Living Faith

Living Faith

Acts 8:14-17

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

Peter and John went to Samaria to check on a report that Samaria had accepted the word of God. That would be mysterious to the Apostles because Jews like themselves, as a whole, did not like Samaritans much and would make cheap jokes at their expense—the ancient equivalent of the modern ethnic putdown.

The Samaritans gave them ammunition for this abuse, because the Samaritans refused among other things to accept the Temple in Jerusalem as the center of worship for the living God. Do you remember the Samaritan woman saying to Jesus, ²⁰Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem’? Jesus answered her exactly as she probably expected a Jewish male to answer. ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²²You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.

“Salvation is from the Jews”? How close-minded can you get?

So Peter and John step into a rat’s nest of bigotry, on both sides, when they go to Samaria to find out what is going on. They find a bunch of Samaritans who think they are Christians but are not. They have come just half way. They have accepted the Word of God but they have not received the Spirit of God.

You have probably heard the saying, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” It means that no one will blame you for your ignorance, but there is an exception when the thing you don’t know is the very thing you are supposed to know. When you are driving a car and don’t know how to stop it but you think you do, "what you don't know” can hurt you plenty. Somebody improved the saying with this: It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s all the things you know that ain’t so.

The Samaritans thought they knew they were Christians, but they were not because they had not received the Holy Spirit. A Baptist preacher I knew forty years ago put it this way—they were professing but not possessing Christians. They accepted the Word of God without receiving the Spirit of God—something like acquiring a new car, but not the keys.

To make the situation more complicated for Peter and John, Jesus had included Samaria in his great commission, which were the last words he said to them before he ascended to heaven: But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ Samaria was to be one of their stops on the way to the ends of the earth. I can imagine John saying to Peter, “I guess we had better check this out,” and Peter answering with a deep sigh, “I guess so.”

So they come to Samaria and sure enough, they discover that the Samaritans had got it wrong. They had missed the point again. Whatever accepting the word of God meant to them, it apparently didn't include an accurate understanding: for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.

We don’t know why they were going by an incomplete gospel, but we know that it was incomplete. We cannot understand or apply the Word of God without the Spirit of God.

Peter and John, however, did not allow whatever prejudices they may have had to alter their commitment to the Great Commission. They were to go to Samaria, so go they did. They did not criticize what they found there. They did not say, “What do you expect of Samaritans?” Instead of criticizing the people, they correct the problem. They pray for the Holy Spirit to come. They lay their hands on the Samaritans, the Spirit comes, and they receive him and awaken to a living faith.

Without the Word of God, we remain in the dark; without the Spirit of God, we are dead in sin.

Light and Life

Living faith requires both the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Often seekers appear to want one more than another. Some want the Word of God as a mental hammer with which to beat their enemies; others want the Spirit of God as a tool to manipulate emotions, both theirs and others.’ I suspect there are a few who want to misuse both the Word and the Spirit, both the light and the life.

A Spiritless word is not the Word of God. A wordless, uninformed spirit is not the Spirit of God. The biblical model of living faith may be simply stated: In a living faith we live by the Word of God as we are filled and directed by the Spirit of God. That is the biblical model of living faith. In it we discern and do the will of God. A Lutheran layman named Robert Longman, on his webpage Spirithome, offered a description of spiritual discernment that I found biblical, sensible, and therefore useful. Here it is. Spiritual discernment:

· is governed by love, for if it is not, it's worthless (1 Cor 13:1-3);

· centers us onto Jesus the Christ and Lord (1 Cor 12:3), and His good news;

· directs us to Scripture, not away from it (Isaiah 8:19, 20);

· builds up the church and its members (Ephesians 4:11-12), giving it power, wisdom, character, boldness, and unity.

· helps create in us a love of righteousness, a heightened sense of sin, and a turning away from known evil.

Good Enough

The other day in conversation I remarked to someone, maybe one of you, that we say something is “good enough” when we suspect that it isn’t. We know when something is good, so we don’t have to say that it is good enough. We don’t have to justify it. It justifies itself by being what it is.

The Samaritans who thought they were Christians because they had accepted the Word of God—though they had not received the Spirit of God—probably thought in terms of good enough.

I was just fourteen years old, and under the conviction of the Holy Spirit, when I tried to make a deal with God. I would do my best, and that would have to be good enough for God. I didn’t grasp the fact that God did not want to improve me. He wanted to change me. I was not to resolve which changes I was willing to make, but to accept the changes that he wanted to make. . The only way for the prayer, Not my will but yours, can be answered is by God doing his will in us, and us consenting to it. Without that we are in a no-man’s land of trying to do for ourselves what is impossible for us to do for ourselves. The change is the work of God. You may call it new birth, you may call it the baptism of the Holy Spirit; but it is the work of God, not your own. That is what those Samaritans learned when they received the Holy Spirit and discovered a living faith. Amen.

The Third Goal of Godliness

The Third Goal of Godliness

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

Three points by way of introduction.

