for 25 plus years probably so I am ashamed that I just went blank that's what happens sometimes and Acts chapter 8 I'm not going to get as far as I had originally planned or hoped. So I'm only gonna read verses one through eight, and then I'll reference a few verses later on farther down. But let's just, let's start with these verses one through eight. Hear now God's holy and inspired word. And Saul approved of his execution. And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church and entering house after house. He dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ. And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip. When they heard him and saw the signs that he did, for unclean spirits crying out with a loud voice came out of many who had them, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. So there was much joy in that city. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the Word of our God stands forever. Our passage today is about several radical messes. I see three, what I'm calling radical messes here. And we're not gonna get to the third one today. That's gonna be Simon the magician. We'll get to him next week. He's his own mess. But we're gonna see ultimately three radical messes all of them falling under the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ. We see the reign of King Jesus announced in Philip's message. We already saw that Philip is, in verse five, proclaiming to them the Christ. If you go down to verse 12, we didn't read this far, but if you go down to verse 12, it says, but when they believed Philip, as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized. So Philip is preaching that God's kingdom, he's preaching about the kingdom, God's kingdom has a king and that king is Jesus, that's his name. And you'll remember at the beginning of Acts, we saw Jesus ascend to his throne where he reigns over absolutely everything right now. He even reigns over our own radical messes. And so we see three radical messes falling under the reign of Jesus in this passage. I'll get to just two of them this morning. The first mess is found in the extraordinary persecution of the church, starting in verses one through four. The second mess is in verses five through eight, and that is the Samaritans. They're a mess of their own. We'll look at them in just a moment. And then the third mess is that of Simon the magician, and we'll look at him next week. As I've been pondering our passage this week, I've tried to find a better word for mess than to kind of capture what is happening. It doesn't seem too eloquent to me and I wish there was a better word. I've just not come up with a better word. We're going to see things here that are just a mess and I'm calling them radical messes. I don't really like the word mess But it's a word that I can at least viscerally relate to, and that's why I'm settling on it. Every single one of us here knows what a radical mess life can be. We know the messy pain we bring on through our own sin. We know the messy darkness. of our own ignorance. We know the messy despair when it seems like everything is spinning wildly out of control. We know radical messes. We live through them every day. Some of you remember way back in, I think it was 1989, 1990, Bo Jackson had these commercials with Nike, and they were all about Bo knows baseball, Bo knows football, because he played multiple sports. And then they expanded them. Bo knows basketball. I think they had even Bo knows surfing, Bo knows horse racing. Bo knows everything. They went on and on. Good for Bo. He knows all this stuff. Here's what I know. I know messes. And I think that's what you know as well. And what we're shown here in these messes in our passage in Acts 8 is something, we know messes, but we're shown something else that we don't really know as well as we should. And that is what happens when our radical messes fall under the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ. The first mess, verses one through four, there'll be some overlap here, but primarily verses one through four, it's the extraordinary persecution of the church. This is a mess that describes something coming upon us from beyond our control. It's something that just happens to us. It's not our own doing. It's happened and we can't do anything about it. It's a mess that exposes our frailty. And here specifically, the mess that the church in is by means of a very deliberate attack upon them against Christians, against God's people. We've just seen the stoning of Stephen in chapter 7, and Stephen's murder sparks this wave, it's like a spark that ignites a fire of hatred against the spreading number of Christians in Jerusalem. And so there is this fervent and tangible hatred against Christians. Verse 1 calls it a a great persecution. On that day there arose, on that day, a great persecution against the church. And this persecution scatters Christians from their homes in Jerusalem, all across the regions of Judea and Samaria. It's the kind of mess that uproots lives entirely, and really everything is lost if you think about what's happening here. Verse three says Saul is ravaging the church, entering house after house, and he's dragging off men and women and committing them to prison. Remember, thousands of people at this point have turned to Christianity. We've been sort of riding a high point until we got to Stephen, and now things are hard, and I'm using the word mess. There's a mess here. As lives are uprooted, Paul, Saul, not yet Paul, soon to be Paul, but Saul is systematically tearing the church apart. It's tearing Christians from their homes, tearing them from their jobs, from their families, from their lives, everything they've known. And this is the diabolical work of Satan, no question about it. The horror of what's happening is, I think, amplified by the language that Luke chooses to use. Verse three, he speaks of Paul ravaging the church. To ravage is to utterly destroy. The root word here in the Greek means outrage, outrage. So we have a sense of Saul, Satan behind him and forces of very great evil raging and raging against these Christians. Paul will later, when he looks back on this stage of