Let's go ahead and get going here in our sermon. This is our 100th sermon here on the forward progress of the church. And I've got a very pertinent question here for you today. How do we represent God? Ooh, how are churches representing God? Think about this now. We've been working on this sermon series off and on for the past four years now, and we are coming down here to the end. We got another one, maybe two, I'm not totally sure yet, sermons here on this series. But we've seen a great deal We've seen so much about how our 21st century churches Should look like a first century church and how we can go about being a first century church That is growing that is following God that is going for God So as we're coming down here to the wire as we're in the homestretch We need to ask ourselves that question. How do we represent God? Paul's gonna show us something here real quickly. Three points in our sermon here today. How we should be representing God. So let's read the first six verses here today. Acts 28, verses one through six. And when they were escaped, then they knew that the island was called Melita. By the way, that's our modern-day Malta, the little defective football that the boot's kicking. And the barbarous people showed us no little kindness, for they kindled a fire and received us, every one, because of the present rain and because of the cold. And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat and fastened on his hand. And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, they said among themselves, no doubt this man is a murderer, whom though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffered not to live. And he shook off the beast into the fire and felt no harm. Hmm how be it they looked when he should have swollen or fallen down dead suddenly Hmm, but after they had looked a great while and saw no harm come to him Bible says they changed their minds and said that he was a God Hmm How do we represent our God? Let's pray. Father in heaven, I want to thank you, Lord, for all you've done for us. Thank you, God, for loving us, for saving us, especially a wretch like me. I thank you, Father, that you hear our prayers and our prayer requests and that you answer them according to your holy will. And while it's coming to mind here real quickly, I want to ask you, Lord, once again, for little Knox there, for him to be healed to have a good long life ahead of him. And I pray Lord for his family, for Jacob and Ashley as they're going through this and his two sisters. Help them Lord to strengthen them, encourage them, help them Father with all the medical bills that I'm sure are rolling in. We do pray Lord for your blessings upon the Jubilee and brother Thomas, he'll be traveling up here in the next day or so to give him safe passage up here and back down home again. Pray Father for a good turnout with the Jubilee that We'll see souls saved and lives changed, people getting help from you Father. We pray, Lord, that everyone who comes, they will come with open ears, open eyes, and open hearts, especially, to take in all that you've got here for us, that we will actually be able to celebrate Jubilee, the releasing, the victory, the strength that we need, Father. Help us, please. Help me, Lord, please, to present the word here today the way you'd have me to. I pray, Lord, to forgive me my sins and help me, Lord, to follow after your holy will. In the name of Jesus, we do pray. Amen and amen. All right. So, to summarize here, Paul has been bitten by a serpent on the hand, it's latched on to him, and he shook that beast off like, what was that? Nothing. Okay. Continues to go on doing what he's gonna do. natives of the island, the people who live there, they look and say, hey, I know that serpent, that viper there, that's poisonous, that venomous, I'm sorry, that's actually the word, venomous. It has struck him. He's a dead man. Obviously, he deserves to die, that's for sure. He's probably a murderer or something like that. But he didn't fall over dead immediately, so they said among themselves, hey, you know, just give it a couple seconds. Maybe he's got a little natural resistance to this. It'll take a couple of minutes, but, you know, he'll keep watching. You'll see that hand swell, you'll see the arm swell, it'll go numb after a while, and the rest of them, he'll just all of a sudden fall over dead. And they kept watching, they kept looking. I imagine them creeping around trying to get a peek at that hand every once in a while. Hey, hey, would you mind handing me that? That hand there, that'll be fine. Use that hand to reach it over to me. Man, there ain't nothing wrong with it. And they keep looking and looking as... He ain't a murderer. There's something different about this Joker. There's something about this dude. What is it? Finally, one of them said, he's a God. And they start shaking their heads. Yeah, he's a God. Yeah, he's a God. And we look at this passage of scripture and the first thing that comes to mind, occasionally at least, is that we go back there to I believe it was chapter number 16, I could be wrong about the chapter there, but where Paul and Barnabas showed up there in town. Everybody's just going on, oh, it's Zeus and Mercurius. They've come down to us, or Jupiter and Mercurius. These two are gods. They do these miracles, and they have big speeches and whatnot. They're gods. And Paul and Barnabas, no, we ain't gods. Calm down. Slow your roll. We