SIX-WEEK SERMON SERIES - Evangelical Covenant Church€¦ · SERMON SERIES Identifying what the Holy Spirit is doing through the church and around the world. A RESOURCE FROM MAKE

SIX-WEEK SERMON SERIES

Identifying what the Holy Spirit is doing through the church and around the world.

A R E S O U R C E F R O M M A K E A N D D E E P E N D I S C I P L E S

T H E B O O K O F AC T S

B L A Z I N G C E N T E R | S E R M O N S E R I E S

If you want your congregation to get a deeper understanding of who the Holy Spirit really is, there is no better place to get a clearer picture of the Spirit’s mysterious presence and patterns than throughout the Book of Acts. In this account of the early followers of Jesus, the Holy Spirit plays the central role in directing and energizing the church’s evolution, expansion, and advancement.

Each week of the Blazing Center sermon series seeks to identify what the Holy Spirit is doing through the church and around the world. This collection of messages, delivered by executive ministers of the ECC, will provide a sampling of what can be declared during this six-week series. Feel free to share the sermon videos with your church, use the sermons as written, or let the written sermons inspire you to write your own. Whatever path you choose to take, we pray that a fire will ignite throughout the Covenant as we discover that the Holy Spirit has changed the world before and is ready to empower us to do it again!

1. THE BLAZING CENTER JOHN WENRICH — page 2

2. LIVING THE DREAM: THE KINGDOM AL TIZON — page 7 OF GOD IN GLOBAL MISSION ACTS 1:1-11

3. THE HOLY SPIRIT CONNECTS LANCE DAVIS — page 11

ACTS 2:1-47

4. THE BLAZING CENTER QUALIFIES PAUL ROBINSON — page 16

ACTS 6:1-15

5. THE SPIRIT OF DISCIPLEMAKING MICHELLE SANCHEZ — page 19

ACTS 8:4-39

6. HEARING THE VOICE OF JESUS PAUL LESSARD — page 25

ACTS 16:6-10

BONUS SERMON:

• THE BLAZING CENTER FOR MARILYN WILLIAMS — page 28 WOMEN IN THE CHURCH TODAY

I N T R O D U C T I O N P A G E 1 S E R M O N S E R I E S

As a church, the Evangelical Covenant Church affirms a conscious dependence upon the Holy Spirit, who is the Blazing Center of our mission.

J O H N W E N R I C H is the

president of the Evangelical

Covenant Church.

T H E B L A Z I N G C E N T E R

B Y J O H N W E N R I C H

One of my favorite words for personal and congregational vitality is “awaken.” When we awaken, we suddenly see what we’ve been missing all along. It is no coincidence that the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries were called the Great Awakening. The Holy Spirit is the one who causes this awakening to occur. Without the Holy Spirit there would be no revival because the Holy Spirit is the one who blows through the valley of the dry bones.

A conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit is one of the affirmations of the ECC. You may be thinking, “What does that mean? How does that work? Who is the Holy Spirit? What difference does the Spirit make? How can we respect the mystery of the Holy Spirit while learning practical ways to keep in step with the Holy Spirit?”

Let’s begin with the Trinity. We believe in a Triune God—God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Christians know about God the Father and about God the Son. But fewer Christians actually know about God the Holy Spirit. In some churches the only time you hear about the Holy Spirit is when the church recites the Apostles Creed.

The Holy Spirit is God. The Holy Spirit is worthy of our love and devotion. The Holy Spirit is God just as much as the Father and the Son are God. Three distinct persons in perfect union as one God.

The Holy Spirit is a person. The Holy Spirit has intellect. The Holy Spirit has emotion. The Holy Spirit has will. These are the elements of personhood. The Holy Spirit does not have a body but that does not mean the Spirit is not a person. The Spirit is not some impersonal cosmic force. The Spirit is a person who can be known, who can be grieved, who can be loved.

Imagine with me for a moment where we would be without the Holy Spirit.

Without the Holy Spirit:

• There would be no creation, because the Spirit was hovering over the primordial waters in Genesis 1.

• There would be no prophecy, because the prophets were carried along by the Holy Spirit

• There would be no incarnation, because the Spirit “overshadowed” the virgin Mary.

• There would be no resurrection, because the Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead.

• There would be no church, because the Holy Spirit gave birth to the church on the day of Pentecost.

W E N R I C H P A G E 2 S E R M O N S E R I E S

S E R M O N O N E

• There would be no Christians, because the Spirit is the one who regenerates the dead soul and mediates the presence of Jesus.

• There would be no spiritual gifts, because the gifts are given by the Spirit to equip the church for mission.

• There would be no mission, because the Holy Spirit is the blazing center of our mission.

• There would be no church planting, because the Spirit told the church in Antioch to commission Paul and Barnabas to go and plant churches.

• There would be no Bible, because the Scriptures are God-breathed and the authors were carried along by Holy Spirit.

• There would be no adoption into God’s family, because the Spirit cries out within us, “Abba Father.”

• There would be no hope because the Spirit is a deposit guaranteeing our salvation.

• There would be no revival, because the Holy Spirit gives us the passion to know God and to make God known.

We could go on and on. Imagine where we would be without the Holy Spirit.

In the ECC, we believe that when a person says yes to Jesus and crosses over the threshold of faith, that person receives the Holy Spirit. The Apostle Paul said that when you believed, you received. This makes sense. Paul calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Jesus. According to John Clark and Marcus Peter Johnson in their book The Incarnation of God, “The Holy Spirit is the personal agent of Christ’s presence and power.” The Holy Spirit is the spirit of Jesus.

In the Old Testament, the word for Spirit is ruah. You can hear and feel the breath. Ruah. The word for Spirit in the New Testament is pnuema, from which we get our word

pneumatic. If you are a mechanic, you probably have a pneumatic wrench that enables you to accomplish more work than you could do in your own human power. The Holy Spirit empowers us for kingdom work.

The Holy Spirit is closer to us than our very breath. A sign of health today is the ability to slow down and become aware of our own breathing. How much more to become aware and consciously dependent on the Holy Spirit who is the breath of God.

Sometimes we forget that the Holy Spirit was active in the life of Christ. As I said earlier, without the Holy Spirit Jesus never would been born or raised from the dead. But there is so much more in between. When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River, the Holy Spirit descend upon Jesus like a dove. The Scriptures tell us that Jesus was led by the Spirit, filled by the Spirit, guided by the Spirit, full of joy in the Holy Spirit, and anointed by the Holy Spirit.

In Luke 4 Jesus reads from Isaiah 61 as he stands up in the synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind. To set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Jesus was consciously dependent on the Holy Spirit.

Jesus was 100% God and 100% human. He had a human body and his body was a temple of the Holy Spirit. He modeled to us how to be consciously dependent on the Holy Spirit. We are to follow his example.

Later in the Scriptures, the Apostle Paul says our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. What is the definition of a temple? A place where God lives. If you have placed your faith in Jesus Christ, then the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, lives in you. Your body is sacred because your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.

This is one of the reasons Jesus told his disciples to be glad that he is going to the Father. Because after Jesus is



glorified, the Father will send the Holy Spirit to fill every believer.

When Jesus walked the earth, he had a human body, so he could only be in one place at one time. But now that we have the Holy Spirit, the spirit of Jesus himself, that spirit can fill every believer, in every place all the time.

This is why Jesus said, “You will do greater works than me…because I am going to the Father and the Father will send you the promised Holy Spirit.” Now every believer can be filled with the person of Jesus through the Holy Spirit. As a human being, Jesus could not jump into your body. But in the form of Spirit, Jesus can fill your body through the Holy Spirit who is the personal agent of Christ’s presence and power.

Jesus taught us many things about the Holy Spirit. For example, Jesus said the Spirit would be like an Advocate or a Counselor. In John 14:15-17, he says, “If you love me keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever – the Spirit of truth.”

The Greek word is paraclete, which means one who comes alongside. As a comforter, it’s as if the Spirit puts an arm around us to comfort us. But the Holy Spirit is also a convictor of sin who will nudge us when we go astray. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, one who comforts and convicts.

And conviction is different from condemnation. In Romans 8:1, the Apostle Paul says, “There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.”

Jesus taught that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, but he also taught that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of power.

Let’s read Acts 1:1-9. In this passage, Jesus is basically saying to his disciples: Ready, set, wait. And the disciples did wait. On the day of

Pentecost, the promised Holy Spirit descended upon the early believers and the church was born. If we are going to do the work of God, we need the power of God.

The mission of Jesus continues through these believers who are now filled with the power of Holy Spirit. Pentecost is a multicultural experience with more than 15 different nationalities hearing the gospel in their own language. It was a Pentecost moment where there was shared understanding. On that day, after Peter’s sermon, 3,000 people came to a saving knowledge of Jesus and they too were filled with the Holy Spirit. Pentecost moments are still going on today and every day.

The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of power, transformed the disciples from a group of cowards into a courageous band of brothers and sisters. So much so that by the end of the first century the good news of Jesus had spread to more than 30 countries and 39 major cities—all in the midst of persecution. That’s the power of the Holy Spirit at work through everyday people like you and me.

So how do we become more consciously dependent on the Holy Spirit? I want to lay the groundwork for application by first talking about the difference between trying and training.

Trying is about performance and legalism. Training is about relationship and apprenticeship.

The disciples followed Rabbi Jesus because they admired him so much. They watched the way he lived his life and they wanted to be just like him. They wanted to learn how to pray like Jesus, forgive like Jesus, serve like Jesus, love like Jesus, laugh like Jesus, and how to be relaxed like Jesus. This is the essence of discipleship: transformation into Christlikeness.

Following Jesus is not about trying; it’s about training. Paul said to his young protégé Timothy, “Train yourself to be godly.” He did not say, “Try to be godly.” In the kingdom of God we do not try harder; we train diligently. Learning to



live our lives as if Jesus were living them for us. The Holy Spirit empowers us in that training, to train our bodies to be temples of the living God.

I’ve been on a spiritual journey. This journey began when I was nine years old when I heard the gospel at vacation Bible school. It was there that I put my faith in Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord.

Even though I have been a Christ follower a long time, it has not been until the last 15 years that I began to appreciate the person and the work of the Holy Spirit even more. Like you I have good days and bad days, but that sense of adventure and anticipation of what God is going do next …all of that is catalyzed by the Holy Spirit. It feels like I’m getting to know Jesus all over again. I am so grateful for the person and work of the Holy Spirit in my life. And that journey continues.

Here are three practical exercises to help us keep in step with the Spirit.

