Matt Chandler - Scattered to Gather

Do you have your Bibles? Go ahead and grab those. Acts, chapter eight. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you. If you don’t own one, that’s our gift to you. I think it becomes important that you see that it’s not just me saying the things that we’ll discuss today, but rather we are going to follow along with the narrative found in the book of Acts. So in week one—this is week six—what we said as we walked through the book of Acts is that there were some things we weren’t going to really focus on, but we had one thing in particular we wanted to show. We said that we’ll see a lot of miraculous things happening in the book of Acts, and that although we are people who believe in miracles and think they still occur, we believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The book of Acts is not ultimately about the gifts.

I mentioned there’s an argument in the book of Acts about whether it is descriptive or prescriptive—whether this is a piece of history that describes what happened or rather from God, this is what you should do and how your life should be lived out. I said that it’s not as simple as picking one of those perspectives; rather, you will see them merging with one another throughout the book. Ultimately, although we are prayerfully considering establishing our Denton campus as an autonomous church, I said that this series isn’t primarily to accomplish that, but rather to reiterate some things we’ve been saying for the last 11 years about the nature of our family here and the mission we believe God has given us to fulfill.

With that said, here’s my very ambitious goal today: I want to cover Acts chapter 8 through Acts chapter 12. Now, if you have any history here, you’ve seen me take a single verse and go for an hour, so don’t panic, all right? We’re going to get it in. I want to go through verses, and I said in that first week that my plan in teaching through the book of Acts is to show you the movement or the spread of the gospel across the ancient world and to the uttermost parts of the earth. We know that the gospel reaches the uttermost parts of the earth because we are here, right? I mean, you and I are in this room, we have a Bible in our lap or on our device or under our chair, or whatever, but we got here because, according to Acts 1:8, the disciples received power when the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they became His witnesses first in Jerusalem, then in Judea and Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth.

So today, I want to just show you the movement of the gospel out of Jerusalem. I don’t know how closely you’ve been paying attention, but Jesus says in 1:8 that they are going to become His witnesses to the ends of the earth, and here we are at the conclusion of chapter 7, and they’re still all hanging out in Jerusalem. Today, we go beyond the walls of Jerusalem, but to get there, some pretty disturbing things happen. Last week, I was out; Bois Hughes, the campus pastor at the Denton campus, preached. You could just tell that he is an extremely gifted man, an exceptionally skilled communicator, and a fervent man of God. In fact, I was a bit nervous; I watched his sermon and thought it was excellent. Then I had a meeting with the elders and wondered if maybe I was the one rolling out. I was pleased to find out that was not what that meeting was about. He covered well the death of Stephen—or really the way he laid it out and taught it was that in our culture, most of us are not going to have to die for Jesus. So he pressed on what it looks like to live for Him.

At the end of chapter 7 in the book of Acts, we find that Stephen is killed; he is dragged to the outskirts of town and pelted with rocks until he dies. Thus, we have our first Christian martyr. Up until this point, there have only been threats, a night in jail, more threats, and another night in jail, but no one has been killed, no one has been severely beaten. But now that boundary has been crossed with the murder of Stephen. With that, we’ll pick up in Acts chapter 8, starting in verse 1. We’re just going to walk through these 12 chapters; I’ll read, tell you what we’re missing, read some more, tell you what we’re missing, read some more, and then I want to just pull two truths out of these four chapters. In Acts chapter 8, starting in verse 1, it says this: «And Saul approved of his execution”—this refers to the execution of Stephen—“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.