“Confidence in the Face of Darkness”
Acts 6:8-7:1; 7:54-60
The Book of Acts is the story of the beginning of the Church.
And As I mentioned last Sunday, in Acts Chapter 2, we see the first portrait of the Christian Church.
And it’s a beautiful scene—idyllic—really.
The brand-new Church devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Everyone was filled with wonder and awe.
The believers were together, breaking bread in their homes, eating together, praising God together and their numbers were growing daily.
You’d think it would have been tempting to just stay as they were—become a club, turning in on themselves, laying low.
But, they were so filled with the Holy Spirit that they couldn’t keep it to themselves.
And so, they ventured out and faced the darkness of an unbelieving world with confidence and consequences.
There were arrests and persecution, but so many new believers…
…so many souls saved…
…so much excitement…
…so much that God was doing through them.
But, of course, with much growth, there came some obstacles within the church they had to overcome.
For instance, it came to pass that some widows were being overlooked when it came to the distribution of food.
And so, they chose seven men who were known to be “full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom” to take on that responsibility.
And Stephen was one of the seven.
Apparently, Stephen was an exceptional guy, and God had blessed Him with great faith and many gifts.
We are told that besides being a food server, Stephen also “performed great wonders and signs among the people.”
And sadly, not everyone was excited about this.
Some members of the Synagogue didn’t like what Stephan was doing and started arguing with him, but we are told that they couldn’t stand up to the great wisdom he spoke.
Apparently, this made them even more angry and they started making up lies about Stephen—and through these lies, they were able to “stir up” the people and the teachers of the law.
And so, these folks, took hold of Stephen and took him before the Sanhedrin.
Now, the Sanhedrin was the high court of the Jews.
They were a very intimating and imposing bunch.
They are the same body of people who sent Jesus to the Romans with orders for Him to be crucified.
Imagine standing in front of this same crew, knowing that they had pronounced the death sentence against the Lord?
I’d be scared out of my wits, how about you?
And so, we are told that the teachers of the law produced “false witnesses, who testified” against Stephen to the Sanhedrin.
And in Chapter 6:15, we are told that these powerful officials were looking “intently at Stephen,” waiting for him to give an answer to these charges.
And, I love this: “they saw that his face was like that of an angel.”
What images does that description conjure up in your mind?
Do you imagine an innocent man?
How about a person who is totally at peace, even with mobs of angry folks hurling insults at him and making up false stories?
How can this be?
Is it the natural response to slander, hatred and evil?
I mean where is the fear in Stephen’s face?
Why isn’t he trying to defend himself against these false allegations?
Was he so confident, so strong, so brave that he felt no need to defend himself or to deny what had angered his enemies in the first place—that he had been performing great wonders and signs in and through the name of Jesus Christ?
When we are attacked, our natural reaction is to attack back.
I mean it’s fight or flight, isn’t it?
When we are falsely accused, we want to clear our name.
When we are hauled before the law on trumped-up charges—we are angry and scared.
But, again, Stephen’s face “was like the face of an angel.”
And then, the high priest asked Stephen, “Are these charges true?”
And what they get is this long sermon from Stephen, beginning with Abraham and moving through the entire history of the Jewish people, the Scriptures pointing to Jesus Christ as the Promised Messiah and concluding with the following words: “And now you have betrayed and murdered him…”
Wow.
Talk about telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Not surprisingly, we are told that those listening “were furious and gnashed their teeth” at Stephen.
Obviously, things had escalated.
They had murder on their minds and in their eyes.
And Stephen had to have known it.
What would you do in this situation?
Run?
Apologize?
Take it all back?
Beg for your life?
Instead, what happens?
Stephen is so filled with the Holy Spirit…
…He is so on fire for God…
…He is so focused on Jesus, rather than the foolishness of this world…
…that he simply looks up to heaven sees the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right had of God that he excitedly forgets all that is happening—and even wants his accusers to be able to experience the same miracle: “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”
Talk about an excited Jesus follower!!!
What does the author of Hebrews instruct us to do?
“[fix] [your] eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.
For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”
That’s what Stephen did.
Stephen was so filled with God he wasn’t worried a bit about what these people were about to do to him.
All that mattered to him was Jesus.
And that is true freedom, is it not?
Wouldn’t you like to have that kind of courage?
Wouldn’t you like to be that free from the cares and worries of the world?
Wouldn’t you like to be that calm in the face of such terrible and violent evil?