1. Practice the agenda of thirds. When your leadership team or your prayer team gets together, experiment using the agenda of thirds. Divide your agenda into three parts. In the first part of the meeting ask the question, “In what ways is the Holy Spirit moving or working in my life? It may be a particular Scripture, answered prayer, a breakthrough, a dream. The point is to take a few minutes to share about how the Holy Spirit is working in your life since the last time you met.

In the second part of the meeting ask the question, “In what ways is the Holy Spirit working in and through our church or community?” Spend some time going around the room discerning how the Spirit is working in your church or community collectively.

In the third part of the agenda, ask the question, “Based on how the Holy Spirit is moving in me and in us, what decisions or topics do we need to discuss and pray about?”

The agenda of thirds centers our attention and our affection immediately on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, who is the blazing center of our mission. Do you know what many leadership teams or councils talk about when they meet every month? Two de-motivating factors: money and attendance. Or they get lost in administrative minutiae, such as talking for 20 minutes about what kind of towels should be in the restrooms at church.

When a leadership team or prayer team centers their discernment in the person and work of the Holy Spirit, that is an amazing experience. It’s the experience the first century believers had as well. In Acts 15, during a significant leadership meeting, the participants were focused on the Holy Spirit. We know that because after the meeting was over, they wrote a letter saying, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (v. 28). The Holy Spirit was active in their decision-making. That’s the kind of meeting I want to be a part of. Following the agenda of thirds can position us to hear from the Spirit.

2. Practice praying the Holy Spirit prayer. The Holy Spirit prayer goes like this: “Holy Spirit, what is it that you want to do in and through my life today?” A spiritual director taught me how to do this and to listen. Almost every morning before I get out of bed, I pray the Holy Spirit prayer. “Holy Spirit what is it that you want to do in and through my life today?”

I do not claim to hear the audible voice of God, but I do sense within my spirit a word or two, such as forgive, peace, trust, joy, or let go. Throughout the day, I watch and wait to see how the Holy Spirit will fulfill that word. Sometimes it’s clear and sometimes it’s not. But it is about relationship and keeping in step with the Holy Spirit.

I recognize that I can be self-deceived, so I cross reference what I hear with the word of God, because the Spirit of God will never speak against the word of God. I find it interesting that I often hear one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. This is why we need to continue in Bible study.



In Isaiah 50:4 we read, “The Sovereign Lord has given me a well instructed tongue. To know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being instructed.”

That language of instruction is about apprenticeship and relationship with the teacher, Rabbi Jesus. There is nothing magical about the morning. Just make it a daily practice to listen the Holy Spirit.

3. Picture the Holy Spirit moving in and through your life. The Holy Spirit is mysterious, and we continue to respect that mystery. At the same time, the Holy Spirit is also knowable. This is one of the reasons the Scriptures provide us with word pictures or metaphors to understand the person and work of the Holy Spirit. Look at this list:

• Hovering over the waters • Dove • Oil and anointing • New birth • Streams of living water • Wind • Fire • Pouring • Gift • Breath

With this precedent of biblical word pictures and metaphors, we are going to practice this experience right now. Throughout the sanctuary you will find various pictures.

In a few moments we are going to stand up and ask the Holy Spirit to lead us to a picture that expresses how the Spirit is working in and through our lives and faith communities. Take a few minutes to linger until you find a picture that fits. This picture is yours to keep.

After you find a picture, gather into groups of three and briefly share why you selected this specific picture.

Just to give an example of how this works, I will go first. I selected this picture.

It’s a balloon festival. I was attracted to the vibrant colors. This picture reminded me of how the Holy Spirit, the Blazing Center, is advancing the mission through the multiethnic mosaic of churches. I see the Holy Spirit working in and

through the Ethnic Commission and the ethnic associations. I see how the Holy Spirit is working through the sixfold test, especially in the area of practicing solidarity.

Everyone ready? Go for it.

I trust this was an encouraging exercise for you.

Let’s continue to walk this journey together as we learn to keep in step with the Holy Spirit.

I want to leave you with two verses:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).

“May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit and the love of God, be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14).



T I Z O N P A G E 7 S E R M O N S E R I E S

L I V I N G T H E D R E A M : T H E K I N G D O M O F G O D I N G LO B A L M I S S I O N

B Y A L T I Z O N

T E X T:

Acts 1:1-11

Greetings! My name is Al Tizon, and I serve as the executive minister of Serve Globally. My job of overseeing the international ministries of our denomination takes me literally all over the world. It’s a beautiful thing to go and see what’s going on across cultures and around the world through our global personnel and partners. Besides being a little dizzy from time-zone hopping (the closest thing to time-travel that one can experience), I travel in awe as I see what God is doing in and through this little but thoroughly global family of faith called the Evangelical Covenant Church.

I’m honored today to share a few thoughts with you from Acts 1.

A clever response of some these days to the question, “How are you, or how you doing?” is “I’m living the dream.” It’s a cut above “Fine,” to be sure, but are you really? Are you—are we—living the dream? If so, what dream? Whose dream? What are we talking about? My hope is, if and when followers of Jesus say it, we mean the dream, God’s dream, as God has revealed it.

One memorable place I went the last few years was Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, as I tagged along with the Covenant World Relief team. We gathered our community development partners there, amazing people from all over Africa, to sharpen and encourage one another in the grueling work of community development. Since that trip, I’m convinced more than ever before that we in the West have much to learn from our African partners. It was an amazing week of inspiration and learning.

But for me, it was also a week of cringing, as I remembered my own attempts to do development work in the Philippines back in the day. So embarrassing in light of what I was hearing from our African partners! We did it wrong in so many ways.

There was at least one thing we did right though, I believe. We operated under the basic premise that if the people of the community are the ones to determine the whats and the hows of projects or initiatives, then the better chance they have to succeed. So in our community gatherings, we’d ask a question to start things off that went something like this: “Friends, if God were mayor around here, what would be different?”

Now this was the Philippines, so God-talk was not a problem. In fact, it was perfectly natural to include God in common conversation. What wasn’t so natural among the poor was getting people to try to imagine a different kind of life. It often took a few meetings to get them to engage in the question, but eventually people started to play along. At first, the responses would be funny—some man would stand up and say, “If God was in charge, I’d be married to Marilyn Monroe.” Then someone else would say, “Yeah, and we’d all be

A L T I Z O N is the executive

minister of Serve Globally

S E R M O N T W O


driving BMWs, and money would be growing on trees,” and so on. Prosperity-genie-god would have his five minutes, and we’d all laugh, which was a good thing.

But after a while, someone—usually a woman—would get serious and say something like, “If God were mayor, we’d all have homes made of cement so the floods wouldn’t wipe us out every year.” And then another would say, “Our kids wouldn’t die of typhoid, pneumonia, and other treatable diseases.” And then the responses would start to pop like popcorn around the room:

• If God were mayor, our children would go to school in ironed uniforms and learn how to read and write and do math.

• Our husbands would have jobs, and they wouldn’t drink so much, and they wouldn’t have mistresses on the side.

• Our wives and daughters wouldn’t have to work at the red-light district or work in foreign lands as maids.

• There would be no more domestic abuse and violence and crime.

• There’d be clean water that we wouldn’t have to walk miles to fetch.

• God would protect us from the government that harasses us and beats us and forces us to move.

• We would own this land, grow our own vegetables, put a fish pond in the middle of that field, and own cows and pigs.

• If God were mayor, we would go over to God’s house and fellowship there and worship there every day.

What we attempted to do in those town hall meetings was to awaken within the people the ability to dream again, and dream our friends did. They dreamed of a world where there will be no more mourning and crying and pain; where

there will be no more death, just life and peace.

Without really knowing it, our friends in those desperately poor communities dreamed about the kingdom of God wherein Christ dwells—not only dwells, but reigns in righteousness and justice, peace and love. And when the poor in these communities began to dream, we knew that the work of community transformation had begun. I was convinced then, and even more so today, that any enduring transformation in Christ—whether we’re talking about personal or community or world—begins with our ability to dream the kingdom dream.

I. ALL ABOUT THE KINGDOM (v. 3). As the mission guy, I must have read this morning’s text a hundred times in my Bible-reading life. Usually, it’s verse 8 where I end up spending the most time. Recently though, it has been verse 3 that has been glowing for me: “After his suffering Jesus presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them forty days [and here’s when it starts to glow] and speaking to them about the kingdom of God.”

That’s our mission, you know: to bear witness in word and deed to the kingdom of God. It’s our mission, because it was Jesus’s mission. From beginning to end—from his birth to his ascension—Jesus was all about the reign, or kingdom, of God. One way to understand the mission of Jesus is that he essentially helped people to dream again according to the kingdom—to be captivated and motivated by God’s beautiful and certain future. I get excited to think about our mission as enabling people to dream the kingdom dream in a world that has forgotten that God is alive and on the move, directing history toward the fulfillment of that dream.

Our friends in those communities I served back in the day, who started to imagine life with God in the center echoed other dreamers found in the Scriptures, such as the prophet Isaiah, who heard God say, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth….No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall

L I V I N G T H E D R E A M : T H E K I N G D O M O F G O D I N G L O B A L M I S S I O N


there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime….They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat. They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity….The wolf and the lamb shall feed together” (65:17).

Another dreamer: In Revelation 7, John caught a glimpse of the same dream but further in the future. He saw a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were all poised for worship, because the one standing in front of them put an end to hunger, thirst, tears, suffering, persecution, and pain.

From the Old Testament to the New, it’s all about the kingdom dream. And I want to remind us that the kingdom dream is not just a pipe dream. It’s not just wishful thinking. The kingdom of God is not a metaphor! It’s real; we catch glimpses of it right now in the present—whenever someone turns to Christ, or a healing takes place, or a poor community is empowered, or when we do right by refugees, or when stores like REI and Dick’s Sporting Goods decide not to sell AR-15s anymore. These and many other events cause us to say, “There is the kingdom!” They point to the truth that God’s kingdom of peace, justice, and salvation will prevail.

Meanwhile, our mission is to reflect this coming kingdom, and to extend God’s invitation for all to enter, even now, into the joy of kingdom life. Our mission is all about bearing witness to the kingdom dream in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and the ends of the earth.

II. NOT ABOUT US (vv. 4-8). It’s all about the kingdom of God. In verse 3 we read that the risen Jesus reviewed with his followers about the kingdom for 40 days. When this verse becomes the central verse of this passage, the verses that follow take on a different character for me—they start to blink and flash, like warning lights. So I ask, what could Jesus be warning us about in light of the kingdom?

A. Not Relying on Ourselves to Fulfill the Dream (vv. 4-5). One warning is in vv. 4-5, where Jesus tells his disciples to stay put and wait for the promise of the Holy Spirit. I hear him say it like this: “Now friends, don’t go anywhere, and don’t do anything until the Holy Spirit comes upon you, okay? I’ve been reviewing the kingdom dream with you for the last 40 days, but not to give you the impression that you can somehow fulfill it yourselves.” That’s blinking, flashing warning light #1: Don’t try to fulfill the kingdom dream on our own. This is ultimately God’s dream to fulfill.