think, okay, they're saying that this is one of their gods that's come down here, because that's primarily what the word God means as it's used here at the end of verse number six, is God, a deity, a demigod. But when you look at this word God, and you do a word study on it, and you find that there's also one other little definition attached to it. After you go through God with a capital G, God with a lowercase g, the demigods, the false gods, and all the stuff on there, there's a little blurb there that's added on, an appendix if you will, appendage, whatever, however that word is. Representing a God. So they didn't necessarily mean that, hey, Zeus or Apollo had just come down to them. They weren't saying, hey, look, it's Thor or one of the others. They might have also had in mind, here, Is a duly appointed representative of the sovereign creator of heaven and earth This man represents the god the one true god He is an ambassador for god this is god's man here This is someone we need to listen to. This is someone we should pay attention to. And if these people, 2,000 years ago, without our modern lights, cell phones, internet, cars, rockets, planes, all this stuff here, without our modern medicine, can think, hey, this guy represents God. Here in 2023, we need to be asking ourselves, how do I represent God? When someone looks at me, are they saying, that's Joe Blow? Or are they saying, hey, that guy represents God. I had a court date a few weeks back. I had to go to court for it. I'm not going to get into it right now. None of y'all's business. Got everything settled. I walked in there and I had a suit on. Didn't know that we were going to be doing a Zoom meeting for the court proceedings, but you know, otherwise I could have dressed down a little bit, but I walked in with a suit. I was going to court. I was trying to be dressed properly for it. And I walked up in line, is where I'm waiting to get inside, and the one guy looks at me and says, are you a lawyer? I need a lawyer. And a couple other people instantly turn around and say, yeah, are you a lawyer? I said, no. I'm not a lawyer. I just chose to dress up because I'm going to court. And I looked at them, and it's like, y'all, really? It's a good thing this is a Zoom court proceeding here, because you all look like a bunch of bums. If I was the judge, I'd throw you in jail just because you're dressed down so badly. This is a court. You should be coming with respect to my court. I mean, they weren't even, you know, the guys weren't, you know, at least wearing a polo. They got sweats on. They got these We're tops on. It's court. It's God. It's church. Now, I admit, I've had a touch of heat stroke in the past. I don't care to repeat it. So once it starts getting warmer, yeah, you're going to see less of the suits. You're going to see polos, because I can't handle the heat physically. I can't do it. But I'm not going to be showing up there at church or at Faith Baptist wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I'm going to try to have some respect, try to be a little bit on the proper side because I want people to be able to at least look at me and recognize, okay, there's something about him. I saw there on Facebook a little earlier about these two guys and they were debating about how to be Showing up the dress dress properly for church, and the one guy says well does God look at the inside of here? Does he look on the outside of you and it's well isn't it supposed to be that God looks upon the heart and says yeah? This is so if you eat a banana the da is the banana good because the outside looks good Or is the banana good because the insides good which are you gonna eat the inside of the outside and the one guy says well I'm gonna eat the inside and it's gonna be good because of the inside there and And the guy says, see, that's my point. And the guy, in a moment of inspiration from the Lord, says, let me ask you something. When you go to buy the banana, do you buy the banana for what's on the inside that you can't see, or do you buy it for the outside? And the guy says, well, I buy it for the outside, because I can see it's good. And the guy says, same thing. So yeah, we should be, you know, showing up to church dressed nice. I don't know how we got off on this tangent, but we did. But the fact of the matter is, we should be representing God. We should be showing up the best we can, not to impress God, because we can't, but to represent God. I would have a problem if the ambassador from Great Britain showed up at the White House wearing cut-off shorts made out of sweats and a wife beater on. It wouldn't fit the ambassador. So why is it okay for us to dress up however we want? Again, I don't know how I got off on this tangent. I hadn't thought about doing this at all, but it's what the Lord directed, so that's what we're going to do. Because we need to be representing God. I guess we'll make that four points then. Our first one will be our shirts. Are they right? Or are they just rotten? But my actual first point here, I want you to see how we represent God. We should be representing Him with our service. Verse number three, and when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat and fastened on him. It says he gathered a bundle of sticks. The native people here literally built this fire and quite possibly several fires there, because the word fire there could be one big fire or several small ones, but they built