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.
As a side note, when it talks about waiting on tables, it is easy to look at this and the image that comes to mind is Jon Gosselin working at a restaurant in Pennsylvania. It could be the idea of giving food to people but it could also be the idea of manning some sort of a booth or a table where the widows would come up and get their daily distribution of food, money, clothing and that sort of thing. This waiting on tables is not how we think waiting on tables.
But getting back to this idea of structure, we have the first evidence of some form of basic structure that is happening in the church. As the church went on down for the next 2,000 years, we get these huge denominational structures. Obviously, Catholicism has the huge structure. Some of the larger Protestant denominations have structure. Some people have different views about whether or not you can have too much structure or too little structure. I know based on the background of a lot of you, some of you come from churches that have a lot of structure. The Catholic faith or maybe the Presbyterians or the Methodists, they have a lot of structure. When you come into a church you expect to find structure. There are others that come from more of a congregational structure where the structure is really kind of loose. Your attitude is we don’t need structure. Let’s just get together and hang out and be kind to each other and all that kind of stuff and don’t worry about structure. We here at Bellevue Christian Church kind of take a middle-of-the-road approach. Our movement has always been an advocate for structure but not too much structure. Enough structure that we would need to support the growth of a church. The idea is that you don’t build structure to encourage growth. You have growth and you follow with structure. You are not getting ahead of yourself and building this huge structure that somehow you have to maintain. Again, too much structure can be bad because it bogs things down. Too little structure can be bad because you have chaos and nobody knows who is in charge and who is responsible. We are actually as a church, because we are a growing church, right now in the midst of really evaluating the church structure, including the role of deacons. We are right in the middle of it and actually rewriting our entire bylaws and by the end of the year we are hoping to have a good solid draft to the members of the church so you can look at that structure, critique it and give us your feedback on whether you think it is a good structure or not. I don’t want to get too bogged down in that, but again the idea is that structure is part of a church.
Along with structure, you often have responsibilities, which means you have position descriptions. This is again very early in the church so there are really only two requirements for the position of deacon. The two requirements are basically they are to be known to be full of the spirit and wisdom. They are not saying since it involves food maybe somebody with some hospitality food service background would be good to be in a position of deacon. Or since it is probably going to involve money at some point maybe we need to have somebody who has a finance background because they could handle the money. That is not the priority. The priority is that they are known to be full of the spirit and wisdom. They said to be known to be full of the spirit and wisdom. How do you know if someone is full of the spirit? I think back then it was quite evident if somebody was full of the spirit. There are different views about what it means to be full of the spirit. As Christian church people, we generally take the stance that at the conversion you receive the spirit of God inside of you. There are other denominations that would say you receive a second filling of the spirit that would manifest itself in what they call the sign gifts. Things like speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues, healings, words of knowledge, and all that kind of stuff. Some would say that is the filling of the spirit that you are looking for and really that might be evidence of what Stephen had going on here because as we will see later he was doing some amazing things. I don’t want to get off track on that. My point is that what they are saying is you need to be full of the spirit. At a minimum it means, like I talked about last week with Enoch, you have to close walk with God. It means that you are not just coming to church on Sunday, leaving your Bible on the shelf and then coming back next week and picking up from the same spot. It means you have this ongoing, regular walk with God. You are constantly talking to God. You are constantly praying to God. You are experiencing the worship of God, not just on Sunday morning but all through your week. That is what I mean. As you do that, what happens is you have this ongoing connection with God, so you receive a constant filling of the spirit. You can’t do it outside of that continuing walk with God.