To remind myself of this, I’ve been gradually phasing out certain words from my theological vocabulary—words like, “building” or “advancing” or “furthering” the kingdom; because frankly, our actions don’t build, advance, or further anything of the kingdom. I’ve been gradually replacing those with words like, “demonstrate” or “reflect” or “point others in the direction of” the kingdom. That might sound hair-splitting for some, but anything that reminds us that the kingdom dream is God’s is a good thing.

It’s when we try to “live the dream” on our own, however well-intentioned and impassioned, that we find ourselves spinning our wheels, burning out, wasting time and energy, and hurting ourselves and other people. The church isn’t just weak and ineffective without the Spirit; it can be downright dangerous and destructive. In fact, as I’ve studied the underside of missions history—or the colonial model of spreading the gospel in the non-Western world—I’ve become more and more convinced that all the paternalism, condescension, manifest destiny, destruction of indigenous cultures, racism, slavery, etc., were the consequence of doing missions without the Holy Spirit!

O Lord, forgive us and give us the patience to wait on your Spirit before trying to live the kingdom dream in any way, shape, or form. Amen.

Church, without the Spirit, the beautiful and powerful Christian faith devolves into rote worship, doctrinaire legalism, irrelevant theology, lifeless catechism,


manipulative evangelism, and dangerous mission. So, Jesus said, “Please don’t go anywhere and don’t do anything until the Holy Spirit comes, okay? Please?”

B. Not Settling for Lesser Dreams (vv. 6-8). I see another blinking, flashing warning light in verses 6-8. It’s all about the kingdom dream for the whole world and nothing less, if we take our cue from the ministry of Jesus. Blinking, flashing warning light #2 is this: Don’t settle for a lesser, nationalistic dream!

The kingdom dream is for the whole world. The disciples didn’t seem to get this, of course. In verse 6, they ask, “Lord, is it at this time that you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Now I imagine Jesus at this point, second-guessing his choice of disciples, saying to himself, “They still don’t get it, do they? After three years of teaching and demonstrating the kingdom in their midst, and more recently after 40 days of reviewing the kingdom with them—this is the question they ask me?” Jesus had been for years speaking and showing the justice, righteousness, peace, forgiveness, and love of the kingdom of God for the whole world, but what his closest companions wanted to know from the risen Jesus was, “Lord, is it at this time that you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Despite sharing all the glories and mysteries of the kingdom dream, the disciples couldn’t break out of their nationalist thinking; they were “Israel first.” They mistook the kingdom dream for a dream only for Israel.

Well, good thing we’re more enlightened than those original disciples, right?! It’s no different today, is it, sisters and brothers? We can so easily fall for the allure of a lesser dream. But it’s not about the Israelite dream; it’s not about the American dream; it’s not about “making America great again,” especially if making it great again means marginalizing, disadvantaging, and harassing others.

Folks, Jesus’s teaching on the kingdom is not about national greatness, whatever our view of national greatness may be. The dream of national greatness is not big enough

for followers of the King of kings and the Lord of lords. This was Jesus’s response to the disciples’ small question. After saying it wasn’t for them to know when God was going to do anything, he reminded them of the bigness of the dream. The kingdom dream isn’t just for Israel; yes, it’s for Jerusalem, but it’s also for Judea and Samaria; it’s for Palestine too, and Egypt, Congo, Thailand, Philippines, Mexico, Russia, the United States, and for the rest of the 200+ nations that make up today’s world. That’s how big my dream is, my disciples. And furthermore—verse 8—you shall be my witnesses in all these places of the kingdom dream for all. Oh, to embrace that dream! Let’s live that dream, the kingdom dream, and nothing less. And let’s awaken others to this dream and nothing less, across cultures and around the world.

Conclusion –There’s one more warning light I see in the passage, and I conclude with this. Verses 9-11 say that Jesus was lifted up to the sky, and as the disciples witnessed this gravity-defying event, they began to gaze. Who wouldn’t, right? They gazed and gazed and kept on gazing until two angels had to come to jolt them back to reality. They asked, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Concluding blinking, flashing warning light #3 is this: Don’t gaze up in the sky too long looking for Jesus. It’s time now to look for him among the refugees, the immigrants, the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, the traumatized, the despairing, the lost. Time now to engage the world around you with the good news of God’s kingdom. Time to do justice and love mercy; to tell any and all about the dream that will become a reality in Christ. Time now to turn from our vertical gaze to the horizontal and pray, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

“Time to live the dream,” the angels said, “to bear witness to the coming kingdom in Jesus’s name and by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Amen.

T I Z O N P A G E 1 0 S E R M O N S E R I E S


T H E H O LY S P I R I T C O N N E C T S

B Y L A N C E D A V I S

T E X T:

Acts 2:1-47

L A N C E D A V I S is the

executive minister of

Develop Leaders

Hello, my name is Lance Davis, and I am the executive minister of Develop Leaders and the Ordered Ministry of the ECC. Part of my role is to make sure that we resource pastors, affirm them in their role, and help them become more resilient to serve their constituency in the churches of the ECC. It has been a tremendous blessing as I’ve walked into this role to be able to do what I believe I’ve been gifted to do. The Lord has called me specifically to look after the souls of our women and men who serve the kingdom of God. So it is such an honor to participate in this Blazing Center sermon series. Specifically, I’ll be talking about how the Holy Spirit connects, and our Scripture today is going to talk a little bit about how the Holy Spirit does indeed connect us all.

We know we live in a fallen world, or a world that seems as though we’re more and more disconnected, and the issues are more polarizing than ever. But we as the body of believers are called to be different from the world. We are people who are called to be connected. We are not supposed to have church in our living rooms and stay there. We’ve been called to be connected to one another and to our brothers and sisters, so that we might be able to reflect the mosaic and the kingdom of God in the way he has called us. We see this in the Scriptures in Acts 2:1.

We are called to be connected because the Holy Spirit does the connecting in verse 1 of chapter 2: “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now, there were staying in Jerusalem God fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, ‘Aren’t these all men of Galilee? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome, (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!’ Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, ‘What does this mean?’”

Brothers and sisters, looking at the Scriptures, we find a multiethnic phenomenon taking place. We find devout Jews from all over the known world. Or, as the Scripture says, “from all under heaven that came from everywhere,” in order to engage in their Judaic tradition. While they were all together, we find that they experienced something. There was a group of Galileans, a group of probably unlearned men, who started speaking in the language of those persons who were visiting at the time.

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It’s interesting that these persons who were speaking in these other tongues were not just speaking gibberish or a form of glossolalia (as some might call it). They were engaged in a conversation where every person was able to hear the wondrous works of God. I’d like to pause to say that that’s exactly what we’ve been called to do. We practice so much bad news, and all of the things that disrupt our lives, but we’ve been called to preach the good news of Jesus Christ. Each one of these people was coming from a context or a place where life wasn’t that easy. In Palestine, life was not that easy. Traveling to Palestine wasn’t that easy. And the places where they came from also had problems. That’s one thing that isn’t new. Problems have been around since the very beginning. But notice that what they hear about the wondrous works of the Lord.

We don’t know if those were past wondrous works or if they were present wondrous works. We just know that what they heard being spoken in their own language was the wondrous works of God. And they asked themselves, “What does this mean?” In other words, all of us are hearing these unlearned men speak in our own language, the wondrous works of God. Now, I would imagine that the wondrous works of God taking place in Phrygia would be totally different than those that are experienced by the Medes. But we find that all of them concluded that no matter what they heard, they were hearing of the wondrous works of God. This excites me, fascinates me—out of all they could have heard, they heard the wondrous works of God and they asked the question, “What does this mean?” What does this miraculous episode mean? What does this phenomenon mean to us?

Well, as the Scriptures goes on, it says that some people made fun of them saying, “They’ve had too much wine.” That’s the way it goes when we hear of what great things God has done. Perhaps you’re reflecting on some of the great things God has done in your life—in the past and present—and what you’re looking for the Lord to do. These wondrous works could just be the fact that he gives us

magnificent and beautiful things to behold. For example, we behold the great weather—sometimes. Even snow brings a tremendous amount of beauty to it. No matter what, they heard of the wondrous works of God. And I want to proclaim to you that the beginning of our recognizing that God has called us together through his Holy Spirit allows us to see that God is calling us into a walk and a phenomenon of good news.

He’s calling us to be the beloved community, and the beloved community is in community together. Verse 14 says, “Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: ‘Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”’”

God here is speaking to our hearts and saying that, as he will then add a date at a later time, he will begin to call all of his people to himself. We find that there’s going to be women and men who will prophesy. They will be proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. What they had on the day of Pentecost was really just a snippet, just a small sample of what was going to come in the future.

And as this prophecy of Joel is unfolding, it says that “even on my servants, in both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days.” The pouring out happens liberally. The pouring out is not sparing. The pouring out of the Holy Spirit obviously is something God wants to be in full


supply, so that no one walks around short on the presence of the Holy Spirit. They are in full supply of what God will supply. This, I believe, will be the mechanism that draws us all together. I believe the Holy Spirit is the one indeed who brings us together, who merges us, who congeals us, who allows us to experience a life in community together.

I would like to pause and say that I think it’s impossible to live in community together without the Holy Spirit for all these people that we see in this particular chapter. They are from every walk of life. Later, we’ll see that they were engaged in fellowship. Later on we’ll see that they gave themselves to not only the apostles’ doctrine, but also engaged in going from house to house, ingratiating one another, and embracing each other.

I want to conclude this particular portion by saying that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” It is this proclamation that is the prophecy of the sons and daughters who are preaching the word of God. And whatever it is that they say, whatever it is that they’re proclaiming is going to cause a reaction of those who hear in faith and they will “call on the name of the Lord.”

Hebrews 11:6 reminds us that “without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” I believe that this is indeed one of those opportunities where people hear the word and they’ve already wondered about God. They’ve already asked themselves, who is he? Who is it? Who is doing this work? Who has created all things that we know? And the answer comes when someone preaches the gospel.

When someone preaches the good news, then someone is suddenly moved by the Holy Spirit to state his faith is Jesus. He came, died, was resurrected on the third day, and now, through the power of the Holy Spirit, wants to dwell in each one of us. “Anyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” That word “saved” in Greek is “sothesethai.” The base of the word “sothesethai” is “sozo.”

I find it quite interesting that the “sozo” used in Greek is similar to the letters S.O.S., which describes another way to be saved, to be rescued, to be delivered, to be healed, to be made whole.