these fires here and it would make sense for smaller ones because 276 people needing to dry out from the rain, one big fire, a couple of sticks ain't gonna do much good. Several little fires, yeah, that works. But either way, it goes. The Apostle Paul is one of these 276 who's just climbed out of the ocean there, the Mediterranean Sea, sorry. It's during a storm still going on. And he does not sit back and wait for the barbarous people to go get more wood and bring it over to throw on the fire. I'm your guest. You need to treat me good. Ain't what Paul said at all. No. Paul says, hey, let me go get some more wood. Oh, another log on the fire. There you go. He's throwing another log on there. He's getting some sticks. He's throwing them in there. Get that fire raging. Let's get some heat going on out here. I walked out to Garage Baptist today and it was 57 degrees. I'm like, man, it's a little chilly out here. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to fire up that propane heater again real quick. Warmed it up to 70 degrees. Ooh, nice and toasty in here. I like it. Even though I'm not much on heat, I still, you know, 70 degrees, that'll last till I get done here. And then of course it'll cool back down to that 50s in there, but that's fine. But Paul says, Hey, I'm going to do a service, not a service where I'm going to be preaching, but I'm going to do a service where I'm going out and I'm getting more wood for the fire, putting more fuel there into the flame so that we can all get warm. He didn't wait for anyone. He didn't stand there saying, hey, you fellow prisoners over there, why don't you all go get some more wood there? Centurion, we can use the wood, so if you don't mind, I'm just going to give a little bit of direction here, because hopefully you're finally listening to me. He didn't do any of that. He marched himself over to wherever he was able to find the sticks, grabbed the sticks, and brought them over and placed them into the fire himself. Too many Christians nowadays won't even lift a finger to help themselves. Lick that finger, turn the page in our Bible, so we can keep on reading. It's like, nope, I read to the end of this page, good enough. And that page only had like one verse on it, but good enough. We won't do anything to help anybody else. Well, we got no problem sitting back and complaining about how people do things, but as far as us doing it ourselves, oh no, come on now. Don't you think that's a bridge too far to try to make me do something? But Paul says, hey, leaders need to set the example. I'm going to set the example. I'm going to go get more wood. It'll inspire other people to go get more wood. And maybe some others did. We're not told about it because the focus becomes on that viper biting him. But it might have led others to go over and get more wood and keep these fires going, get them nice and big, hot, warm them up, thaw them out, dry them out, all these other outs. What are we doing, Church? Do we show up to the church house, sit there, sing, bow our heads to pray, and walk back out and that's it? Or do our fellow members of our local assembly see us doing our part to serve? Do our communities see us doing our part to serve? Do our neighbors see us doing our part to serve the Lord God Almighty? I seem to recall a point in time where Jesus was there in the upper room with the 12 apostles, and he took off his robe, wrapped himself in a towel, grabbed a bowl of water, and began to wash the feet of the apostles and dry them, and used it as an object lesson there. It says, hey, each one of you needs to serve. Be willing to get down there and wash the feet of the next guy. Are we doing that? Are we trying to serve? I'm not saying we have to wash anybody else's feet. I got a hard enough time getting down there to wash my own feet without falling over in the shower. But are we serving? We should represent God with our service. We should represent God with our sense of concern. Notice with me down in verse number 8. And it came to pass that the father of Publius, now he's the chief of the islander, lay sick of a fever and of a bloody flux to whom Paul entered in and prayed and laid his hands on him and healed him. Now, let's just be honest here. The gift of healing It is one of those gifts that ended when the New Testament was completed. Okay, where you can just lay hands on them and heal. That part's over with. So, none of us have that ability. But, we can still pray. We can still take someone to the doctor. We can still explain meds to people who don't quite understand it. We can help them better understand the procedure that needs to be done. We can share our knowledge, our experiences of having gone through it. I remember a few years back there, I'd had a deviated septum fixed in my nose there. And oh man, oh that hurt. I hope to never go through that again. I had a cousin. His wife had to go and do it as well, and I was able to sit there and tell her on Facebook, expect this, this is what's gonna happen, you need to do this, that, and the other there, and you get through it, and she thanked me for being able to share my knowledge with her. I could have easily kicked back and said, hey, you know what, her doctor will tell her all about it. I don't even know if my doctor had gone through it or not, just performed the surgery for sure. So my doctor may not have even had the practical experience from my end of the scalpel that I do. So I was