Getting back to this, they were required to be filled with the spirit, but they were also required to have wisdom. Wisdom I say is just simply knowledge that is applied. A skillset of knowledge and skills and life experience that you can apply to a very unique situation or possibly complex situation as it sometimes is in the church and come up with a wise answer to it. You just learn to give wise suggestions and wise feedback. We often associate wisdom with age, which in many cases is the case, but a lot of times it is not. I know some of us know older people that really just aren’t wise. They never learned the lessons they should have been learning so they are not living a life of wisdom. On the other hand, we know young people in their 20s or so that can be very wise for their age. We are not talking about an issue of age here. We are talking about whether or not somebody can take the knowledge that they, the life experience, and be able to apply that in complex situations. Regrouping where we are at is the idea that you have this situation. There were all these widows that were diverse, the Greek speaking, the Hebrew speaking. They didn’t get along. They thought there was favoritism and the apostles came in and said you guys figure it out and that is what they did. Basically, they began to assign people to the position of deacon. It goes on to say “The proposal pleased the whole group. They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit; also Philip, Procorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolas from Antioch, a convert to Judaism. They presented these men to the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them.” What you have here is a picture of the first ordination service or what some people call the installation of deacons where they would come up forward and the existing elders or pastors would lay hands on those deacons. What it means basically is you are being set aside for a special purpose. We will be doing that come January following the congregational meeting. That is what you have going on here. What I want to point out is that you are also finding out right that Stephen really is an extraordinary person. Not only is he a man full of the spirit and full of wisdom, but it goes on to say that he is full of faith. Last week we talked about faith. Remember Hebrews 11 talked about faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of the things you don’t see. Sure and certain. So much so that those heavenly invisible realities out there, you believe them so much, they become a concrete reality within your life. That is the degree of faith we are talking about. When he is full of faith, I guarantee Stephen believed everything that he preached; everything that he spoke on. This was a good thing the assignment of the deacons. It goes on and talks about the assignment and says this was a very good thing. We read farther it says “The word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.” We see that with just the simple act of delegation the word was able to spread. Things didn’t get bogged down. We see a bunch of priests becoming obedient to the faith means that Jewish priests were being converted. At that time, there was estimated to be 8,000 priests within the city of Jerusalem. This began to get the attention of all sorts of people.
Also at this time, we get the sense that Stephen, although he had been waiting tables for a while, he is suddenly getting released to do some other things. In other words, God must have been satisfied in his willingness to wait tables, but now he had bigger plans for him. Obviously, Stephen was a gifted man. It goes on to say “Now Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power, did great wonders and miraculous signs among the people.” I will stop right there. We see a few more attributes of Stephen that weren’t included in the first few lines. We not only see he is a man of faith. We not only see he is a man of the Holy Spirit. Now we see he is a man full of grace and power. Grace is a word throughout the Bible that speaks of God’s favor upon you. We talked about Enoch pleased God. Stephen pleased God so God’s favor was upon Stephen. They we talk about God’s power. God’s power we talked about a couple weeks ago in the Foundations Class is sometimes referred to as God’s omnipotence; all powerful. So powerful he is able to raise Jesus from the grave. This is the kind of power that now is inside of Stephen; a phenomenal power. We begin to get further clues that his man Stephen is an extraordinary person. We get the picture of Stephen standing there, again a man that is full of the spirit, a man that is full of faith, a man that is wise, full of grace, and full of power, and so what happens when he is unleashed great wonders and miraculous signs begin to happen. Wonders generally refer to miracles. Signs are miracles that point to something. What he was doing was pointing the people away from their old religious traditions that had become corrupt and pointed them new to the resurrected Christ and the message and the kingdom that he was bringing in.