his life after his conversion, he'll later say to Timothy, 1 Timothy 1 verse 13, he'll call himself a former blasphemer, persecutor. And then the ESV says, insolent opponents. So that's how Paul's describing himself. But that insolent opponent is also translated violent aggressor at times. Paul's saying, I was violent against Christians. I did real physical violence against God's people. And both men and women, you notice, are dragged from their homes, which means families are forcibly torn apart. And if we had been there living through this ourselves, it would have been cause for great despair. What we're reading about here is the church being systematically dismantled and lives being dismantled. So it's a radical mess brought on by these external forces bearing down on them that are completely out of their control. There's nothing they can do here about this. Now, we know something of this feeling, don't we? All of us. We've not been forcibly dragged from our homes or faced that level of persecution. But we know the feeling of being caught up in something that threatens us, threatens our families, threatens our lives, threatens our work, threatens our church, threatens our faith. And it's come upon us and it's completely out of our control. We know that feeling. I know that feeling. And you feel lost and untethered. and you don't know how you're gonna make it through. And this is where we need to see what happens when this radical mess falls under the reign of King Jesus. Here's Saul ravaging the church, ripping Christians from their homes. Satan is behind all this. Peter will remind us, Satan prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour, 1 Peter 5. The church is being laid to waste. It's all out of anyone's control except for Saul. Nothing anyone can do. but it is not out of the control of King Jesus. And here we see, Jesus is so incredibly powerful. He's so incredibly wise, and he's so incredibly good, that he overcomes Saul and he overcomes Satan by using their own evil and chaos and ravaging against them. You see what happens, Saul scatters Christians in an attempt to destroy them. Verse one, they're scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, and you can see Saul just kinda, there, I did it. They're scattered all over the place. There's no more church in Jerusalem anymore, and rejoicing and thinking that he's won this victory over Christians. But what's really happening? What's really happening is King Jesus is at work. And King Jesus is overruling this attempt at chaos and destruction so that in this instance, the gospel will be proclaimed far and wide. So verse one, they're scattered. Look what happens in verse four. Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Instead of Christianity being destroyed at the hand of Saul, Christianity multiplies. To put it another way, this radical mess has met the radical reign of King Jesus. We think about what's happening here, and of course there are direct implications for the mission of Christ's church. We can be confident, no matter what the opposition is, Jesus will advance his gospel. He will always overrule and overpower evil whenever it attempts to silence his people from speaking his name. So we need not fear the future of Christ's church. The church, it does not hang in the balance. It does not hang in the balance based on the upheaval that might happen in our nation or around the world. Jesus will continue to build his church. He will always overwhelm and overcome evil that opposes it. And often it will be built up the strongest at the precise moment when Satan seems himself to be the strongest. And that's what's happening here. So there are implications for the mission of the church, broadly speaking, but I don't want you to miss the personal implications as well, because you are individually members of the church also. So there are truths here for us as individuals, personally, When external forces have borne down on you and just knocked you all over the place, sideways, upside down, and you're spinning, and you, just everything is out of control, Jesus will always come to you in that mess. And when he comes, he will bring his reign, power, wisdom and goodness to care for you. And he will overcome evil and he will hold you and he will preserve you. He'll cause you to grow and even flourish just as he does with the church here in Acts. Remember, you're part of the same church. This is us we're reading about here. This isn't some, you know, distant history that has no bearing on who we are. We are part of the body of Christ and Jesus will always care for his body. That's the first mess, the first radical mess, bears down on them, not something they brought upon themselves. The second radical mess that meets the radical reign of Jesus is that of the Samaritans. And here I'm looking at verses five through eight, but we'll extend this down a little bit into some of the discussion about Simon below. Here's what we need to know about the Samaritans. Their mess, it's really of their own doing. It's a mess in many ways of willful ignorance. It's the kind of mess that comes upon a people when they choose to reject that which is true. So the Samaritans, they're north of Jerusalem in Samaria, and they're a problem. As a people, they're a problem. They're bitter enemies of the Jews. Their division is in their hatred towards one another. It's ethnic, it's nationalistic kind of ideas. It's theological primarily. Their hostility goes back into ancient history when the northern tribes of Israel formed their own separate confederacy. And the Samaritans are kind of the remnant of that, even though they're intermingled with the Gentile nations around them, which is another reason the Jewish people hated them so much. But they represent this ancient, painful division within the Jewish people. And then the Samaritans themselves, they've come to reject most of the Old Testament as God's word. They embrace the first five books of the Bible, but then they reject the rest. And that means they also reject Jerusalem as a place of God's temple. And it means they made their own temple in a different place, which was eventually destroyed in their