The following was preached at Veedersburg and Hillsboro UMC on Sunday, January 11, 2009. The text for this week's passage is Acts 19:1-7.
One of my favorite questions is, “Now what?” And a part of me loves this question because it gives me an opportunity to be a little ornery. If someone has just told me about something really exciting that has happened to them, and I can tell that they are really pumped up about it, I’ll often ask them, “Now what?” And while it is one small part ornery, it is mostly because I want to push them to the next level. You see, too often, we have these great, emotional experiences in our lives that really get us pumped up about something, but after a while the fire that was ignited dies down, and we go back to our lives as normal without any discernable change because of these events. Now, if something happens in our lives that is so significant that we really get excited about it, we should be able to point to that event as a turning point in our lives. Life is full of opportunities to grow, and all too often we fail to take advantage of those opportunities because we don’t think about that question. We don’t take it to the next level. This is rarely more painfully obvious than when it comes to our Christian walk.
We sing or hear a song that really speaks to our hearts. God orchestrates the events in our lives in such a way that just the right person comes to talk to us at just the right time. In the difficult times in life, this happens more than we realize at the time. Perhaps, maybe just perhaps, there is something said in a Sunday morning sermon that speaks to you at just the right time. These instances are all around us. We know that God is at work around us and we have a strong sense of the Holy Spirit’s presence. These times when we no doubt know that Holy Spirit is present and at work in our lives are often referred to as “mountaintop moments.” I can think of a few instances off the top of my head that have happened in my life, and hopefully you can as well. We have these significant “mountaintop moments,” but time passes on, and life continues much as it did before. And a lot of times, that why we need to ask ourselves, “Now what?”
I don’t ask the question to put a wet blanket on the emotional experience. I ask it help them process through the next steps that we are called to take in response to these moments in our lives. There is a song by the group Lifehouse called Everything. It asks the question, “How can I stand here with you and not be moved by you?” How can we have a profound encounter with the Holy Spirit in our lives and not be changed by that experience? Well, I’ll tell you. We fail to take the next step.
In Acts 19, Paul travels from Antioch in Syria to Ephesus. While he is there, he comes across some disciples, and he realizes that they never took the next step. They were probably Jews that were persuaded by hearing Apollos, who is mentioned in Acts 18. They heard of the teachings of John the Baptist, repented of their sins and looked forward to the coming Messiah. They knew about John the Baptist, but they had never heard of Jesus. They took the first step of repenting and looking forward to the coming of the Messiah, but they never heard about who this Messiah was. As followers of the teachings of John, surely they knew that someone else was to come; they just didn’t know that he had already come. They didn’t take the next step. However, when Paul tells them about Jesus, they do. They take the next step and put their trust in Jesus.
A lot of times people will acknowledge their guilt. People will recognize that they have fallen short and have failed to live a life that glorifies God. They will be genuinely repentant, but they never take that next step of putting their faith in Jesus. It’s not enough to simply regret our past actions. The Greek word for repentance is metanoia. The prefix, meta, has to do with an association, fellowship or participation. The noun, nous, has to do with the mind, the faculty of perceiving, our understanding. So, essentially, to repent is to completely change the way that you understand the world. But turning away from how we understand the world and not turning towards anything else doesn’t do us any good.
I read an article this week, and before I tell you what the title of the article is, let me cut off any strange looks I’m about to get by admitting that I am a bit odd. I think about things that other people don’t think about. Often Katie will ask me what I’m thinking while we are out driving. Usually, I say, “Nothing,” and that’s the actual truth. More often than not, I’m just taking in the scenery. One time we were driving from Kentucky to visit our families in Indy, and I was looking out the window. She asked me what I was thinking, and I said, “How God relates to space and time and whether or not it is possible for Him to exist outside of time.” And I was totally serious. And not only do I think about strange things, I read things that other people don’t read. The article that I read was called “Wired for Change: What Neuroscience Taught Me About Renewing My Mind.” That’s right, I read an article about neuroscience this week, and this is where I get back to the point.