1. All of the letters Paul wrote, which is about a third of the New Testament, were addressed to people who were born again. They knew both from Paul’s preaching and from their own experience the big difference between the works of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit. Paul could not have addressed the words of our text to the general population of Thessalonica, but only to the Christians there. That is why modern Christians treat the letters of Paul as addressed to us as well as to his first readers, and why Paul is not a good source of inspirational sayings for non-Christians. What he says does not apply to them nor work for them, until the Holy Spirit gives them by new birth.

2. The word “godliness” does not appear in the text, but godliness in the church at Thessalonica is what Paul is grateful for and asks for more of. In Christian terms, godliness is an inward relationship with God and an outward expression of God’s love to the world.

3. In the modern church we do not expect godliness from a church full of new converts, none of whom had been Christians a very few years earlier. In Thessalonica, none of them had grown up in a Christian home, since there were no Christian homes when they were growing up, and none of them had gone to Sunday School because there were none of those either. Some of them may have grown up in the Synagogue, but that was as close they got to the Word of God.

The way Paul addresses them indicates that the Thessalonians had come a long way in a short time, .

How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.

What Paul says about them is my testimony about you, and may be your testimony about one another. If you are a visitor, it may be your testimony about your church at home; if you have no church, we hope you will get a sense this morning of just how big it is to be part of a church, which he calls in a another place the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.

The Thessalonians were teachable Christians. Paul was confident that they would understand him because they saw things as he saw them, and needed only to know more. On the basis of this confidence Paul prays for them to achieve the third goal of godly living, which is to be blameless before God when Jesus comes.

We often talk about the first two goals of godliness, which are to honor God and bless the world. Paul had a great deal to say about them throughout his letters. The third goal is more rarely stated, probably because it contains a personal ambition; but this first Sunday of Advent is a perfect time to consider it, when we are thinking about how Jesus came into the world to save us, and is coming again to take us home to be with him forever,

New Birth the Starting Point

The starting point of a godly life is new birth. The first Christians, like the Thessalonians, knew no other way to live it apart from this starting point. The Spirit of God in our lives is required for godly living, because the fruits of the Spirit must come from the Spirit. Otherwise all we can produce are what Paul calls “the works of the flesh,” none of which are very nice. Even listing them makes us uncomfortable.

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

These are only examples of “things like these.” If you don’t understand some of the long words, they describe some pretty icky stuff; in explaining them I would get off track and I would tell you more than you want to know, or need to know to meet the third goal of godliness. Enough to say that the works of the flesh are all bad, and all have evil consequences—yet they are all that can be expected from those who are born only of the flesh. It’s no great surprise that Jesus says, What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.”

Those who have been born from above understand the third goal of godliness: for each of us to appear blameless before God when Jesus comes with all his saints.

Needing No Excuse

To be blameless means to need no excuse. If you need an excuse, you need more than that: you need to repent, and apologize, and be forgiven.

Blame is usually self-blame, inhibitions imposed by a guilty conscience. Other people do not blame us nearly as much as we blame ourselves. We look for excuses to mitigate the self-blame, to convince ourselves that we are not such terrible sinners after all.

Excuses are bad strategy for two reasons. They usually aren’t true, and they dodge responsibility. Instead of excusing yourself, you need to repent before God and apologize to your spouse, your teacher, your boss, your neighbor, your parents, or whoever else you offended by messing up. You may still have to bear the consequences. You don’t repent or apologize because it will get you off, but because it is the only way to face reality. We don’t need an excuse; we need forgiveness.

The television drama JAG, acknowledges this obvious truth. When the heroes, who were all Naval and Marine officers, were accused by their commander of messing up in some way, they had one response only: “No excuse, Sir,” or “No excuse, Ma’am!

To appear blameless, needing no excuse or apology, is a high goal even if your appearance is before a commanding officer, or Judge, or Principal, or Dean, or employer; how much higher it is to appear blameless before God when Jesus comes with all his saints! Yet that is exactly what Paul prayed for in our text: may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

It was possible for Paul to pray for the church as he does because the church was neither indifferent or hostile to this prayer. The Christians wanted for themselves what Paul wanted for them, which is what God wanted for them too. They didn’t want to have to say, “No excuse, sir.”

Not a Lot of Time Left

We do not have a lot of time left to abound in love and be strengthened in holiness. In our gospel reading this morning, Jesus warned us to get ready, because we don’t know when the end will come. He said that his coming will be as sudden and decisive as the springing of a trap.

If we knew when it was going to happen it wouldn’t be sudden. There are only two possible outcomes in the Bible.

Þ We will will meet Christ when we die.

Þ We will meet him when he comes again.

You are not going to miss him!

A great-grandmother I know put it in perspective when she said that she has a smaller fraction of her total life left to live today than she yesterday. She doesn’t know exactly what the fraction is, but she knows that it is getting smaller every day. So, whether you are young are old, there is not a lot of time left!