As it goes on to say, some people didn’t like that so opposition came in. Opposition from whom? “From members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called)—Jews of Cyrene and Alexandria as well as the provinces of Cilicia and Asia.” So you had all these congregations made up of all these different people that were suddenly coming against Stephen. Getting together and coming against him. As a side note, the Synagogue of the Freedmen was believed to be a Jewish church made up of former slaves. People that were slaves in Rome that when they got out they became converts to Judaism and then they basically came into the Jewish Synagogue. So that is what you have going on here. You have all these people all of a sudden coming against Stephen. At first, they didn’t come at him too hard. As it goes on to say, they simply just began to argue with Stephen. “But they could not stand up against the wisdom of the Spirit by whom he spoke.” In other words, they didn’t realize it but they were trying to take a stand not against this man Stephen. They were trying to take a stand against the Holy Spirit and it wasn’t going to happen. So what did they do? When somebody knows they are losing oftentimes what they do is resort to some sort of deceitful methods. We don’t have it on the screen but it goes on to say that the Jews secretly hired people to go around and begin to basically lie and say that this man Stephen was out there spreading blasphemous thoughts about God and about Moses. Blasphemous being evil thoughts about God and their greatest prophet Moses. Immediately what they began to do was they seized him and brought him into the Sanhedrin which is basically the Jewish court that can be made up of as much as 70 people; the priest, the elders, some regular people. You have all these people in this courtroom setting. So he is pulled into this courtroom setting and what happens are more lies and more accusations come against him. It goes on to say “They produced false witnesses, who testified, ‘This fellow never stops speaking against this holy place and against the law. For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs of Moses.’” I can’t go back and really explain the meaning behind all of what they are saying, but if you know your Old Testament, you know that basically the Old Testament gets its start when Moses is going up on Mount Sinai and God hands the commands to Moses. The commands that would ultimately become the customs and the rituals for the Jewish people including a blueprint for the temple they would build; a temple which they believed contained God. The temple was where God was. You have this guy Stephen coming in and basically messing with their religion. He is messing with their customs. They think he is spreading all these lies. But Stephen, just like Jesus, was not trying to overthrow all 3,000 years of Jewish history. He was just saying something is starting to change. Before you had the law that was given by Moses which resulted in a long list of dos and don’ts that you were not able to keep. Now that law is being replaced by grace that comes through Jesus Christ. You have the temple that was built where God would reside. Now he is saying the good news is God doesn’t reside in a temple built by man. God resides in a temple of the heart. That is all he was saying. He is not discounting everything that came before, but he is saying things are about to change, so you better pay attention.
By that time, you have this courtroom setting where people are just enraged about the whole situation. They are really upset about it. On one side you have the Sanhedrin and on the other side you have poor Stephen. From a spiritual angle you have much more going on. You have the law versus grace. You have a battle going on there and it is a spiritual battle that is just constantly heating up and enraging everybody except Stephen in the room. In the midst of this, the Sanhedrin, everyone in that room that was against Stephen, began to look at Stephen. “All who were sitting in the Sanhedrin looked intently at Stephen, and they saw that his face was like the face of an angel.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t hear many people refer to someone with the face of an angel other than an occasional reference to a child. The face of an angel. What does that look like? We have all these images. Some people say he was glowing. But we don’t know what was going on there or what it looked like. At a minimum, we know that God was making his presence known. What was going on inside of Stephen was now coming out. The fullness of the grace, the fullness of God that was going on inside of him, he was so full that it was beginning to manifest itself in his outward appearance. That is how powerful it was what was going on there. Right in the middle of that they are all looking at him and somebody must have all of a sudden come to and the accusers are saying is that true?
At that point, we see Stephen just stand up and give the speech of a lifetime. In fact the only speech he ever gave, but it is still the longest recorded speech or sermon, or whatever you want to call it, in the entire Bible. He goes on in chapter 7 for 52 verses of basically a speech. I was going to read through that. I really struggled with that but when I read through it, it was ten minutes to read through. But it was a phenomenal speech. To summarize it, basically what Stephen did is he proceeded to give the Jewish people a history lesson. Starting way back with Abraham and taking it all the way through the Red Sea and all the way through the desert before they got into Jordan. He basically gave them a long history lesson. As a side note, if you don’t like the Old Testament because you think it is hard to read, read the speech of Stephen and not only read it, if you have an NIV Bible you probably have 100 cross references back to those verses in the Old Testament that supports every word that Stephen is saying. If you want to get a handle on the Old Testament just read through that because that is a snapshot. He summarized almost the entire history of Israel in those 52 verses. If we were to read through it, we would see throughout that speech he weaves through some not so subtle insults. Basically, he was implying that even though they had the law that they had rejected the law. Not only did they reject the law by not keeping the commandments and that sort of thing by going after idols, they went after the prophets that came and basically told them you better straighten up your act or you are going to feel God’s wrath. That is what is going on.