In this article, the author talks about how our brains work. There are all sorts of neural paths that get formed in our brains when we do something. The first time we do something, we are blazing a trail in our neuro-networks. The more often we do this action, the easier it becomes for the electrical impulses to pass through our neural connections. They essentially smooth out a neuro-path through our brains. The example that the author gave is that it is like walking through a cornfield. The first time you do it, you may wander back and forth, but the more you travel along that path, the more defined it gets. This is why changing our understanding of the world is so difficult, and turning from the sin in our lives is so difficult. We are literally refiguring how our brains work. It is exceedingly difficult to do something like this on our own. But when we take the next step, we don’t have to do it on our own.
After we come to the point when we realize that our lives have not glorified God, we see the truth of Romans 3:23 in ourselves. And, what does Romans 3:23 say? “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” It is a very tame passage, when we apply it to other people. But at some point in our lives, we have to realize that Paul is speaking to us here. And suddenly, this verse is not so tame. It violates everything that we have understood about ourselves up to this point. We all like to think of ourselves as good people, and for the most part, we’re right; however, being a good person does not mean that we are living in relationship with God. Being a good person is not a surefire ticket into His eternal, holy presence. No matter how good we are, we cannot earn the right to live in eternity with God.
There is a verse in Paul’s letter to the Romans that highlights this point. It is a verse that has had a profound impact on history. I might even go out on a limb here and say that it is one of the most important verses of Scripture. Without it, we may not be sitting here this morning. A German monk by the name of Martin Luther read this verse and it gave him the strength to stand up to the abuses of the Roman Catholic church, and sparked the Reformation. An Anglican priest by the name of John Wesley heard Luther’s Preface to the Romans one night and he caught on fire for God, setting the foundations of the “people called Methodists,” who now sit in this sanctuary. The verse is Romans 1:17.
Paul is quoting one of the prophets in Romans 1:17 when he says, “The righteous shall live by faith.” The full passage comes out of the book of Habakkuk, which is just as fun to read as it is to say. Habakkuk 2:4 says, “Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by faith.” When the prophet says “his soul is puffed up,” he is referring to those who are full of pride. Being proud of your accomplishments is not necessarily a bad thing; however, when we are “puffed up” about them and boasting about our accomplishments, that is when one becomes a problem. If you do a quick search on the word “proud” in Scripture, you’ll find that nearly every time it has negative associations. When we think that we are good enough to spend eternity in relationship with God, but have failed to take the next step of putting our faith in Jesus Christ, we are only fooling ourselves and living a life of pride.
The baptism of John was one of repentance. John’s role was to “prepare the way for the Lord.” Remember? He was the one who turned hearts and readied the people for the coming Messiah. When Jesus came, the time for preparation was over. It was time to take the next step. These disciples that Paul came across in Ephesus were good people, but they had not accepted Jesus as their Savior. They were waiting; they were ready for him, but they hadn’t taken that next step. They had repented of their sins, but they had not yet put their trust in Jesus. When Paul tells them about Jesus, they do put their trust in Him, and they are baptized in the name of Jesus. They took the next step and put their trust in Jesus.
Now is where it all comes together. John the Baptist came to prepare the way, but he never intended for us to simply stop with repentance. John’s ministry constantly pointed to Jesus as the one who would come to take away the sins of the world. It is through Jesus and Jesus alone that we can truly be free from our sins. Free to enter into a relationship with the eternal God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We can feel as bad as we want about our past mistakes, but until we place our full trust in Jesus, we haven’t taken the next step. I want to encourage you today to take that step.
Our closing hymn this morning is “Amazing Grace.” It’s a very popular hymn, even those who have never stepped foot into a church have heard it. But did you know who wrote it? John Newton. Now, the name itself probably doesn’t mean all that much to you. But John Newton was a former captain of a slave ship, who had a profound encounter with God. For a long time, he continue to captain these ships, even though he professed to believe in the Christian faith. However, later in his life, he recognized that he never had fully embraced the faith. He had failed to take the next step and realized it. He ended his life as an Anglican priest who joined William Wilberforce in the fight to ban the slave trade in England. When we sing these words, we sing the words of a man who truly was blind, but because of the grace of God, he was able to truly see.
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