northern territories. And there's this extraordinary hatred between Jews and Samaritans. Remember when Jesus was going to stay in a Samaritan village in Luke 9, the Samaritans wouldn't have him because he was going to Jerusalem. They didn't want anything to do with Jerusalem. And they rejected Jesus as they rejected Jerusalem. And the immediate impulsive response of James and John was to call down fire on the Samaritan village that had rejected them. Jesus, should we call down fire and consume them? Because we'll do that. That's just how we deal with the Samaritans around here. That's the kind of, just that instinctive response is the division there, the hostility. And the hostility is rooted in this willful ignorance, this rejection of the truth that the Samaritans had embraced. Remember, they rejected most of the Old Testament. So, this is their own doing. They've refused God's Word. They've chosen blindness and ignorance. And so the Samaritans in scripture, in the New Testament, in many ways, there are people that are, they're hopelessly lost. It is a radical mess here of their own making. You also remember when Jesus met the Samaritan woman in John 4 at the well, she asked Jesus about worship. Where will true worship take place? You know, on the Samaritan side or on Jerusalem? And remember, they rejected Jerusalem. So this is a pressing question for her. And Jesus tells her in John 4, 22, he tells her, you worship, you're Samaritan, you worship what you do not know. We worship what we know for salvation is from the Jews. Jesus is highlighting the willful ignorance of the Samaritan people and their rejection of God's word. They worship what they do not know. The Samaritans are seen as kind of a hopeless, lost, defective, unfaithful, ignorant, profane people. Next week, when we read about Simon, we'll see these kind of things in his life, his ignorance, his engagement with magic and evil ideas, really. They're a mess. And in this instance, they've chosen the mess for themselves. They're responsible for their own blindness. And into this radical mess, Jesus brings his radical reign. Jesus sends them Philip. They didn't ask for Philip to come. Philip was sent there by the Lord Christ. Philip goes down to the city of Samaria and verse five, he proclaims Christ to them. Remember, one of the things Jesus promised he would do was he would open the eyes of the blind. And these folks, they've chosen blindness, but Jesus, an extraordinary act of grace, goes to them through Philip, and he opens their eyes to the truth. He shows them that he is king. In verse six, it says, the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip. It's the most amazing thing. They had previously chosen not to pay attention to the word of God. They're gonna go their own way. But now, Jesus comes to them through the preaching of Philip and Jesus gets their attention. Verse eight, the result is, as they come to believe, There was much joy in that city. And then go down again to verse 12. They believe Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ. Just highlighting this reality that they believed. Now, here's where we apply this to ourselves. Think about how often we willingly make our own messes. We choose to close our eyes to the truth. and just kind of wander off blindly our own way. We know what God's word says about how we should live, what we should do in this situation, what we should believe. We know God's commandments. We know the wisdom that is found in scripture. And we know our need to grow and learn and change over time. We've not yet arrived and yet over. And over again, we have a pattern of closing our eyes, closing up our ears, and ignoring the truth that we should know. It's a kind of a willful ignorance. And over and over again as we do that, we then make our own radical messes, just like the Samaritans. Every time we reject God's word or God's way, or maybe a little bit like the Samaritans, we just get stubborn. We just get stubborn as the years go by, and we think we've got it all figured out. And they knew which mountain God was gonna be worshiped on, because they chose it for themselves. They just made it up. And well, they thought they had it figured out. And we can get stubborn, which means we're not open to hearing God's word on things we think we already know. We've closed our eyes to it. Maybe it's not so much stubbornness, it's just pride, just plain pride. Maybe this is part of what happened to the Samaritans. They didn't want to admit they were wrong in rejecting God's word. And we get a little proud, and the hardest thing in the world to say is, I was wrong, I was wrong. Maybe in our pride or stubbornness or our willful ignorance, we just make a mess of things. And it's our own mess. You can probably look back on your life and see that having happened to you at different stages. And if only you would have known then or chosen to know then what you know now. And so we have, We have all these messes, broken relationships, we burn bridges easily, hurt people, we say harmful things, we do harmful things, we have this kind of enmity with others, and we're just pretty good at making messes, just like the Samaritans. And into this radical mess of ignorance, willful ignorance, Jesus brings his radical reign of grace. Through Philip, Jesus opens the eyes of the Samaritans to the truth. This leads them to repentance and faith and joy and baptism. Look down at verses 14 through 17. Now I'll read these verses because it describes the eventual spirit coming upon them. It says this in verses 14 through 17. Now, when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit. For he had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they, the apostles, laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. So this is a strange moment. They believe, but then they don't yet receive the Holy Spirit. God has been good to them. He's opened their eyes. He's sorting out the mess that they've made by bringing his salvation upon them. And then there's this strange moment, they believe but they don't yet receive the Holy Spirit. What's happening here? Some people speculate, and this is very common in many churches, that