In his last couple verses, he basically unleashes this string of accusations to these Jews. He goes on to say “You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him.” He is insulting them big time because usually when you see the Jews being referred to as stiff-neck people that is coming from God back in the Old Testament. Stiff-neck is not a compliment. It basically means you are obstinate. You are resistant to change. You are stubborn. Then he goes on to say with uncircumcised hearts and ears. I don’t have time to get into the whole uncircumcised/circumcised discussion but basically he is saying you prided yourself as people who practiced circumcision as a sign of the covenant relationship between man and God but you did it on a physical level but I was looking at something on a heart level. You failed to circumcise your heart. You failed to demonstrate your true commitment to me through your hearts. Not only that, he goes on to say you killed all of those prophets that came and tried to let you know that things weren’t going right. Not only did you kill the prophets, you killed the prophets that predicted Jesus was going to come, including John the Baptist, one of the greatest prophets. Then you crucified the greatest prophet of all; the Righteous One, the Messiah. He was just laying into them. He was just letting them have it all at once. As we know, this enraged the Jews. So much so that it goes on to say “When they heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, saying, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’”
Again the image is an embattled courtroom scene. The idea of gnashing the teeth is a phrase that means rage. It is like letting go of bulldogs on somebody. It is rage to this person. In the midst of this Stephen says oh look I see the heavens open and I see Jesus up there standing up there. He is oblivious to all this because his mind has all of a sudden gone up to the heavenly things. This again is evidence that he is an extraordinary person. Not just because he saw the heavens open up but because he saw Jesus standing up. Now if you know your Bible, there is nowhere else that talks about Jesus standing up in heaven. We know in Mark where it goes on to say Jesus was talking to the disciples and “After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God.” So why is Jesus standing? That is the million dollar question. But the best answer I have heard and the one I seem to like is the idea that he was standing up to give honor to Stephen. He was recognizing Stephen as a man of honor. We have all been to weddings and the bride is getting ready to come down the aisle and we stand up as a gesture of honor. You are someplace important and a dignitary comes into the room; you stand up. Jesus was paying an honor to Stephen. He was standing up. He opened the heavens up and he stood up and Stephen’s eyes were all up there watching it. This drove them nuts. This drove them completely over the edge. It says “They 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.” Stoning was a form of execution. It was an approved form of execution. In many countries today it is still an approved form of execution. What it often involved at least in the Jewish tradition was they would take the accused outside the city because they didn’t want it to happen within Jerusalem boundaries because it would violate all sorts of cleansing things. So they would take the person outside the city and up on a hill and push them over, ideally so he would fall on his back. If the fall didn’t kill him because he would fall on rocks, they would take the largest boulder they could find and drop it on him, possibly hitting his chest and crushing his heart. If that didn’t kill him, then they would all start throwing stones at him until he was dead. That is what stoning was about. That is what Stephen went through. In the midst of that stoning, we find a very little interesting tidbit of information. It says “Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul.” Saul is also known as Paul. Paul is probably the most quoted person in the New Testament next to Jesus; the most revered person next to Jesus, yet the first introduction of Saul or Paul is actually holding the cloaks of the witnesses that were participating in the execution of Stephen. If we had time, we would look at verse 8:1 and he was standing there giving approval to the situation. The first introduction of Saul is standing at the execution of someone who Jesus saw fit to stand up for. Amazing. The story basically ends there except it goes on to say “While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ Then he fell on his knees and cried out, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he fell asleep.” Again, this is one more indication that Stephen is an extraordinary guy because he is being stoned by these men and women even and he doesn’t just say Jesus save me or God save me. He says receive my spirit. Get ready. I am coming home is what he is saying. Not only that he says and forgive these people. They don’t know what they are doing. They really don’t. Will you just forgive them. If you know your Bible and know the gospels, you know this may sound familiar because it is basically almost the exact picture of what Christ went through. Christ was a miracle worker. Christ had a message. He brought the message in. The message was not received well because he was talking about destroying the customs of Moses. He was talking about destroying the law and the temple, or at least in their minds. They dragged him before the court. They produced false witnesses. They dragged him outside of the city not to be stoned but to be executed on the cross. Right before he died, he looked up and said Lord receive my spirit and please forgive the ones who participated in this because they do not know what they have done. Stephen is a picture of Jesus. He is a picture of Jesus. He is the first martyr of the book. He is an extraordinary person. I hope you can see that.