able to share it with her. There are little things like that where we can show a sense of concern for others. And of course there is the ultimate sense of concern for the immortal soul. that we go and we tell someone about Jesus, that we tell them that there is a need to get saved, because one day they will find themselves burning in hell for all of eternity, if they don't accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior in this life, here and now, putting their full faith and trust in Him, and Him alone. Because without Jesus, they will find themselves in eternity in hell. But with Jesus, they'll find themselves in eternity with God in heaven. Now Paul showed a sense of concern. He went to work on this guy. He prayed, laid hands on him, healed him. Verse 9 comes along here, and we see, and when this was done, others also which had diseases in the island came and were healed. People had problems. They came and they got healed. So he didn't just stick with this one guy. He says, okay, that's done. All the power's gone out of me for today, I can't do no more. No, no, Paul actually worked to help other people as well. Verse 10, we see he teamed up to help other people. And notice it says, who also honored us with many honors. That us is talking about Dr. Luke. Dr. Luke is a physician. So while Paul's healing diseases, I could just picture Luke over there, mending bones. Okay, we got this set there, and we got it wrapped up, it's secure. lance the spoil right here and drain it we could do this that and the other and they are working together and our sense of concern for the people around us should be us working together not just the pastor out there doing all this but the whole church from the pastor on down to the youngest person there in the church salvation wise going out and telling someone else about Jesus Christ Helping out, maintaining the church, making sure the outside looks good, pulling those weeds, spraying the weeds, whatever needs to be done with the weeds. Get rid of those weeds. Hey, you know, washing windows. Keeping the place spick and span. You know, this person, it's their job to clean the church and I don't want to step on their toes. Yeah, I bet they would like some help. Let's show a little sense of concern for them. We can make phone calls to people. Shoot text messages. Use snail mail and drop a card or a letter in the mail to go and be of encouragement to them. Stop by. Maybe not so much on a stop by anymore. For some reason, it just seems like we just don't like getting visitors anymore nowadays. But yeah, we could still try. And we have visitations. We go and visit people, go and visit the sick, people who haven't been in church in a while, people who haven't been at our church in a while, whatever the case is there. Let them know, hey, we still care. We still want to see you. We miss you. Hope you're getting better. Show a sense of concern. But thirdly, or fourth, depending upon how you want to treat that first part there. Verse 14. Staying in fellowship. In fact, let's back up to 13. And from thence we fetched a compass, and came to Regium. And after one day the south wind blew, and we came the next day to Potilio, where we found brethren, and were desired to tarry with them seven days. And so we went toward Rome." They stayed there for seven days at this place. Now this is getting Harder and harder to do, have fellowship. Our fast-paced worlds are demanding we constantly be going. We get busy doing projects that just end up consuming all of our time. The only time for certain activities is late on a Saturday night, so we're too tired for Sunday morning, and a lot of our churches aren't having Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening services anymore. So that cuts out Sunday, or the only time that the event is taking place is on a Sunday. You know, they've got baseball games on Sunday, football games on Sunday, soccer's on Sunday, hey, this is on Sunday, that's on Sunday, everything is on Sunday. No time for God. No time for fellowship with each other. These guys here, they are being marched to Rome. Now, I suppose you could consider it a little bit of an inconvenience for the soldiers. The prisoners, they certainly didn't mind having to stay there for seven days. Seven days further away from whatever punishment was going to be doled out to them. But the prisoners and the soldiers stayed here. in this city for seven days so Paul and Luke and Aristarchus could have fellowship with the local brethren. Nowadays we have to deal with church hurt. We get our feelings hurt. Oh, oh, I can't go back no more. They said this about me. They said that about me. They didn't like that casserole I made for homecoming. They didn't thank me or anything. Oh, I'm hurt, I can't. If you're suffering from church hurt, I'm just gonna put this out there real quickly. It means your eyes aren't on God. Okay? Plain and simple. I don't want your eyes on me as the pastor. I don't want your eyes on anybody else there in the church. I want your eyes on God. The Bible says we're supposed to lift our eyes onto the hills from whence cometh my help. The idea being is we're looking up to the top of the hill there. Our eyes are naturally going to see what's above the hill, which is the open sky up there, which means that we're going to be looking toward God, not toward each other. Yes, we should look to each other to encourage. We should look to each other for strength. We