Guess Who's Coming to Church | Archdeaconry Service
Preached by Edmund Hilder on 30th of January 2022 at South Canterbury Archdeaconry Service
Guess who's Coming to church
Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome and thank you for joining us here today. Today we are in Acts Chapter 9 verses one through 22, and it's about Saul’s conversion, but I thought a more suitable title for today would be "Guess who's coming to church".
It's kind of like Jesus saying to his whole church, look who I have invited, and they would have all probably been shocked. So, this afternoon, I'm going to start with looking at Saul and this invitation into the church family and then I'm going to hand it over to Andy Miller, who's going to talk a bit about the Ananias figure of this story and share a couple of stories he has experienced over his years of doing mission work.
As I was preparing for our message today, I looked at the first 10 chapters of Acts. It became pretty clear that there is a central theme of God calling into his family the people that we would least expect him to.
This theme goes all the way back to the beginning of the Old Testament, the first of God's chosen people was a guy named Abraham, who was an idol worshipper, and then it continues with the story of Joseph, the runt of the litter, the last one who would have been picked, but God chose him.
You see the same thing in David, who became the famous king and, it continues through the Old Testament prophets, time after time. The theme continues into the New Testament, when Mary and Joseph show up, a poor young couple from the wrong side of the tracks with a scandalous rumour around this child that Mary is about to bear, and it continues on.
When Jesus picks the apostles, untrained men from Galilee, like who in the world are these people? And as Jesus goes to heaven and builds his church, in the first 10 chapters of acts, it continues right along.
And so, I want to step back for just a moment and talk about these first 10 chapters of acts.
Where we have five surprise invitees, people who, at least at that point, everyone would have considered unworthy and undeserving of God's mercy and grace. The first one would be the persecuting priests' in Acts Chapter 4.
We saw that when the church was meeting every day on the temple steps and they were explaining how Jesus is the Messiah, they were praying, and then the priests began to persecute them. The priests told them to shut up, to scatter, and when they didn't do that, they had them arrested.
They turned them over and had them beaten, and yet a couple of chapters later, by Acts Chapter 6, we discover a large group, not just a small group, not just a few of them, but a large group of priests had become Jesus’ followers.
But it gets even more surprising by the time we get to Acts Chapter 8. God is inviting into his family, the hated Samaritans. For 700 years there'd been this intense, mutual hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans.
The Samaritans were considered spiritual half breeds. They had their own Bible, a cut and paste version of the scriptures where only parts were there. They had their own priesthood. They had their own temple. And a Jew would do anything he could, not to even go through that territory, which made Jesus talking to a Samaritan woman all the more shocking, in John Chapter 4, or his use of the Good Samaritan as a positive example.
After we have the persecuting priests and the hated Samaritans. We find a foreigner and a unique one at that. He's known as the Ethiopian eunuch, and here is a guy that's not even allowed to enter into the temple to worship God.
Yet the Lord sends Philip there and says, invite him in, and then he goes back to Ethiopia, and the gospel is spread that way. Then we come to the 4th one, which is the one we're going to dig into in more detail today. God says by the way, I also want a sworn enemy named Saul to become one of my family members. Saul had persecuted Christians. He had them jailed. He had been the part of the murder of some. He was a bad guy, and he hated Christians. He pursued Jesus followers, and then Jesus pursued him and saved him.
And shockingly, as we're going to see, Jesus not only saves Saul but puts him into a prestigious leadership position. No one in the early church would have thought this was possible.
The last of these five shocking invitees is a gentile named Cornelius. The Jews wanted nothing to do with gentiles. They were even worse than Samarians. A good Jew would never even eat with or go into the house of a Gentile. They were considered to be created for destruction, yet God is going to say, Nope, I want them in the family as well.
With that little bit of an overview and an understanding, we see a God who pursues the ones we might be pretty shocked to see in church.
I want to stop, and I want to step back. I want to spend the rest of our time in light of the five surprising invites in the first ten chapters, specifically God's call to Saul. I want us to look at four lessons from this passage.