In close, we think about what are some lessons we can take from this. There are probably a number of lessons. The first being that organization in a church is okay. Those are some practical things we can gain from it or just get some understanding of what a deacon is. But really there are some more spiritual things here. The first and foremost is that we are all called to be witnesses. Martyr is just really another term for witness. Actually it comes from the same root. A witness does what? A witness provides mounds of evidence for something. Just as Stephen was providing mounds of evidence for his faith, we are to be witnesses. We are supposed to provide evidence for our faith. If you are afraid of being too vocal out there or whatever or afraid you have to someday be a martyr, I doubt if anybody will have to be, then simply let your witness be from your life. In other words, have a behavior that matches your belief. I said before the most frustrating thing is seeing Christians that I know from the church out there acting like fools. They are not even acting like Christians. They are an embarrassment. They leave here and they go out wherever whether it is on Facebook or on the street or whatever and you say did they get any of this stuff? If you are not going to proudly wear the name Christian and display it in a witnessing way, take it off. Remove it. Don’t even come to church to be honest. Because we don’t need more hypocrites walking around. You are witnessed by your behavior based on the belief based on your faith. That is the first thing. Be a witness.
The second thing is be filled with the spirit. We are told in Ephesians to be filled with the spirit. We are all about well I received the spirit when I was baptized or converted but we don’t talk much about the filling of the spirit. I think there are a certain amount of us that are afraid of what it means the filling of the spirit because we are afraid if we get too filled with the spirit we don’t know what is going to happen. We have no idea. God may actually give us a gift whether it is healing or prayer or speaking in tongues or whatever it is, so we avoid that part of it. It is clear that we are told to be filled with the spirit. It means seeking an ongoing filling of the spirit. Not a one-time thing but a daily thing. Even if it doesn’t mean those sign type of gifts, at the minimum it means that you are being spiritually formed by the spirit of God. There is no way that you can be filled with the spirit without spending time with God; without cracking your Bible open; without getting in prayer; without engaging in ongoing conversational fellowship and worship with God. You have to do that to be filled with the spirit.
Thirdly, I think all of us need to be willing to wait tables at times. Stephen didn’t start out as an extraordinary person. He started out simply as someone who said there is a need. I can do it. I am available, so I will wait tables. We don’t know how much he knew about himself at that time and how gifted he was. The problem we have in the church is oftentimes we have people come into the church and they have all these gifts that they feel they have to impart them on the church and they don’t want to do the menial tasks. They don’t want to serve. They don’t want to greet at the front door. They don’t want to take communion to widows or whatever because in their mind it is a menial task. It is not for one. But they feel that you are not recognizing my giftedness. You don’t understand I am a gifted teacher. I am a gifted preacher. I am a gifted musician. We say why don’t you be faithful with a little and then maybe we will give you more. What happens is some people leave because they want their gifts to be recognized. Stephen on the other hand didn’t want to do that. He was willing to wait tables. If we want our gifts to be recognized, start by waiting tables and allow God to tell you when it is time to raise up and begin to utilize your giftedness in a real way. That is the story of Stephen. A man that was willing to wait tables. A man that was full of the spirit. Full of wisdom. Full of power. Full of faith. All these things. And a man who ultimately was a witness for Christ. A man who looked like Christ. He was an extraordinary person. I don’t want you to be thinking that these extraordinary people like Stephen and Rahab and Enoch are somehow superstars and you can never be like that. As I say over and over, these were just ordinary people. Ordinary people who God chose to use in extraordinary ways as long as they opened themselves up to the spirit of God and were willing to submit themselves to his commands, his calling, and allowing him to begin to manifest his spirit through them so they may begin to use their gifts in amazing ways; inside the church and outside the church. Let us pray.
