Life Lessons with Dr. Steve Schell

74 - Repairing His Reputation

The early church had the luxury of not having an ugly legacy to undo. People were able to hear what they had to say without suspicion based on what other Christians had done in the past. But we don’t have that luxury. We stand at the end of 2,000 years of a history in which Christians did some wonderful things, but those years have also been filled with wildly un-Christlike behavior done by people who called themselves Christians. So-called Christians have burned people at the stake, drowned people for wanting to be baptized by immersion, sent armies on crusades to liberate the “holy land,” killing women & children and even Christians who didn’t look like them. So-called Christians put millions of defenseless people in slavery and sold their children to strangers. They celebrated Easter by driving Jews out of their villages and cities. They annihilated six million of them in the holocaust. They deliberately forced a nation of people to become addicted to heroin so they could sell them drugs. They broke promise after promise to native people, and slaughtered them and seized land that they had sworn was theirs forever… etc. etc.

I mention some of these horrible things not to stir up collective guilt, but to put our task in perspective. No, most of those weren’t real Christians, but they were the fruit of Christian cultures. They often went to church… a lot, and “yes” those churches failed miserably to disciple them. But the problem is, the world doesn’t know the difference between a so-called Christian and a real one, and to be honest, neither do we at times. How often have we been shocked to discover someone was just playing a game?

So, here we are today, trying to proclaim New Testament Christianity to a world that has watched “Christians” closely for 2,000 years. And if all we have to offer them is more of the same, they will continue to look for help elsewhere. They must see people who shatter the stereotype, who live differently, who act differently, who treat them differently… for a long enough period of time to prove it’s not just one more marketing attempt. We, as a church, but also we as individuals, have to live in such a way that people will be able to discern the difference between nominal and genuine Christianity. Words will mean very little in this process. People don’t believe our words anymore. It’s time to let our light shine before men in such a way that they may see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven (Mt 5:16).

73 - Legalism or Liberty

Two people can do the same thing, and one of them pleases the Lord but the other does not, because two people can do the same thing for different reasons. And there is no area of life where this is more true than in religious matters. The difference between legalism and liberty is a very fine line, and it’s very easy to cross that line without even knowing it, and, in my opinion, that’s the root of the problem we’re reading about today. The threat of persecution was constantly hanging over the heads of the church in Jerusalem, and it was their desire to avoid persecution that pressed them to appear as obedient to the Law of Moses as possible. If the church in that city was perceived in any way to be a force that turned Jews away from Judaism, they would be, and were, attacked. They would face physical violence, people would lose their jobs, unbelieving spouses would divorce them, families would disinherit them, property would be seized; they would become outcasts. In fact, even if they themselves kept the Law, if they were suspected of being in relationship with people who had stopped keeping the Law, or if they had supported someone, like Paul, who was preaching salvation by grace rather than Law-keeping, they would be attacked. So to protect themselves, they tried to observe the Law as fervently as possible, while still believing in Jesus. But as the years went by, it appears some hearts, maybe many hearts, became so fervent for the Law that the truth that salvation comes by faith in Christ alone had grown weak, or possibly disappeared altogether. Some may have drifted across a fine line.

72 - A Lonely Obedience

There are times we must obey what God shows us even though He has not revealed it to others. There are paths we must walk alone. Paul’s decision to go to Jerusalem is an example of this. At first glance it appears he was being unnecessarily stubborn, almost as though he had some sort of death wish. Time and again he had been warned prophetically. In place after place believers saw in the Spirit what was going to happen and tearfully begged him not to go. Yet he refused to turn aside. Why? Are we observing in his reaction a weak, foolish part of Paul, or are we seeing someone with the courage to obey a voice others have not heard? Are we watching a man walk out a lonely obedience?

Everyone seemed to know what was going to happen to Paul, and everyone, except Paul, agreed on how he should respond. The difference lay in the interpretation of what they saw, not in the revelation itself. And who can blame Paul’s friends for their conclusion? If God showed us a life-threatening persecution ahead, who wouldn’t take that as a warning to flee? How many times in the Bible did God warn His servants this way? Yet, Paul had a different interpretation from everyone else, and each time another word came, he felt more resolved to go. In this passage, we’re watching some very mature believers have a profound difference of opinion… and everyone is trying to do the right thing. Yet, only one person interprets the revelation correctly.