Now, I don’t believe Samuel Morris, who created the Morse code, had this Greek word on his mind. As a matter of fact, from what I understand, S.O.S. is not even an acronym. It was actually just a word that was spoken in urgency or a mayday. It was an expression to be able to communicate to the folks on the receiving end that we are in distress.

Beloved, we are in distress. We live in distress. Were going through the challenges of life, but our S.O.S. is calling on the name of the Lord. It’s a part of what connects us. We’re all different in our challenges, different in our complicated lives, and the things that stress us out, but what is common to us is that we’ve all called on the name of the Lord and we are indeed saved.

The Scriptures go on to say, “Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”

Those who call on the name of the Lord, death will not be able to keep a hold of you. We escape death, as we know it, when we call upon the name of the Lord. But as we hurry through this particular passage of Scripture, I’m always celebrating what I find in these words. When Peter finishes his sermon, he ends up with these statements:

“Fellow Israelites, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. [That’s Jesus Christ.] Seeing


what was to come, he spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.”

Yes, that Holy Spirit was poured out on that day of Pentecost that made people proclaim the good works of God in the language of other people, in languages they were not even familiar with. They were able to speak, under the power and anointing of the Holy Spirit, the glorious works of God. And when they did so, the people asked the question, “What does this mean?” But after Peter spoke and preached, they proclaimed and asked the question, “Brothers, what shall we do?” Because Peter had just said, “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah….When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’”

This is also the question for us today. We are in a fragmented society. There is a calamity on every end. Our answer is the same as Peter’s. We ask, “What shall we do?” knowing that this Christ died on our behalf and was raised from the dead, in order that we might never see and taste death.

Knowing this, what shall we do? “Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’” The Holy Spirit is a gift and the Spirit of God is present with us when we receive this gift. This gift that you and I receive is really the connecting power. It is the thing, the presence of God, that brings us together and makes us one. We’re not brought together by the things that societally puts us together. We’re not even brought together by culture, for there were various cultures present here. We’re brought together only, and specifically, by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures go on to say, “And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is

for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

I believe that in his calling he has made it possible so that you and I might be able to call on him. And in our calling on him, we are drawn together as we are drawn to him. It is not just the vertical beam of the cross that connects us with God, but it’s also the horizontal beam that connects us with each other. This calling is the call that called all of these folks to come and listen to the message of our beloved brother Peter. And with many other words, he warned them and he pleaded with them, “‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’ Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.” That day, 3,000 souls responded to the gospel as Peter preached it!

Yes, there is a call from God, and that call is a call to repentance. That call is a call to baptism. But first, it’s a call to trust in him as Lord and Savior. Second, he cares for us. God knows exactly where we are. He knows what we’re going through. He cares for us. We live in a world where people say they care about us, but do they really care about us the way the Lord cares about us? He cares about us when we’re good and when we’re not so good. He cares about us and loves us unconditionally. And not only does he call us and care for us, but he also cautions us. Remember the Scripture says that. And Peter cautioned them and warned them with many other words, saying, “Save yourself from this perverse generation.” In other words, there were a lot of things that were going on, probably culturally in society, but he was saying, “This is not your focus.”

Our focus is on him who is able to keep us from falling. Our focus is on him, who has called us out of darkness into a marvelous light. And then finally he connects us. These 3,000 people, who didn’t come from the same background, who didn’t have the same upbringing, who didn’t even live in the same region, all responded to the same message. And as they responded, they opened their hearts up to Christ.


I just look at this passage that says in light of their coming together to call on the name of the Lord, coming together, being baptized and repenting, that they devoted themselves to each other and to the fellowship and to the doctrine of the apostles. They devoted themselves to prayer. They devoted themselves to staying in the word and staying with each other.

I always look at this, a possibility where we, as the beloved of Jesus Christ, are like a garment. As a matter of fact, I took this from my wife (and I hope no one tells her). She knits and this is what she was knitting. I looked at a ball of yarn. And I also looked at the garment she was knitting. And I realized that without Christ, this is what we are. We’re yarn. We’re individuals. We’re known for whatever color, or what kind of texture, we have as yarn. But then God through the Holy Spirit actually begins to weave us and mold us into something the Scripture would refer to in Hebrews as having faith in him. As we grow in him, as we love him and honor him, he is fitly joining us together as the Scripture would say. And as he is joining us together, we make a garment of Christ. Without the Holy Spirit, well, we are only becoming unraveled. We’re only becoming individuals. Again, he’s the one through the Holy Spirit who knits us together, who fits us together, who joins us together.

I would like to close with another analogy. Imagine yourself to be a conservationist and you’re avid. You’re dogmatic about it. You just take every single bottle in and you make sure it’s recycled. You find the container to recycle. Then you go to the community, you start recycling from there, and people begin to know you as a recycler. They know you as a staunch conservationist and, only to find out after throwing away thousands, hundreds of thousands of bottles for years, that every bottle that you throw away couldn’t be used. As we shipped it away to be recycled, it was shipped back to our nation because it was contaminated.

Anyone who throws away a bottle for the sake of recycling has to realize that you can’t keep the top on it. And not only that, you have to make sure that this little tab that comes

on the bottle is also removed. If you’re going to be a true conservationist, then this packaging needs to come off, then you can recycle it. Outside of that, it’s no good. We talk about wanting to live together. We talk about wanting to worship and serve together, but I want you to know just like a contaminated bottle, it won’t work without the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit connects us. The Holy Spirit connects human beings, connects the churches. The Spirit connects us collectively as believers. God has been so faithful in his word and he’s been so faithful to us.

We don’t want to become an unraveling garment. Thinking we can handle challenges and tribulations and trials without the Holy Spirit we will just become unraveled and will become individualistic again. God has called us to become the collective God, the gathering of God. He’s called us to be his children and he connects us. He joins us together. He fits us together neatly, strategically, just as a knitted garment. We are knitted together by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit connects.

I thank God for each and every one of you. As I close, let us pray: Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to share about your word that brings us together as brothers and sisters. Father, I pray that you connect us even more. Help us to know that the connecting power is only through the power of the Holy Spirit. Lead us and guide us in the days to come. Help us to focus on your Son, Jesus, so that as we have received him, we allow his powerful Spirit to work in us, to join us closer together as brothers and sisters. In Jesus’s name I pray. Amen.

God bless you.


PA U L R O B I N S O N is the

executive minister of Love

Mercy Do Justice.

T E X T:

Acts 6:1-15

Among so many amazing things we know about the Holy Spirit, we know from Acts 6:1-15 that the Blazing Center qualifies for service. The church in Jerusalem

was still in its infancy, but they were growing and adding disciples daily.

Yet the power of the movement was threatened by a conflict that arose between the Hellenistic and Hebraic Jews over the daily distribution of food. The Hellenists, or Jews who spoke Greek and who had adopted elements of Greek culture, believe their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food—in contrast to the Hebrew widows who spoke Aramaic.

This wasn’t a resource problem because the believers had decided to pool their resources. According to Acts 4:34, “There were no needy persons among them.” They likely had enough food—the conflict was around how resources were being allocated. They were in the middle of a problem based on a lack of equity. Equity means everyone has equal opportunities because resources are allocated based on the degree of access. People with greater wealth, education, status, and power have easier access to societal rewards, but others have less access or in some cases, no access. This is a reality Jews were familiar with.

The Torah commands that accommodations be made for widows and other vulnerable people in society. Landowners were instructed to leave the edges of their fields unplowed so that poor people could have enough food to survive (Leviticus 19:9-10). Several Old Testament prophets, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Malachi lifted up concerns for the poor and decried the marginalization of widows and orphans (Isaiah 1:17, 23; 10:1; Jeremiah 5:28; 7:6; 22:3; Malachi 3:5).

The early church was also experiencing challenges related to cultural differences:

• They were all Jewish disciples and lovers of Jesus.

• They were pooling their resources.

• They were doing life together in community, but they were not all the same.

They were experiencing challenges related to differences that made a difference.

There are a ton of things that excite me about this early community of faith:

1. They were wrestling with what it meant to take care the most vulnerable in their midst. The church today must also be wrestling with this challenge. Who are the most vulnerable among us, and how are we responding to them? Like the early church, our prayers and responses should be led by the Holy Spirit, who is the Blazing Center of our mission.

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2. When faced with cultural conflict, they didn’t ignore the problem or demonize those who expressed concern. As people of faith, we’ve got to learn to listen for “helpful insights” that are sometimes hidden in a critique. My mother used to say that in life you’ve got to learn to “eat the fruit and spit out the seeds.” I’m still learning!

3. The apostles proposed a plan of action that included the whole community. Let’s be honest: It’s difficult to make big decisions with a bunch of folks. The “disciples” in our text were the whole community of believers. What likely happened is that the apostles conferred among themselves, prayed, and felt led to propose a solution to the larger community. The apostles were themselves full of the Holy Spirit and handpicked by Jesus (save one, Matthais, who was chosen to replace Judas). Their solution included allowing the community to pick its own leaders, who as it turns out were all men with Greek names.

We could learn a lot from this early church. No one likes it when someone makes a decision that impacts them without their involvement. Our ministry solutions should be grounded and informed by the communities that will be impacted by those decisions. Anything less is ministry malpractice.

We see that the apostles, as positional leaders, were qualified by the Holy Spirit, but the larger community of disciples were also qualified to contribute to a solution that was designed to bring not only equity but also shalom. Shalom is a peace that comes when everything is complete and whole. The purpose of justice in Hebrew society was to restore and sustain shalom. The shalom of this community had been broken, but the community came up with a decision that would help restore it. Shalom should be our word. We must seek ways to restore and sustain shalom in our own communities.

The proposal from the apostles to choose seven men

“pleased the whole group.” We recognize that this society was a patriarchal one, where women often had very different experiences than men. Unfortunately, our society still suffers in some respects from disparate treatment of women as compared to men. We’ve got to do better. One way we can do better is making sure we don’t keep just selecting men to serve in leadership. If our leadership teams include women when opportunities arise for service, women will also be chosen. Moreover, the ECC is a church committed to the multiethnic mosaic and as such should reflect this value in our decision-making and leadership—not unlike the vision of Revelation 7:9.

Getting the right people on your team is a critical step for effective leadership. The vision was cast by the apostles and enthusiastically endorsed by the people, but it would not work without choosing the right people to fill the job. The job description that the apostles designed was not like any I have ever seen, even for ministry positions. They listed three requirements for this important function: men of good report, full of the Holy Spirit, and full of wisdom.

1. Pick people with a good report. These leaders would be handling large sums of money, taking care of vulnerable people, as well as everyone else. Your reputation in the community matters. Integrity matters as a foundation for godly service.

