’s pray: Father, I thank You today for Your Word. I thank You for the practicality of just tracking with You and learning with You and seeing how all through Scripture the people are normal. They’re real. They’re just like us...same problems, same issues.
Lord, most of all, I thank You for caring enough about us to love us to send Jesus Christ to die for us with all of our issues, and then not just to leave us there, but to empower us by the Holy Spirit. God, I pray in the next few moments we would be more Spirit-empowered, we would be honest about our issues and where we are, and Lord that You would transform us by the work of the Spirit into the people You desire for us to be. In Your name we pray, Amen.