in the normal course of the Christian life, you first believe And then later, at some other moment, then you actually receive the Holy Spirit, or the filling of the Holy Spirit. So you become a Christian, but not a Holy Spirit Christian. And it's kind of a two-level Christianity that some people teach based on this moment here in Acts 8. There are Christians, and then there are real Christians who have the Spirit. Some of you I know have come out of churches that teach this and you felt the weight of that and the harm of that and the damage from it. So we need to be clear, this is not what's happening here. This is not a two level Christianity kind of thing where they believe and then eventually it's the norm, later you'll get the Holy Spirit. All believers receive the full measure of God's Spirit as they become Christians. Jesus does not withhold His Spirit from anyone who belongs to Him. The reason the Samaritans don't immediately receive the Spirit is because they're coming into the Christian faith, they're coming into this truth out of their mess, It's such an extraordinary and historic moment that it takes the apostles, Peter and John, to come down from Jerusalem to authenticate what was happening. And it takes the apostles to confirm and establish this new unity with the Samaritans where there had only once before been hatred and division. the point of their delayed reception of the Holy Spirit is that this is a very, very special moment on all kinds of different levels. As Jesus brings his radical reign of grace upon a people that were otherwise utterly and hopelessly lost, or so it seemed. And isn't this what happens to us Isn't this what God does for us? We make messes, we choose to wallow in the messes of our own making, we're willfully ignorant, we go our own way, we close our eyes to the truth of God's word, and Jesus chases us down with his reign of grace. Next week we'll look at Simon the magician. This morning before we close, I want us to look at the language in verse 16 of the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit works here in their lives. Verse 16 says, well, verse 15, they're getting Peter and John to come down and pray for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit. And then it says, for he, the Holy Spirit, had not yet fallen on any of them. And it's that language of the Holy Spirit falling on them that I want us to pay attention to as I wrap things up here this morning. This word, to fall upon, it's a critical word because it defines what they did not have, what they were lacking. the Holy Spirit hadn't fallen upon them. It's a word that's used 12 times in the New Testament. It's used, for example, in Acts chapter 20, verse 37, when the elders of Ephesus, they're saying goodbye to the apostle Paul, it's a tearful goodbye, and they fall upon Paul and embrace him and weep over him as they say goodbye to him. It's kind of an act of affection, this falling upon him. The word is also used in Acts 20 verse 10, when Paul throws himself upon Eutychus, who had fallen out the window and died. And Paul is aiming to revive him. And he throws himself upon him as an act of really desperate affection to save his life. The same word to fall upon is used by Luke. The prior time that Luke uses it is in Luke chapter 15, verse 20, which is the parable of the prodigal son. When the father runs to his son and he falls on his son, embraces him, kisses him in the warmth of his grace, In these instances, this falling upon, in all of these instances, it expresses an abundance of affection spilling over into the physical action of falling upon someone or embracing someone. And this is the picture of what the Spirit is doing now in this very, very special moment for the Samaritans. It's just like the story of the prodigal son. They had been wallowing in a mess of their own making for a long, long time. And now Jesus comes to them in his reign and in his grace. And through the Holy Spirit, he falls upon them. And he embraces them and loves them and rejoices over them because they've come back home. And this is where we can apply this to ourselves. We make messes. It's just what we do. It's what we know. Bo knows football. Pastor Aaron knows messes. And into our mess, Jesus brings his reign. He's king over our mess. He in fact has stepped right into the mess of our lives through his incarnation. And he's extended his grace through his death and resurrection to pay for our sins. And then while we're still just utterly stunned by the messes of our own making, not knowing what to do, where to turn, He falls upon us with his embrace of extraordinary grace. You might picture that image of the father falling all over his prodigal son, embracing him, kissing him, rejoicing over him, throwing a feast for him. And here we are. Our God has set a feast before us in this table. Why has he done that? He's done it because he knows we are coming here out of the messes of our own making. But we're coming to our King, King Jesus, who falls all over us through his spirit, and embraces us, and he throws this feast of grace for us as he rejoices to call us his own. So that going back to verse eight now, we can find much joy in spite of our messes, as the Samaritans did in spite of theirs, because of this grace in Christ. Let's pray as we come to the feast ourselves where God embraces us as his own. Heavenly Father, we are grateful for your word and the wonder of it all. We certainly see ourselves in these passages and what is more difficult for us to see is your mercy and your grace and your kindness. So you've given us this meal as a testimony, as a visible sign and seal that the promise of your grace poured out upon us in Christ through your Spirit is certain and true for each one of us who comes in faith. And so I pray, Lord, that you bless this meal, that we might rejoice in Christ as we share communion with him and with one another. And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Invite you to stand, and as we come to the table, we're gonna sing together, excuse me, part of Psalm 89. It is to the tune of Ode to Joy, so we know the tune. You'll find the portion we're gonna sing in your bulletin.