1. We don't get to pick our brothers and sisters.
Jesus gets to choose; it's his family. It's his church. It's his kingdom, not ours, and the fact of the matter is whenever we go, oh not him, not her Lord. What we're thinking is, they're not worthy. They don't deserve it. This means we have completely forgotten who we are.
I want to show you a couple of verses about how worthy we are and how deserving we are—one from the Old Testament and one from the new.
Let's take a look at this. In Isaiah Chapter 64, verse 6, we are told that all of our righteous acts are like filthy rags, and I want to highlight this. The prophet here is saying, you know you do some good stuff, but I want to tell you the best of your best, all of your righteous works, if you pile them together and you put them in the presence of God's holiness, they are like dirty filthy rags.
You see, sometimes we make the wrong comparison, and we get the wrong idea. We look around at other people, and maybe you are more righteous than most people, "good for you", but you start thinking I'm a pretty righteous person because you're comparing your righteousness with other people, not with the glory of our Lord.
Because when I compare it with other people, I think I'm worthy, and I deserve it, but we don't. But when I compare it with God, I just go, oh my gosh, I am a mess.
The other passages from Romans Chapter 3, verse 23, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
There's not one of us that has lived a life worthy to stand in the presence of the Lord without being consumed by his righteousness and holiness, not because we have an angry God because we have a holy and a righteous God, and sin is not in his presence.
That's what we forget when we think we get to choose our brothers and sisters. Let's be real here. When we think somebody is undeserving or unworthy, it's because of their past or maybe their present, or they don't have everything together.
We tend to think those who think like us, those who understand what I've come to understand, then they can belong and when you drive into the church, and you see a bumper sticker from maybe the other side of the issue, and you just go, how could a Christian believe that.
And you say, Oh man, I'm just so upset. How can these kinds of people be here, and the truth is these are the people that are supposed to come to church. We're supposed to have mature and immature people. We're supposed to have people who were here and who were over there, and here's the reason why, because Jesus is greater than all of our differences and divisions.
When Jesus chose his inner circle, he gave a model of the kind of church he wanted.
We don't get to pick our brothers and sisters, and we don't earn our way into the family. Every one of us was adopted into his family by his grace and his mercy. And if we're not careful, we will forget that.
The second thing we need to remember from Saul's story and all these stories are this.
2. No one is too bad or too broken to join God’s family.
And the fact is, in my life and your life, we've all got some people we think are too bad or too broken. Saul is more intense. He was an arch-enemy, a personal enemy. For instance, Ananias remembers him; he had done great personal harm to Ananias. As far as we know, Ananias either had relatives, or himself had fled from Jerusalem, his friends had been put in prison and killed, and Saul had shown up with every intent to do that to him.
He drove them out of Jerusalem, helped murder Steven. He relentlessly pursued these Christians. But the weird thing is Jesus didn't just say, well, I want him in the family. Jesus didn't just save Saul. He put him in leadership.
Remember in Acts Chapter 9, verse 15, the Lord said, go, this man is my chosen instrument. The one that has scared you to death, the one that has been destroying everything you stand for. He is my chosen instrument, and here's what he's going to do. He's going to proclaim my name. He's going to be my ambassador, my spokesman to gentiles of all people, to their kings and the people of Israel.
We now know him as Paul the Apostle, the writer of many of the New Testament letters that we have today. Who would have guessed?
I want to ask you this question, who's your Saul? Who scares you to death? Or even personally has brought you harm. Scares you to death politically, scares you to death in the marketplace. Has been unfair. Has created harm in your life, your marketplace, your family. Who's your Saul?
And here's the question that goes with it. Is your response more like Jonah’s when God sent him or more like Anania’s?
Because I have heard some conversations between church folk, we need to be more honest in our conversations in hallways and life groups among friends and our families. Because if we're honest? We're a lot more like Jonah than we are like Ananias.
3. We are supposed to give to others what God gave to us.
We owe people undeserved grace and mercy. Is this not our calling? We owe people undeserved grace and mercy. It's not a suggestion. It's a requirement. Jesus died for us while we were his enemies, and he asked us to do that for others, grace and mercy is something they don't deserve.