2. Pick people who are full of the Holy Spirit. How do we measure this? The Scriptures say that we are known by the fruit we bear. Examine the fruit. (See Galatians 5:16-25; 1 Corinthians 13; Acts 1:8.) The Holy Spirit equips us with dynamite power to witness, to evangelize, to share the good news!

3. Pick people full of wisdom. Wisdom is the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment. Wisdom is born over time, through good seasons and bad, ups and downs, and in the biblical sense a reliance on God. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10).


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It’s ironic to me that there was no mention of customer service skills, experience in food service, or even purchasing when the church chose those early leaders. It seems that the skills specific to the task were those they would learn on the job. They were qualified because the Holy Spirit made them qualified. Their integrity, Spirit-filled life and wise leadership made them perfect for the job.

At the church where I grew up there was a missionary by the name of Frances Bynum. She wasn’t a missionary in the way Covenanters understand missionaries. She didn’t spend time spreading the gospel in a foreign land and serving indigenous people. But in my tradition, there were women called by God and sanctioned by the church to bring the good news of Christ to neighborhoods and new church plants, often led by other women called missionaries. They didn’t have big budgets, but they had big hearts and a passion for lost souls. Missionary Bynum developed quite a reputation for preaching, teaching, and being led by the Spirit.

One day an aspiring young missionary asked Missionary Bynum how she became so “anointed.” In other words, how did you become so “filled by the Spirit of God” as evidenced by your service? As the story goes, Missionary Bynum turned to the young woman and said, “My anointing came from working in the kitchen serving the saints meals.” Sometimes the most thankless jobs in ministry are places and spaces where God breaks you and molds you into what he wants you to be. It is in this holy crucible that we learn to trust God and love our neighbors as ourselves. We can’t afford to look down on any ministry opportunity that God affords. Early in the planting of Grace Outreach Covenant Church, I learned the importance of doing everything unto the Lord and not unto humans.

Make sure you walk with Integrity. Stay in communion with God, practice living the fruit of the Spirit, and ask God for wisdom.

It’s safe to assume that the leaders the early church

selected had all these basic qualifications, but Stephen, who would later go on to be martyred, was also Full of Faith. We know that “faith comes by hearing” and it is clear from the sermon Stephen preached before he died that he knew the word. You might say that Stephen and Phillip were overqualified for the job. They could do the job as described, but clearly the Holy Spirit, who does the qualifying, was preparing them and opening doors for them to make an even greater impact on the kingdom. What is God preparing you for? Your big break may begin with a small opening. Make the most of it!

It’s not clear how or when it happened, but God began to open doors for Stephen and under the power of God he “performed great wonders and signs among the people.” When persecution came to the church, he preached the sermon of his life. At his stoning, a young Saul was present, and we know God had a different plan for his life too. Phillip would go on to proclaim Jesus in the city of Samaria, cast out unclean spirits, and heal many people. He led the Ethiopian man to Christ, and some theologians argue that it was this man who helped to bring the gospel to Africa.

Leverage all that you can in this life to bolster your education, skills, and experience, but never forget that it is the Holy Spirit, the Blazing Center of our mission that qualifies for service.


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T H E S P I R I T O F D I S C I P L E M A K I N G

B Y M I C H E L L E S A N C H E Z

Brothers and sisters in Christ, let’s begin today by reconsidering a critically important question together. That question, I would say, actually surpasses every other question

in its immediate relevance and importance to our lives. And that question is, “What are we doing here?”

Typically people give answers to that question such as, “We’re here to glorify God and enjoy God forever.” “We’re here to worship.” “We’re here to love God and to love others.” These responses are not incorrect, but they are actually the answer to a different question—the question of why we were created. We were indeed created by a God of love, for the purpose of love, to love God, to glorify God, and to love others. Yet these are lists of things that we will do forever. And my question was slightly different. I want to know, why are we here on earth? Why are we here in this place?

That leads us to think there are certain things those of us who are in Christ can only do here on earth now, things we can’t do forever. Have you really pondered that? What is it that we can do now that we cannot do forever? These things are the secret to our joy, the true answer to the question. They are the things we should be majoring on and they are the unshakable purpose of our life here on earth. So let’s recall together what it is that we can do now that we can’t do forever.

We can join God in God’s mission to seek and to save the lost. We can say “yes” to God’s invitation, to be his witnesses, to be his storytellers of the greatest Person who ever lived and the greatest story that was ever told. We can embrace our appointment by God as ambassadors of holistic reconciliation in an effort to see people reconciled to God, reconciled to one another, and reconciled to all creation. We can join God on his relentless quest to make things right in this broken world. So what is it that we can do now that we can’t do forever? As we say together in the Evangelical Covenant Church, we can make more disciples among more populations in a more caring and just world.

I see my role as executive minister of Make and Deepen Disciples for the ECC is to remind every person in every ministry in our movement that making more disciples is at the very heart and soul of why we exist. It is the very purpose behind everything that we do. And this is not just my opinion (at least I hope not), but the opinion of Jesus Christ who shared his dream for his church in his final days in what we have come to call the Great Commission: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

This is Matthew 28, the Great Commission. Let’s talk about this word “great” for a minute. The word “great” can be used in several different senses. I’m sure that many of us

M I C H E L L E S A N C H E Z is the

executive minister of Make

and Deepen Disciples.

T E X T:

Acts 8:4-39

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regularly blurt out the phrase “That’s great” to mean, “That’s wonderful. That’s excellent. That’s exciting.” But I’m not so sure that’s what Jesus and his disciples were thinking that day when they heard the Great Commission. They were probably thinking something more along the lines of the first definition for “great” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which is “notably large in size, huge.” That’s a pretty good description of the true nature of this so-called Great Commission. I’m sure as the disciples heard it, they were dumbstruck by its magnitude. Most of these disciples had just let Jesus down. In other words, they were still having trouble being disciples. Were they really ready to now go and make disciples? And what about this craziness about making disciples of everybody? Now remember, this was before the days of planes and trains and automobiles, and Israel was going to be a challenge enough to reach.

Was Jesus serious? Well, he was indeed! We know he was serious because he sealed the Great Commission with a promise. It was the bow on top, the most important part of the Great Commission: “And surely I am with you. I am with you until the very end.” Without God, all things are pointless. With God, all things are possible. And the mystery of how Jesus can be with us, how he can be God with us, as we pursue his disciple-making mission, is soon revealed in the first chapter of the book of Acts. Jesus tells his disciples, “Actually don’t get started right away. I want you to wait. I want you to wait until I can be with you fully present in the form of the Holy Spirit.” And at Pentecost, Jesus gifted his church with his own spirit, the Holy Spirit, the only one who can empower us to fulfill our disciple-making mission.

Now, some have understood the Book of Acts to be the acts of the Apostles. I think we would do better to think of it as the “acts of the Holy Spirit.” Today we will learn from one such story in the Book of Acts about how the Holy Spirit acted to empower and encourage Phillip—not one of the early disciples, actually, but a deacon of the early church—to reach out and to make a disciple of a most unlikely

character, the Ethiopian eunuch. Our story today will cover a selection of verses from Acts 8:

Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah there. When the crowds heard Philip and saw the signs he performed, they all paid close attention to what he said (vv. 4-6).

So there was much joy in that city (v. 8).

Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”

Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.

“How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading: “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants? For his life was taken from the earth.”

The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or



someone else?” Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing (vv. 26-39).

Now, let’s take a closer look at the life of Philip the evangelist—the only one, by the way, whom the Bible calls by the title of “evangelist”—to understand three ways in which the Holy Spirit (Jesus with us) informs and empowers us as we make disciples:

1. The Holy Spirit guides our mission, 2. reaches the margins, and 3. illuminates the Messiah.

First, the Holy Spirit guides the mission after the disciples are scattered. In other words, basically persecuted and forced to leave Jerusalem due to persecution, Philip didn’t let that stop him. He continued to share Christ with all who would listen. And he even did that in Samaria, which was the very place that was typically quite hostile to anything Jewish and to Jewish people like Philip. But the people in Samaria, surprisingly, were not only listening, but were responding with great joy.

Now, all of this abundant fruit that Philip saw in Samaria would have been reason enough for him to stay right where he was and continue to harvest that fruit. But at the proper time God spoke and guided him to a new place and to a new person. And I’ve got to say the guidance really was a little strange. God said, “Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” And

the Scripture makes a note for us very specifically, this was a deserted place. This was like asking Philip to go from the center of everything to the middle of nowhere. Philip must have thought, “Now how could I possibly have any kind of impact here?” But he obeys. He took the step and, then when he did, God guided him again and nudged him to take yet another step through the Holy Spirit: “Go over there to that chariot.” And when he does, Philip has the unprecedented opportunity to make a disciple of an Ethiopian statesman whom the Spirit had already prepared to hear the good news.

It is so encouraging to know that it’s not up to us to figure out the mission of God. It is the Spirit of God who guides our mission. And this, by the way, is why prayer is so vitally important to mission. If you are familiar with the BLESS initiative, which is the Evangelical Covenant Church’s key evangelism research resource at this time, you know that if we truly want to bless the world, we must begin with prayer.

As you seek to make disciples, pray! Pray, not just so that you can talk to God about people, but so that God can talk about people to you. Pray so God can guide you. The Holy Spirit longs to guide you about who to speak to, where to go, how to love, and what the next step is—but he usually doesn’t shout. The Holy Spirit typically whispers and invites us to listen. He whispers so we’ll lean in and stay close to God on the journey. And as you pray, listening for the whispers and feeling the nudges of the Holy Spirit, realize that the Spirit typically does not reveal the entirety of God’s missional plan to us all at once. God’s style is to lead step-by-step-by-step just as he did with Phillip. The Holy Spirit yearns to speak God’s good news through you, through your unique voice. But before the Spirit can speak through us, we must first listen as he speaks to us. In his book Whisper: How to Hear God’s Voice, Mark Batterson asks the question, “Is God’s voice the loudest voice in your life?” That’s the question. If the answer is “No,” that’s the problem. Ultimately, all of us need to find our voice, the unique message God wants to speak through our lives. But



finding our voice starts with hearing God’s voice, and as we do, the Holy Spirit will guide our disciple-making mission.

Second, the Holy Spirit longs to reach the margins. No person is beyond the reach of God’s embrace, no matter what it might look like to us. And the Spirit of God is the one who opens our eyes to see this. To see that the good news truly is great joy for all people even, and perhaps especially, for those impossible people at the margins—whether on the margins of society or on the very margins of the earth. The Ethiopian eunuch happened to be both. Earlier in Acts 1, Jesus gave the disciples the gift of the Spirit for a purpose—to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Now I’m sure the disciples thought that this list was really something! Jerusalem and Judea, daunting but doable. Samaria, doable but distasteful. And the ends of the earth, downright impossible. And yet making a disciple from the very end of the earth is exactly what the Spirit empowered Phillip to do.