should look to the pastor as the leader, as the under shepherd that God has established. But if I say something that offends you, Number one, is it scriptural? Because if it's scriptural on my end, that means you've got a problem with God. Don't be sitting here saying, well the preacher done insulted me. No. Your sin done insulted you. Number two, if I said something wrong and it ain't scriptural, how about coming and talking to me about it so we can get it straightened out? We avoid that like the plague anymore. Because it's easier for us to just get our feelings hurt and take our ball and walk home Uh, that's it. I'm leaving. I'm outta here. Y'all ain't gonna do things my way. Forget it. I'm outta here. That means we're not staying in fellowship. You have siblings. You fight with them. You eventually make up. You should anyways. I know a lot of people don't, but you should. I've got cousins I have fought with in the past. We make up. People at work, had disagreements with, guess what? We've made up. Why can't we do that at church? We need to stay in fellowship. And as much as I greatly appreciate the online preaching. doing our church services online. Garage Baptist is an online church service. We don't actually have a church, so you're not members of it. This is just something extra. It's supplemental material. Something extra to get you ready to go to church today. Something to help keep you going throughout the course of your week till you get back to church. So don't use me as an excuse. But too many are doing just that. They're using these online services as an excuse. Well, I tuned in for the broadcast this morning. I don't need to go to church now. Yeah, you do. You need that fellowship. You need to get there with the brethren. We draw strength from one another. We learn from one another. We grow with one another. But when you get to the point that it's like, Now all I need is the online and you're not someone who's homebound. You're just choosing to stay home. It won't be long until you're no longer going online and watching the live stream. Now you're just listening to it while you're busy doing something else. And while you're busy doing something else, you're slowly walking away to the point that eventually you're going to be outside during church. and you're completely missing it. So I'll watch later. No you won't. Be honest, shame the devil, tell the truth. But because you're not getting the fellowship with your local assembly, now all of your neighbors around you who knew that you used to go to church at this time are now seeing you outside doing whatever. At home. instead of being at church. Ah, that Jesus thing. Yeah, I knew it wouldn't last. I knew you'd go ahead and come on back, get your head on straight. I knew there was nothing really to it. Yeah. Yeah. We need to stay in fellowship. Hebrews 10.25, not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together. We need to stay in fellowship at our local assemblies. Paul, he's a prisoner, making his way to Rome, still stopped to have fellowship. and not for 7 minutes or 7 hours, 7 days. Staying in fellowship caused others to seek him out. Verse 15, And from thence, when the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us as far as Apiaforum and the three taverns. Apiaforum was about 50 miles or so away. from Rome, and they came all the way down there. The three taverns was located about 33 miles south of Rome. So those who got too winded stayed there, and the rest came on down, and Paul eventually made it up there. Others heard and said, ah, I missed the first group that went out, and I'll just go and meet them at the three taverns, and they met up there. Will others be seeking God Because you represent Him in staying in fellowship. That's the question. Or are they going to say, I don't need God because they're not staying in fellowship, so why should I? Must not be much required of us with God. I guess that means I'm good enough right where I'm at. That's a problem. Everywhere Paul went, he represented God to the best of his ability. And that's all God asks. He doesn't ask any of us to be Superman. He doesn't ask any of us to go above and beyond what we physically are able to. He just asks us to be faithful. Even that ambassador, I mentioned earlier, the ambassador from Great Britain. Let's say he shows up there at the White House and he's dressed to the nines. You know, the ambassador still doesn't know everything. He's got a lot of information. He knows a lot of details, but he may not have all the answers that would be asked of him there at the White House. But he does his best. Church, are we doing our best? Do we rightly represent God? Or do we represent Him poorly, if at all? We need, we need, to check ourselves on this. And for the most part, we all need to do a lot better job at it. Because we represent God. Our Father in Heaven, I thank You, Lord, for all You've done for us. I pray, Lord, for Your blessings upon this day. Help us, Father, please, to follow Your holy will. To be a light to others. That someone will be see their need to be saved before it's too late. Help us please and I pray Lord for your blessings upon these live streams here and those who will be tuning in later on or even over there on sermonaudio.com. I pray Lord for your blessings upon the book as well, the survey of the book of Acts. In Jesus' name we do pray, Amen and Amen. I'm thinking of a song here, Softly and Tenderly.