Because if I give you grace, some favour, some blessing, and you deserve it. It's not grace if you deserve it. It's your wages. You've earned it, and if I give you mercy because you've done this or done that, or by taking these steps. It's not mercy. It's justice.
You see grace and mercy by definition, can't have a, yeah, but first, do this and that. They're not earned, and we didn't earn them ourselves.
In 1st Corinthians Chapter 6, verses 9 through 11, it says, do not be deceived, and it lists a whole bunch of sins. We read that and go, Yeah, that's right, all of those people don't deserve the kingdom! Then in verse 11, it says, and that is what some of you were, and then we all keep quiet.
That is who we were before we were washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord.
That's what I love about our Sunday services as Anglicans at the time of confession. It reminds us that we have all sinned and fallen short, but it's not by our works that we are saved but by the grace and mercy of God. We've got to remember that.
4. The only way to think and act like this is with a renewed mind.
We've got to renew our minds.
Because at the moment, there is this kind of thinking in a cancel culture world where we're so ready to write people off, to spread out the slander, the rumours, or whatever they did that is out of step.
We start pursuing the priests that persecuted us and pursuing the Samaritans who hate our guts and have treated us like trash forever, pursuing the Ethiopian eunuch, the Saul, pursuing the Gentile, and everyone feels justified by it because we have been done wrong, so we have the right.
But we're called to align our values and our actions with scripture, not culture, and we're called to represent Jesus.
There's a time and a place for a cause. Things are important, but at the end of the day, people are even more important—all people are made in the image of God. Even the Sauls who have harmed us greatly.
Look at Romans chapter 12, verses one and two, which talks about this renewed mind. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy because of what he's done for us, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice to the Lord.
I want to hand it over to Andy to speak a bit about his journey.
I want to leave you with two questions.
Two key questions when it comes to thinking about who the Lord is inviting into the family.
The first question is, am I a recruiter or a bouncer?
What's my knee jerk response to people? Who I might disagree with.
Am I a greeter, inviting them in or am I a recruiter going after them, or am I a bouncer telling them all the reasons why they don't belong.
The question comes down to this. Do I define people by who they are or who they were?
The lie of Satan is we are what we did, and there is no room to change. We are forever locked into it. The incredibly good news of Jesus is it's paid for. It's paid in full, and you are who you are. You are not what you did. By saying this, we are not excusing what people did or giving people a free pass to do whatever they please under the grace of God but we are choosing to look past that.
Which leads to the second question. The first one was about people who do things you disdain and despise and did it in the past. The second one is what you see in people now.
Do I see the rock, or do I see the sculpture?
I want to share something that happened this morning which, I believe was the Holy Spirit working in me. This morning I got to St John’s to find the church garden ripped up and plants left all over the parking lot. My immediate reaction was thinking ‘these low life's.’ I posted it on Facebook, looking at it now. probably to get some validation and my sentiment was shared by the community.
A couple of hours later I received a call from the person responsible, really apologetic and ashamed at what he had done. Offering to pay for and fix the mistake he made. In that moment the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart, convicting me for thinking the worst and seeing the ugly rock instead of the sculpture.
Imagine you’re Leonardo Davinci, or you're some great sculpture. They would look at this rock, and they could step back, and they could in their mind see the sculpture that would come out of it.
I want to tell you Saul did not look anything like an apostle or a writer of the Bible. Most of us would just see an ugly rock. But that's not what Jesus saw, and so I asked myself, what is my knee jerk reaction, not only recruiter or a bouncer.
Do I have a knee jerk reaction where I go? No, they are just an ugly rock or do I think the best of people when they take their steps forward, and they haven't yet taken all those steps and think, man, there might be a beautiful sculpture in there?
None of us is worthy.
Saul wasn't worthy, and the lesson of his life is a lesson of the heart of God.
He's a recruiter. He's a lover of the lost. Who takes rebels and rejects and turns them into royalty, and once he's done it to us, he's asked us to have that same attitude and same heart towards everybody we come across.
Father, I ask you to take the things we've looked at and grow us up in. Our ability to truly be not like our culture but transformed by a renewed mind that is aware of a reality that our world doesn't see, to your fame and your glory, Amen.