Shortly thereafter, according to one commentator, the Ethiopians were regarded by the Greeks, and their neighbors from Homer’s time onward, as living at the very edge of the world. So reaching an Ethiopian would in fact represent, for the Jewish people, that very thing—reaching the very ends of the earth. It was also a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. For example, Psalm 68:31 envisions a time when even the Ethiopians would reach out to God like the Holy Spirit did for Philip. The Spirit also awakens us to the reality that making disciples is synonymous with making every effort to reach every type of person—all ages, all races, all ethnicities, all abilities, all classes, all cultures, every type of person at the remotest reaches and the most distant margins of the world. But perhaps, even more significantly, there are certain key respects in which the Ethiopian eunuch draws our attention to how the Holy Spirit urges us to make disciples, not only at the margins of the earth but also at the margins of society.

One reason this story floors me, reading it 2,000 years later, is because it suggests the possibility that the first

fully non-Jewish convert to Christianity was a black man. Now, obviously our circumstances have changed quite a bit today. There is a world of difference between the Ethiopian official of Acts 8 and African American men today. Nevertheless, I know that largely due to the ongoing impact of slavery and societal discrimination, as well as the church’s historic complicity in those things, many black men continue to feel disenfranchised in society. And in some cases, they even feel distant from God.

Take a look, for example, at a study that was published in the New York Times in March 2018, detailing extensive data that indicates the reach of racism for black boys. The solid research of the study reveals that, even when black and white children grow up next to each other with parents who earn similar incomes, black boys fare worse than the white boys in 99% of America. And the gaps only worsen in the kind of neighborhoods that promise low poverty and good schools. It’s really a devastating and eye-opening piece that highlights the ongoing challenges that so many black boys and black men face in society today.

Another eye-opening read is the book Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores, by our own Dominique Gillard, who is the ECC’s director of racial righteousness. He urges us to question how it is that the U.S. holds more black adults in correctional control—that is in prison, jail, probation, or parole—than the total number of slaves that existed before the abolition of slavery. No wonder there are black men who continue to feel disenfranchised by society and, in some cases, distant from the God who allowed that to happen.

I used to work on Wall Street as an investment banker and, while I was there, I had an African American male friend who gave me a hard time for being a Christian. “How can you be a Christian” he asked me, incredulously, “Don’t you know that’s the white man’s religion?” I could tell that the Spirit was beginning to break through when I gently responded by reminding him that Jesus was also a man with brown skin who experienced discrimination and



disenfranchisement in his society. Looking back now, I also wish I had pointed out that the Holy Spirit made a special effort to reach this black man in Acts 8. And not only to reach him, but also to bestow upon him the honor of being among the first Gentile converts to Christianity. In fact, many argue he was the first—prior even to Cornelius. Which is why this story’s placement in the narrative suggests the gospel is good news of great joy for all people.

The Ethiopian eunuch also draws our attention to yet another important aspect of disciple-making at the margins. It’s true that in his own country, the Ethiopian eunuch had elite status. He was a royal official. He was in charge of the entire royal treasury. Plus the fact that he was reading and traveling by horse and chariot meant he was very wealthy and highly educated. Still, we should note that at this time in Israel—which was the place where he wanted to worship God—this man would have existed at the religious margins. This was true, not primarily because of race, but because of his marginalized sexual status. Even though this eunuch was visiting Israel to worship, and presumably was seeking to live as a God-fearer at that time, there nevertheless were strict biblical rules spoken plainly. Leviticus 21 and Deuteronomy 23 clearly barred eunuchs from the Temple for life because of their sexual status.

This man was quite literally doomed to a life of distance from God. Yet quite interestingly, one commentator points out that Isaiah 56:4-5 foresees a time when even eunuchs would be included among the people of God.

For this is what the Lord says: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant— to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.”

Perhaps this encouraging text is precisely why the eunuch was drawn to reading the scroll of Isaiah in the first place. As one commentator points out, the whole point of this scene is what was promised to the prophet Isaiah is now coming to pass in the life of the church.

A Gentile eunuch is welcomed among God’s people. Because of his sexual status, this man was doomed to distance from God. So imagine the jubilation he must have experienced as Phillip shared the good news, that through Jesus Christ, for the first time in his life, he could finally come near to God. Actually, even better still, God had come near to him for his whole life. The Ethiopian would have been prevented from truly worshiping God. Prevented from fully becoming a part of God’s community. Prevented from coming near to God. And this is why it was so poignant, and so poetic, when after hearing the good news of Jesus, the eunuch asked, “What is there to prevent me from being baptized?” Clearly, nothing at all, not anymore. And so he is baptized on that very day with joy. We learned from his story that the Holy Spirit breaks through boundaries. The Holy Spirit empowers and challenges us to make disciples at the margins.

So, we’ve seen that the Holy Spirit guides the mission, and we’ve seen that the Holy spirit reaches the margins. Finally, we see that the Holy Spirit illuminates the Messiah. At the end of the day, we’ve got to realize that disciple-making isn’t a thing. God doesn’t want our lives to be all about discipleship and disciple-making. God wants our lives to be all about Jesus. The difference is subtle, but it’s significant.

Discipleship only has value to the extent that it centers us in Jesus and deepens our devotion to a person, to the Messiah Jesus Christ. This emphasis on Jesus is vital, not only when it comes to deepening disciples, but also when it comes to making disciples. If you want to see the power of the Holy Spirit break through in someone’s life, don’t focus on things like theology or ethics or the church and, for heaven sake, definitely don’t focus on politics! Focus on Jesus Christ.



In The Art of Non-Evangelism, Carl Madeiras writes, “The gospel is not a ‘what?’ It is, not a ‘how.’ The gospel is a ‘who.’” The gospel is literally the good news of Jesus. Jesus is the gospel. So if you want to share the gospel, share Jesus. This is precisely the pivot point in our journey with the Ethiopian eunuch. As the man reads from Isaiah 53, the Spirit sends Philip to reveal to him that the very person he’s reading about is none other than the long awaited Messiah, Jesus Christ. This sheep who was led to the slaughter and whose life was taken away from the earth, was none other than the very Son of God, who loved us so much that he died and rose again to set us free and make a way for us back to God.

As we consider our call as disciple-makers, we must be very clear about our role and about God’s role. They are not the same thing. We can’t make anyone a Christian, so we must forever let go of that burdensome responsibility. What we can do is point people to Jesus, and when we do, it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to illuminate that Jesus is the way, that there’s no other path to God than through him, that Jesus is the truth, that he alone can show us what is real, and that Jesus is life itself, that full and forever joy comes only from him.

Our job is to give good news about Jesus because, as the eunuch asked, “How can I know unless someone guides me?” We are called to be guides and, one of the best ways to guide people into the good news of Jesus is to tell stories about him. We are to share the stories of Jesus from Scripture. Or, better yet, to read the stories of Jesus from the Scriptures together, just as Philip did on this day. And when we do, we must trust in the Holy Spirit’s wisdom and timing. We must trust that the Spirit is the one who will open people’s eyes and awaken their hearts to the reality that Jesus is the Messiah.

We conclude our journey together today where our Scripture itself concludes with joy. Verse 39 reads, “And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away (and this must’ve been pretty

interesting) and the eunuch saw him no more and went on his way rejoicing.” When we share Jesus with others, we may experience some weeping along the way. This is true. It’s not always easy to share Jesus with others, but we can be sure that joy will come in the morning. Spiritual conversations are challenging and they have their ups and downs, but ultimately they lead to joy. In his refreshing little book, The Reluctant Witness: Discovering the Delight of Spiritual Conversations, Don Everts explores a recent study which shows that Christians who have dived into the waters of spiritual conversation report positive feelings, including peace 71% of the time, joy 55% of the time, and even exhilaration 19% of the time. In fact, a majority of Americans (77%) are glad about their most recent conversation with someone who did not share their faith.

As we make disciples, the Holy Spirit guides the mission. The Holy Spirit reaches the margins. The Holy Spirit illuminates the Messiah. The Holy Spirit also brings joy.

When we consciously depend on the Holy Spirit to make disciples of us and to make disciples through us, we will ultimately experience joy. We will leave a legacy for others of joy in the heart of Jesus Christ. This is what life is all about. There are some things that we who are in Christ can only do now here on earth that we cannot do forever. As we say in the ECC, these things come down to joining God and God’s mission to make more disciples among more populations in a more caring and just world

Mission Friends, let’s do this!


T E X T:

Acts 16:6-10

PA U L L E S S A R D is the

executive minister of Start

and Strengthen Churches.

L E S S A R D P A G E 2 5 S E R M O N S E R I E S

S E R M O N S I X

A few years back a friend of mine, Mark, told me about driving his family home in the middle of the night. They were heading back to their place in Michigan. Mark loves

to drive at night when there are few drivers on the road because he likes to drive fast. He told me that on this particular night all his family were sleeping in the van, and he was driving in the left-hand lane on the interstate, as he tended to pass more than be passed.

Mark had recently been challenged in his faith to learn to listen for the voice of Jesus. Though a follower of Christ for many years, he was skeptical when people told him they had heard the Lord’s voice. On this night, as his family was sleeping and he drove through the night, he determined he would give listening a try. Basically, he said to Jesus, “If you’ve got something to say, well, I’m listening.” No sooner had he thought this than he felt impressed upon his mind that he should move into out of the left lane and into the right-hand lane. As quickly as that thought came, Mark expressed doubt—and the impression came back, even stronger: move into the right-hand land. Mark signaled moved into the right-hand lane. He looked up in time to see a vehicle passing them, going the wrong way at high speed in the lane he had just vacated. While Mark did not hear a literal voice, the impression he received was clearly from Jesus.

We are of a people that believe that God does indeed speak to us personally through the Holy Spirit, though maybe not always as clearly as how my friend Mark experienced it. Canadian theologian and author Dr. Gordon Smith, writes in his book Hearing the Voice of Jesus that there are two questions every believer must be able to answer: What is Jesus saying to me? And how do I know it is the voice of Jesus? It is a part of our maturing as followers of Christ to more clearly discern the voice of Jesus and know with confidence what he is saying to us.

We find many examples in Scripture of people listening for the voice of God to discern God’s will for them. In Acts 16:6-10, we see the Apostle Paul seeking to hear and understand what God is saying to him. The Scripture tells us:

Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

This passage relates a significant turning point in the second missionary journey of the

H E A R I N G T H E V O I C E O F J E S U S

B Y PA U L L E S S A R D

Apostle Paul, for he clearly believes that the Holy Spirit is directing him not to just visit churches he and fellow missionary Barnabus planted on their first mission trip, but to visit new countries as well. Places in which they are to plant new communities of faith—specifically Mysia and Bithynia and the province of Asia, regions in modern-day Turkey.