71 - Repentance and Faith

If we really understand something, we can explain it to a child. Even if it’s something very difficult like the theory of relativity. But if all we can do is repeat the words or phrases someone said to us, we don’t understand, we’re simply parroting back what we heard. Particularly when it comes to religious matters, people seem content to dutifully repeat the right words without ever asking themselves the deeper question of, “What did I just say?” The problem is God is always looking at a person’s heart to see if certain attitudes and beliefs are really present. He’s not concerned whether or not we said it right, He wants it to be right. And above everything else, for a person to be saved, God is looking for two things: repentance and faith. Has that person really repented, and does that person really believe? Because if they haven’t, even if they say the right words, they’re still separated from God. And to make matters worse, the process has deceived them into thinking that because they said the right words, they’ve pleased God.

As if he’d walked into a court of law and raised his right hand swearing to tell the truth, Paul called together the Ephesian elders to act as his witnesses, and as if he were under oath, he stood before them and gave an account of the years he spent in their city. This speech is Paul’s evaluation of his ministry among them. Had he faithfully done what God sent him there to do?

70 - Walk With Me

What an amazing 24 hours! From Sunday evening, when the church gathered in Troas, to Monday evening, when Paul reached Assos, he didn’t stop ministering the entire time. He lectured and dialogued all night, eating very little, and then at morning light, having had no sleep, he began a 30 mile walk which required at least 10-12 hours of strenuous walking over hilly terrain. This is almost 30 years after he was converted. Paul has to be in his late 50’s or early 60’s. He’s not a young man. And I think his eyesight was poor and he needed assistance when he traveled (Gal 4:15; 6:11). 

These few verses show us the depth to which Paul freely gave of himself, as well as any passage in Acts. He virtually denied his own physical needs for 24 hours in order to give everything he possibly could to these believers. And he hadn’t even planted this church. Most of them weren’t his converts, but they belonged to Jesus and they needed to be discipled. They hungrily listened and asked him questions all night. Then when it came time for his team to leave in order to board the ship, someone must have come up to him and said they desperately needed to talk with him, possibly a leader or a group of leaders, who were struggling with a situation in their church. But there was simply no more time. Or was there? What if the team went ahead and got on board the ship and told the captain that Paul would walk instead of sail to the next port? He could catch up to the ship in Assos. That would buy him an extra day so he could talk with these believers while they walked. So, of course he would. He would gladly forgo his own need of sleep to carve out a chunk of time from a hopelessly busy schedule…and give it to others who needed him. He said, “Walk with me!” Will we do the same?

69 - Paul's Offering

The seven men Luke names here were representatives chosen from the different regions where Paul had planted churches. They were carrying a financial gift from their churches to the poor in Jerusalem, but Paul was bringing them to Jerusalem. They were his offering, they were the fruit of his labors, and when he arrived he would go into the Temple, the place where Jesus had spoken to him commanding him to go to the Gentiles (Ac 22:21), and there he would report to Him that he had obeyed. On the day of Pentecost, as the firstfruits of the wheat harvest were being waved before the Lord to honor Him as the Source of the harvest and to declare that the harvest was holy and belonged to Him, Paul, in his heart, would present his “firstfruits,” to honor God as the Source of all that had taken place, and declaring that the entire harvest, the multiplied thousands of new believers from all around the eastern Mediterranean, belonged to Him. Yes, Paul ministered effectively among the Gentiles, and had become “all things to all men” (1Co 9:22) to reach them, but he was still a Jew inside, and this was his heart-language of worship. He wasn’t performing a ritual, he was coming home. He had observed Pentecost all his life, but never had he presented such precious gifts as these.

In a sense, Paul is modeling that coming day in which all of us will present to Jesus the fruit of our lives. Not as a work needed to earn our way to heaven, though being fruitless is a dangerous symptom of detachment from Christ (Jn 15:2-6), but as the tangible evidence of our love for Him. When all is said and done, the only lasting treasure we will have to offer Him will be the people whose lives we have helped to draw closer to Him. 

68 - Dangerous Times

The church we read about in the Book of Acts was a tiny minority of people living in a dangerous world. We watch them in situation after situation face various forms of persecution, yet we also see them in situation after situation wisely handle whatever came at them, and continue to grow. Today, Christianity has become the largest religion on earth, yet we are still living in a dangerous world. Even though there are so many of us, we are persecuted more than any other religion. In some parts of the world believers face open persecution. It’s physical, violent and cruel. Here in the West, persecution is growing, but it’s still mainly a matter of changing attitudes. It’s primarily rejection and ridicule, but we’re beginning to experience what it feels like to be an unpopular minority. Our faith and moral values are being rejected by the dominant culture, and because this shift is only a few decades old, we’re still learning how to deal with it.

The good news is, we don’t have to look far for help. The Bible is a handbook on how to live successfully as an embattled minority. We find there, one example after another of men and women living wisely in the midst of danger. Today’s lesson is no exception. We’ll watch Paul and the believers in Ephesus navigate a city-wide riot that occurred because so many people had become real disciples of Jesus Christ. The sooner we learn from them, the safer we’ll be. 