You know, I believe it’s possible.
I believe it is possible to be so filled with the Holy Spirit of God; that we can have confidence in the face of any experience of life—even death itself.
As you all know, my mother passed away in January.
She was a wonderful saint, my biggest inspiration in life and the inspiration for many.
My two sisters and I spent the last two weeks of her life with her, and we were there when she took her last breath.
At one point, when she could no longer move on her own due to lack of nutrition and strength and was laying on her back, she laughed and said, “I feel like a beetle.”
The heroic way she faced death was incredibly inspiring to me.
She was fun, happy and witty to the end.
Stephen has always been one of my favorite biblical characters.
Verse 15, where it says “his face was like the face of an angel,” has forever struck a chord with me, and what comes next is nothing less than a miracle.
After Stephen declares: “Look, I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God,” the mob “covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him…
…while they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’”
Stoning another human being is absolute monstrous cruelty.
To hurl rocks at a human being, slowly striping off pieces of their flesh…
…crushing the bones in their legs, arms and face, creating wounds in too many places to number suggests to me a torture whose horror is literally beyond anything I can conceive.
And in the midst of that cruelty and hatred and darkness and satanic evil—to be able to have such love in your heart—to be so above what these people are doing…
…and I don’t mean in a haughty way…
…I mean in a way that one is able to see the situation through the eyes of God—for what it is…
…to see lost, sinful, ignorant, people doing the unthinkable without even knowing what they are really doing…
…and to, in a real sense, have compassion on them, because they don’t know Jesus-and that is why they are doing this—and thus to pray for them, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
To have a godly, caring love for the souls of these persons who are literally killing you, with anger, hate-filled, contorted faces as they lob these painful objects at your body…
…is beyond amazing.
It is the miracle of being fully in the Kingdom of God while still living on this earth.
Stephen was filled to the brim with the Holy Spirit.
There is no other explanation for it.
I want to be like that.
The challenge to forgive is a universal challenge that we all face.
The challenge to love our enemies is one of Jesus’ commands that we find nearly impossible to live out.
But you know what?
Our forgiveness, our ability to love, to pray for the well-being of our enemies is rooted, not in our strength, rather it is rooted in the vision of “the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”
Can we become so transfixed on the glory of God, the love of Christ and His victory over death and the devil on our behalf that we will be able to face anything this world can throw at us?
Can we?
One awesome detail in our Scripture passage for this morning is the presence of a young man named Saul.
Saul was a powerful and persuasive persecutor of the early Christians.
He was an earnest man who wanted to do what was right—and, because he thought the Christians were blaspheming God, he believed that the stoning of Stephen was the right thing to do.
But, I’m not alone in my conviction that this incident had a huge effect on Saul’s future.
I think, that in watching up close and personal the heroic, faith-filled and compassionate way Stephen died that Paul just couldn’t get it out of his head.
How could he?
No one had ever, to his knowledge, prayed for the salvation of those who were brutally murdering them.
Of course, Jesus did, but Paul didn’t know this at the time and he certainly didn’t witness it up close and personal.
And I think this incident so impressed Paul—a man in search of truth—that he started to wonder if there wasn’t something to this Christian movement after-all.
And that crack in the door of Paul’s life—opened just a wee-bit by the effect of Stephen’s witness—was just enough for God’s Spirit to get inside of Paul and start working on Him, bringing Him to God’s self…
…readying him and opening him up to and for his face to face encounter with Jesus that would change the face of our world!!!
Not long after this incident Paul was saved.
He met Jesus Christ on the Road to Damascus—and this persecutor and murderer of Christians became the one—whom God used spread the Christian Church throughout the ancient world.
United Methodist Bishop Jeremiah Park is famous for saying: “God loves you, and there is nothing you can do about it!”
That’s a powerful statement.
For the scattering of the church, which occurred after Stephen’s murder, shows how God uses—even negative situations—for the ultimate good.
Oftentimes, our greatest growth occurs during or in response to our greatest struggles.
I pray that God’s redeeming and relentless love—even for the most vile of sinners—seen in the results of Stephen’s confidence in the face of great darkness will serve as a reminder to us of God’s faithfulness and will cause all of us to open ourselves up more and more to faith in Christ—to the point where we are so filled with the Holy Spirit of God that absolutely nothing on earth or under the earth can stop us in our pursuit of furthering God’s Kingdom.
May it be so!
Amen.