Paul is a classic missional leader in many ways: he feels he has a clear sense of where God would have him go, and he feels confident to act upon that vision. And, Paul convinces others to accompany him, in this case Silas, a fellow leader from his sending church in Antioch, and eventually a younger pastor named Timothy whom they pick up along the way. And so, they leave and visit the churches Paul and Barnabus had planted on his first trip. But according to the text, when they come to these new regions where people have not yet heard the good news of Jesus, inexplicably the Holy Spirit blocks Paul and his friends from entering these areas. The text tells us that Paul and friends retreat to the coast, to Troas, uncertain as to their next step.

Remember Gordon Smith’s questions every believer needs to answer? What is Jesus saying to me? How do I know it is the voice of Jesus? Paul finds himself frustrated in Troas asking these very same questions, wondering where it was that he went wrong in understanding the call of the Spirit. Had he misheard? Had his own ambition or evangelistic motivations spoken louder than the Holy Spirit as he sought to discern the opportunities of this journey?

Have you had this experience? Where your own ambition or needs seem to speak louder than the Holy Spirit as you sought to discern a path forward? Where the noise of your life and desire for control work against your ability to listen well? It is notable that Scripture tells us that it was actually in this moment of doubt, when Paul is questioning, when arguably he is at one of his lowest moments emotionally, that the Lord does indeed speak clearly to him in a vision as to where they are to go and whom to evangelize next. And the text says they immediately begin to make preparations to leave for Macedonia.

Gordon Smith writes that “the emotional contours of our lives become the soil in which we discern, sift, or determine what is truly from God and what is not.” Smith goes on to say, “Discernment is all about attending to what’s happening to us emotionally in a way that’s informed by the mind, by the breadth and witness of the Scriptures, and by the counsel of other Christians.” These three stops on the path of discernment are important. First, “informed by the mind” is where we use our reason and analytical tools. Second, “breadth and witness of the Scripture” affirms that as an idea or impression comes to us, we can test it against our understanding of God’s word, or we simply recognize its truth because of our familiarity with the Scripture. This is an important step in recognizing God’s voice as we do not simply come to know about God through his word; in a mystery and through the work of the Holy Spirit we encounter Jesus and come to know him better. Third, the counsel of other Christians affirms the communal aspect of discernment where we test what we think we hear with other believers who we trust.

Smith adds a fourth point though when he writes, “But it’s really testing our own hearts to see if this comes from God.” When I asked a friend how she knew what she heard was from Jesus, she said she would sense a lift in her spirit. For some of us it comes as we are reading God’s word. Whether or not we are aware of it, we always bring our whole self to Scripture. Our worries, concerns, and questions, as well as our hopes and joys, are with us as we read. So, we may be reading something written 3,000 years ago, but all of a sudden, the words jump off the page at us and we realize this verse is for us today. And it speaks directly to the situation that has been causing us concern. I call this the “shock of recognition”—where you are reading or hearing something from Scripture and all of sudden you realize it is God’s word for you right now. In other words, it is in paying attention to God’s presence in the everyday events of our lives that the voice of Jesus can often be heard.

There is a sense of immediacy here, where the Spirit



speaks and moves in the moments and spaces of our everyday existence. Author Cynthia Bourgeault, in her book Mystical Hope, writes, “The spiritual life can only be lived in the present moment, in the now. When we go rushing ahead into the future or shrinking back into the past, we miss the hand of God, which can only touch us in the now.” There is a truth expressed here where God has plenty to redeem or celebrate about our past, and much to say about our hopes or anxieties around the future, but God through the Holy Spirit is only able to speak to us in the now. If we spend most of our time living in the past or looking to the future, we will miss what Jesus is trying to say. Bourgeault reminds us that our ability to listen for the voice of Jesus is directly tied to our attentiveness in the present moment.

Interestingly, there is a neurological disorder, phonognosia, where people can hear and understand the words someone says, but they fail to recognize the voice, even of someone they have known for many years. This disorder results in an inability to build trust, because they never have the indicators that this person is known to them, reliable and safe. They can’t tell the voice of one they love from that of a stranger.

A number of years ago, Rebecca and I were camping in the Desolation Wilderness in California. It was mid-May, before Memorial Day so the campground was mostly empty. As we drove in, there was only one other family that we could see. It had been rather windy, but as the sun went down, the air stilled and quiet descended upon the campground. All that could be heard was the crack and pop of pine campfires and the low murmur of voices. And, at our campsite anyway, there was the clank of pots as we began to make supper. It was during that time of darkness that exists between twilight and the rise of the moon when across the surface of the evening calm ripped a child’s terrified cry, “Mommy, Mommy, where are you?” The panic was unmistakable in her voice. “Mommy, Mommy!” Her voice was off to the right of my camp. I remember thinking, “She’s probably with the family I saw earlier on the other

side of the campground—which means she’s heading the wrong direction.”

“Mommy, mommy, where are you?” You could hear the growing terror in her voice. And then I heard a woman’s voice calling from somewhere down to my left—her voice was calm, soothing, firm, “I’m here, baby, I’m coming, don’t you worry.” The girl cries out, “Mommy!” in a way that is both scared and hopeful, as she recognizes her mother’s voice and the chance that everything will be okay. And the mom called again, “Turn towards me, honey, and keep walking and I will meet you.” The little girl knew what to do and there was no hesitation in her following the instructions from her mom. I stood up then and could see the bobbing flashlights as they made their way toward each other across the campground.

The gift to the lost girl was not just that her mom was there and heard her cry, but that she in turn recognized the voice of her mom, so she could trust the instructions that she was given, allowing her to find safety. As a result of the Fall, of the brokenness in our world, we can be a people with spiritual phonognosia—the inability to recognize the voice of Jesus as he speaks through the Holy Spirit. The Scripture tells us in John 10:27 that Jesus is the Good Shepherd and that the sheep know the voice of the shepherd and confidently follow him as a result. We become familiar with the voice of Jesus through reading God’s word and meditating on its meaning, from learning to listen in the events of our lives, reflecting on when we think we have heard Jesus in the past and whether or not those intuitions proved true, and checking what we hear with others we trust. Remember, we are of a people who believe that God does indeed speak to us personally through the Holy Spirit. And over time, as we make a practice of listening through reading and in prayer, our ability to discern grows until we are able to recognize the voice of Jesus and know with confidence what the Holy Spirit is saying. So, how is your listening? And, what is Jesus through the Holy Spirit saying to you?



T E X T:

Acts 2:16-18This is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:“In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.”

T H E B L A Z I N G C E N T E R F O R W O M E N I N T H E C H U R C H TO DAY

B Y M A R I LY N W I L L I A M S

When the Holy Spirit came upon the church and into the hearts of the first followers of Jesus, on the day of Pentecost, Peter quoted Joel’s prophecy in the Old Testament to help the crowd understand what was happening. God has always intended to pour out the Holy Spirit on both men and women in his church, as equal partners, workers and leaders for and in the kingdom. In the Evangelical Covenant Church, we believe what Peter preached is the blazing center for our theology of women.

I am Marilyn Williams, an ordained minister with the Evangelical Covenant Church, and I have the distinct honor of serving at Covenant Offices as the first director of women’s initiatives. This is a brand-new model of ministry for women in the Covenant. We seek to expand upon the rich heritage of women’s ministries within our denomination by fostering the flourishing of women into our five mission priorities.

It is a new day for women; and we have intentionally stepped out of the old silo model to equip and empower women not in one area of ministry, but in all areas of ministry! We are committed to the flourishing of female disciples of Christ in all areas of kingdom witness, service, and leadership. In this new ministry model, men and women will work more collaboratively within our denominational mission priorities to foster the flourishing of women in every stage of life, ministry context, and personal call. We believe this is God’s original intention.

What do I mean by God’s original intention? Let me explain something referred to as “The trajectory of the Holy Spirit.” My seminary professor of theology, Dr. Glen Scorgie, used the art of pass-receiving in football as an illustration to help Christians better understand how God intends men and women to interact in his kingdom.1 Like the quarterback in a football game, God has a plan, a designated trajectory in mind. Even though we are not always ready to execute that plan, God continues to work out his intention through the work of the Holy Spirit.

One such example of the trajectory of the Holy Spirit at work in human history is the issue of slavery and racism. Sadly, the legality of human slavery, even supported by many evangelical churches, existed in the United States until the 1860s. One hundred years later, the residual inequities of Emancipation required further working of the Holy Spirit to move within the hearts of his people toward the civil rights movement. Clearly, as we long for the full expression of God’s freedom to be realized on the earth, God is continuing to lead his church down the field, toward his intended trajectory of freedom and dignity for all God’s children. What might have once been unclear to us has become more and more clear. Like a dimmer switch, the Holy Spirit is slowly but surely opening our eyes to God’s original intention for his creation.

M A R I LY N W I L L I A M S

is the director of

Women’s Initiatives.

W I L L I A M S P A G E 2 8 S E R M O N S E R I E S

B O N U S S E R M O N

It is becoming more and more evident today that God is moving his people toward a fuller understanding and application of equality, freedom, and mutuality between men and women. “Fuller understanding” is key here. It requires of us to understand this is not “our” new thing, or even God’s new thing. Having a fuller understanding of what God is doing requires us to understand that what God is doing today has been part of God’s intentional plan all along.

However, as we all know, understanding male and female interaction in the kingdom has not always been a simple play for God’s church. Just as it is no simple skill for a pass-receiver to anticipate where the ball will land from the moment it is released, it has not been simple for the church to understand God’s intended movement through the Scriptures, and through church history, for men and women to work together in partnership with him.

Yet God is patient and consistent. Throughout the course of church history, we can see God moving his people steadily away from the ways of this world and toward the culture of his kingdom. Like the pass-receiver who must keep his eyes on the ball and learn to read the pass, the church in each generation must also learn to identify and then move with the trajectory of the Holy Spirit. Just as God revealed truth about slavery and just as God continues to convict his church about racism, God is working to move men and women into equal partners in his kingdom. Sadly, this too has taken God’s children quite a long time to receive God’s intended trajectory. Up until 1920, women did not have the legal right to own property as sole proprietors, attend universities, or vote. Although some would view the feminist movement as a temptation for the church to follow secular society instead of God’s leading, contemporary feminism has its roots in evangelical Christianity. Tracing back to the 19th century when women fought slavery, demanded the right to vote, turned over unjust laws, organized and inspired philanthropic volunteers, and bravely went out into the remote parts of the world as missionaries

and Bible translators, “Christian feminism” predated the secular feminism we are familiar with today. Although secular feminism certainly has its flaws, we can relate to its rebellion against movements that directly conflict with our Christian values for women as divine image bearers.