67 - Distracted

Discovering God’s call is only the first step in a life of service. Enduring in that call is the second and most difficult step. Staying focused and continuing to do what God called us to do never goes unchallenged. The enemy never ignores a fruitful ministry, but will use every method at his disposal to try to stop it. If a person refuses to give in to moral failure, the devil will try to get them to believe heresy. If they refuse to believe heresy, he will try to lure them with riches. If they refuse the deceitfulness of riches, he will raise up people to persecute them, and if they endure persecution, then he will use one of the cruelest weapons of all, he will attack those they love. Love makes a person vulnerable to worry. We worry when those we love are struggling. So if he can’t stop us, he’ll try to distract us. He’ll use misunderstandings, betrayals, or the agony of watching loved ones walking away from God to torment us. He’ll try to exhaust us by tormenting us in the hope that he can drain our energy away from the work we’re called to do.

This is exactly what the devil was trying to do to Paul. He hadn’t been able to turn him away from his call. None of his methods had worked, so he used one church in particular, to try to distract him. And in some measure it worked (2Co 2:12, 13). Today we’ll cover only two verses in Acts. But if we look beyond the brief statements Luke makes here, and take into consideration the information Paul gives us elsewhere, we’ll discover that during those years in Ephesus, Paul was enduring an enormous amount of unseen pain. He was deeply worried about the church in Corinth.

As we watch what happened to Paul, many of us will realize we, too, have had much of our energy drained away by worry over those we love. The good news is Paul wasn’t defeated by this. In fact, his patient love for that church ultimately gave God time to win the hearts of many of those whom the enemy had tried to deceive. Yes, we’ll see the devil attack Paul, but we’ll also see Paul triumph. 

66 - The Real World

The real world has an ugly side to it. Just ask a policeman or an emergency room nurse. Beneath the surface of our society there’s a lot of suffering. People are capable of doing amazing things to themselves and others. And the same is true of the real spiritual world. It, too, has an ugly side. Many people don’t want to see that side, it frightens them. But pretending it’s not there doesn’t change reality, it just leaves us vulnerable to attack and unable to protect ourselves.

The passage we’re studying today talks about evil spirits. It shows us the power they can have over a human being, but it also shows us the power of the name of Jesus Christ. We need to be bold enough to realize that the forces we’re watching at work in ancient Ephesus are still part of our world today, whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not. Somewhere over the course of history, Christianity became spiritually powerless and very “scientific.” The church in the west followed our culture into a deep skepticism about the existence of a spiritual world. Even if we held onto a generic belief in God, the idea of angels or demons, or the devil himself, became something we associated with primitive, pre-scientific superstition. We thought of ourselves as enlightened, informed, increasingly in control of our own destiny. With the emergence of modern medicine and psychology, our need for God’s help grew smaller and smaller. If He wasn’t “dead,” He was at least unnecessary.

But reality tends to be stubborn. It doesn’t cease to function just because we ignore it. Sooner or later we bump into it and are forced to acknowledge its existence. And the real world has a spiritual dimension just as certainly as it has a physical one. Not only does God exist, but so do angels and demons. They’re as real as you and I. So, today, let’s see the world the way Jesus and Paul saw it… and let’s discover the authority Jesus’ name has over that world.

65 - Ministering God's Power

Passages like this are both thrilling and frustrating. It thrills us to see God’s power work through an individual to this degree, but it can also frustrate us. When we recognize what is possible, some of us are painfully reminded of what didn’t happen. It confronts us with the question: Am I moving in all the power God has made available to me? And for some, that brings up feelings of guilt and shame, and even anger.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, many Christians are committed to the idea that miracles, like these we see being performed through Paul, don’t happen anymore. They believe that at some point in time God stopped doing such miracles, so when they read passages like this they feel a great admiration for what God did during that early stage of church history, but feel no responsibility to try to do similar things today.

There is another group of Christians who will tend to skip over a passage like this, not because they don’t believe it or think such things are still possible, but because it stirs up deep emotions they don’t want to feel. Seeing miracles happen for others only reminds them of miracles that didn’t happen for them or someone they love. It raises the painful question of “why?” And there are also those who’ve grown quietly cautious. In the past they allowed their expectations to be raised to a high level only to end up disappointed and embarrassed. They didn’t become angry or unbelieving, just confused and tired of trying.

Knowing these things, and sometimes feeling the same emotions, I wanted to politely skip past these verses and move on. But I felt that displeased the Lord. Instead, He wanted us to look deeply at how He used Paul in Ephesus, so He could release us from confusion and condemnation, and teach us how to embrace more of His power, without ending up frustrated.