Because the church has been commissioned by God to be a light, a vanguard, in the world, showing the world the way of the kingdom, it is necessary for the church take a closer look and begin to move toward God’s trajectory intention for women. As evangelicals we look beyond tradition and culture for our kingdom direction—we look first and foremost to the word of God, and a careful and holistic study of the word. We begin our search for God’s trajectory regarding men and women in the kingdom by understanding there is a redemptive narrative to the word of God. Redemption is the central impulse of the gospel. Primary to the word of God is the redemptive act of saving and regenerating our souls through faith in Christ. One part of this renewal is the Holy Spirit’s work to redeem humanity into its original intention. Relationships between male and females is a significant part of this plan!

In Genesis 1:26-27, we read, “God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them: male and female he created them.”

Counter to emergent human theologies which came through church history, God is not more like a man than a woman. God is not male. Neither male nor female is more like God; but rather, together we are partners in our ability to reflect the image of God and portray God’s dignity. God also commissioned them, male and female, to steward, multiply, and rule his creation. What comprises the image of God in humanity is not male nor female, but the ability to lead and govern as God models, to understand the difference between right and wrong, to make moral judgments as God would make, and to be in relationship with God and one another. Both men and women have been commissioned to partner with God by pursuing our God-given identity and personal call. Men


T H E B L A Z I N G C E N T E R F O R W O M E N I N T H E C H U R C H T O D A Y

and women are peers in bearing the image of God and being commissioned to govern and steward God’s creation. Therefore, how we relate to one another as women and men is radically significant in our ability to bear God’s image on the earth. Perhaps this is why the prophet Joel, recited by Peter at Pentecost, spoke of such a time when the Spirit of God would be equally poured out upon men and women!

God set it up from the beginning for men and women to work together in fulfillment of their commission. Adam, by himself, was not adequate to fulfill this great commission. He needed a helper suitable for him. God declared everything he made as “good” until Adam was missing a suitable partner. Suitable did not mean one who was inferior to him, but one like him—one who could work with him in all God had commissioned humanity to be and to do. Without an equal partner, God declared for the first time, something was not good. Once Eve was created, God declared his creation good again. God’s plan for community is based on the equal participation of man and woman, brothers and sisters in Christ, to bear God’s image and do God’s work on earth. Man and woman were created to work interdependently. Where Christian men and women are not working together, the full image of God is lacking, and we lack what God considers “good.”

Now, we have context for Joel’s prophecy. The Old Testament not only records God’s displeasure over power structures that oppress the vulnerable; the prophets in the Old Testament longed for the day when creation would be redeemed, and worldly social barriers and oppression would be eliminated. The prophets cried out for shalom: peace with God and within all God’s people. God had promised a Messiah who would come to redeem and restore his people into a new shalom, a new kind of community different from what any human being had experienced since before the Fall. For this reason, God in Christ is seen as an ezer, a helper, protector, and deliverer from the result of sin entering the world and corrupting our ways.

The prophecies about the Messiah pointed to a ministry of healing and reconciliation from the corrupt and oppressive systems of this world. Throughout the pages of the Old Testament we see God as helper, coming to the aid of the oppressed, and empowering women like Tamar, Abigail, Ruth, Huldah, Deborah, Jael, Esther, Rahab, and ultimately Mary, the woman who bore Jesus’s own body within her womb, to transcend power structures of this world and become key agents in his spiritual trajectory. Although male privilege was rampant in the time of the Old Testament and women had few rights and very little opportunities, the Spirit of God was at work to liberate humanity from forces of oppression, and restore God’s original design of gender equality, freedom, and mutuality.

The Spirit the prophet Joel is referring to is the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost through Jesus’s ministry. It wasn’t just what Jesus said, but it was how he related to women that was revolutionary. In Luke 8:1-3, we are told women were included among his disciples. In the Gospels, we see Jesus going out of his way to reach out to women and invite them into his mission. The Samaritan woman (found in John chapter 4), who became the first evangelist among her people, is another example. Women felt safe to come to Jesus. The sinful, repentant woman, who isn’t even referred to by name, was esteemed by Jesus in Luke 7:36-50, as a model student to Simon the Pharisee. Just before his death, Jesus defended Mary of Bethany against cruel accusations regarding her assertive claim as his disciple in Mark 14. Upon his resurrection, in John 20, Jesus revealed his resurrected body to Mary Magdalene, identified as one of Jesus’s disciples in Luke 8:1-3, and sent her to instruct the other male disciples. Therefore, it should not surprise us that the Book of Acts, often referred to as the Acts of the Holy Spirit, begins with Jesus’s disciples joining “together constantly in prayer” and includes men women awaiting for their next assignment from Jesus (Acts 2:14).

Pentecost launches the church into Joel’s prophetic promise that God’s men and women, young and old of all



nations, will receive spiritual power for kingdom witness, service, and leadership. Later, we see Paul, in Acts 16:14, partnering with Lydia for the formation of the new house church in Philippi. We also see the Holy Spirit prophesying through Philip’s daughters in Acts 21:8-9. (Just to be clear, prophesying not only gave room for the Spirit to instruct and inform God’s church, but also included the sharing of God’s holy word to God’s people.) The remainder of the New Testament builds on the egalitarian work Jesus introduced to his church and the continued trajectory of God’s original intention for men and women to partner together in and for his church.

The witness of the early church was a faithful and supernatural expression of Jesus’s support of women and the continued empowerment given to men and women at Pentecost. It is also helpful to point out early church fathers, such as Chrysostom, Tertullian, and others, recognized women with ministry responsibilities such as instruction, baptisms, and communions. Women make up 1/3 of the 26 ministry leaders mentioned in Romans 16. Paul refers to these women, such as Junia and Phoebe, as equal partners and with the same titles he gives his male ministry leaders. New Testament scholar Richard Baukhman informs us when names are listed in the New Testament, this tells us that person was widely recognized as leader and teacher in the New Testament Community.2 The church began with the Holy Spirit empowering both men and women for kingdom witness and service, which ran counter to the predominant culture of that day.

Although the church continued to limp under its familiar brokenness and power struggles, the Holy Spirit continued to point the church where God wants to go. These women, and many more, kept the ball moving forward, even though it will be another 2,000 years of struggle. And yet, God does not fail. He does not fumble. We see the Holy Spirit working mightily in women such as Joan of Arc, early church mothers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Crosby, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Aimee

Semple McPherson, Rosa Parks, Phoebe Palmer, Henrietta Meers, Mother Teresa, and many more receivers of God’s trajectory for men and women partnering together for God’s church. The Holy Spirit has been working to deliver women out of the oppression of the church and into the flourishing of the kingdom since the Fall of humanity broke this equitable partnership into power struggles between men and women (Genesis 3:16).

Therefore, how we relate to one another as male and female is destined to reflect God’s image within us. For this reason and many more biblical standards, the Evangelical Covenant Church stepped out in the evangelical world in 1976 to ordain women as equally called and gifted for every area of service and leadership in the church, marketplace, and in the home. The trajectory of the Holy Spirit, that which Peter preached as a fulfillment of what the Prophet Joel preached hundreds of years prior, is the Blazing Center of our theology of women.

We affirm this position by acknowledging the priesthood of all believers as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy in 61:6: “You will be called priests of the LORD, ministers of our God” (NLT). The priesthood of all believers (also called the common priesthood of the baptized) affirms every Christian can minister to others in a priestly role (helping people to reconcile with God), a prophetic role (proclaiming God’s truth), and a servant-leader role (leading God’s people) according to the spiritual gifts and call God imparts to them. Therefore, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are not gender-based. In all the lists of the gifts of the Spirit, including the gifts of teaching and leading, there is not one hint of gender distinction. It’s not that no one is to lead in God’s kingdom, but spiritual authority is determined by God, not our gender or any other ism! The Lord commends those in his church to various roles and positions of service through the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the measure of faith he pours out on every believer (2 Corinthians 10:18). We must understand, the kingdom of God is built on spiritual power, not human status. This was the vision the prophet Joel proclaimed



would come through the work of the Holy Spirit.

This is the result of God’s intention, Jesus’s ministry, and the work of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, whereby anyone, male or female, who put their faith in Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, will receive the Holy Spirit and become an agent of God’s reconciling and redeeming grace. Because, as Paul explained in Galatians 3:28 (CEV), “Faith in Christ Jesus is what makes each of you equal with each other, whether you are a Jew or Greek, a slave or a free person, a man or a woman.” Christ has equally redeemed all people, both men and women, to become one in Christ together, redeeming their partnership in bearing the image and rule of God on the earth. This applies to the home, the marketplace, and the church! According to the gospel of the Lord Jesus, the Christ, women are equal partners in marriage and equally called to all areas of Christian discipleship, church witness, and church leadership!

Because separate is not equal! This is also why we have moved into a new and intentional model of ministry for women today: the integration of Women’s initiatives away from a siloed independent model and into all five of our mission priorities. We see God’s trajectory, and we receive God’s charge to move more fully into what the prophet Joel proclaimed would come through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit! We believe this new model will move us alongside what the Holy Spirit is doing for women in today’s world, as never before.

As part of this movement, we are hosting a web page on our denominational website (covchurch.org/women/ ) where women can get connected into any area of ministry they are called and gifted for. We will also include biblical resources and support for all women to flourish in their journey as female disciples of Christ.

So, I ask you, “What would it look like to foster the flourishing of women in their God-given call and spiritual gifting at your church?”

1. Do you have women who preach?

2. Do you have women on your leadership team/elder board?

3. Are women mentoring other women?

4. Are women being mentored in their spiritual call and gifting?

Without gender parity in our churches the thief of our souls is stealing from our churches the full witness of the Spirit and the other half of the reflection of the image of God in our churches! God gave us a sneak preview of the work of the Holy Spirit through the prophet Joel. Later, Peter proclaimed the fulfillment of that promise at Pentecost. God has always intended to pour out the Holy Spirit on both men and women in his church, as equal partners and workers. “For such a time as this” has been modeled for us and is continually given to every generation in the church. Now is the time to unify as sisters and brothers. Now is the time to humble ourselves to the trajectory of the Holy Spirit’s work today. Now is the time to come together and show the world what Genesis 1:26-27 truly looks like!

1. Glen Scorgie, The Journey Back to Eden: Restoring the Creator’s Design for Women and Men (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2005). 2. Richard Bauckham, Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Michigan, Eerdmans, 2002).



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