Stephen Preaches the Gospel Ready to Die

51“You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit! As your fathers did, so you do. 52Which of the prophets didn’t your fathers persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, of whom you have now become betrayers and murderers. 53You received the law as it was ordained by angels, and didn’t keep it!”

2. The Believer Who Is Loved by the Lord

The Loveliest Song

Stephen gave his very life in devotion. Seeing it, we came to recognize how misguided our own faith is, unable to tell faith from the world. This is because we believe that keeping the Lord’s Day once a week and putting in an offering fulfills our duty to God. We ought to ask ourselves whether Jesus really gave his life hoping his people would live out their faith like that.

Jesus gave his people a new commandment: love one another. Having received it, we must now set aside the old commandment and love our brothers and sisters in the faith as the twelve disciples did. To love one another, we need to know what the other person is living for, and we must work to help them toward what they long for.

To love Jesus, too, we must know who he is, why he came into the world, and what he means to accomplish in the end. The only way to know his thoughts and his desires is through the Bible. Therefore we have to read Scripture to know the whole heart of God. No one receives a letter from someone they love and leaves it unopened; in the same way, we who are his must take up the letter he has filled with his love.

Stephen, too, knew the Old Testament, and he understood well that Jesus had to hang on the cross and die for our salvation. His message was that the Messiah would come, and that he was the Lamb who bore the sins of all people. To explain his faith clearly before people who served the God of the Old Testament only with reverence and dread would hardly have been easy. Yet Stephen, with careful logic, began his sermon with Abraham, the man they honored and loved.

Acts 7:2-4

2He said, “Brothers and fathers, listen. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, 3and said to him, ‘Get out of your land, and from your relatives, and come into a land which I will show you.’ 4Then he came out of the land of the Chaldaeans, and lived in Haran. From there, when his father was dead, God moved him into this land, where you are now living.

This is the account in Genesis 12. Stephen explained how God called Abraham on his own initiative and how he led him. On the surface he was speaking of a familiar theme, that God called and led Abraham, the father of faith; but for those who trusted in the law it was a matter of great weight.

Before Abram became Abraham, he was an ordinary man. Until God called him, he was simply living in Mesopotamia like anyone else. The heart of the sermon is that God came to Abraham while he was living an everyday life. What matters is that Abraham did not search and search until he found God; God came to him first.

Why did Stephen make so much of Abraham’s ordinariness? To show that Abraham was not chosen because he had faith. He did nothing at all to become the father of many nations. God made him one, because he had promised to make him the father of many nations. We too are sinners by nature, but because God chose us, we became his children and received salvation. You were not saved because you did the church a favor by attending. What matters is knowing that God chose us on his own initiative and caused us to be saved.

Everyone breathes, but some live with the blessing of salvation in their hearts, while others have nothing but their fleshly nature. So Stephen wanted to give his hearers a chance to think about what they were born for and why they were living.

Stephen is asking you the same thing now. He is asking your conscience whether the life you have lived so far is something you achieved by your own effort, or whether Jesus, as your Lord, has led you to this very hour. I hope you will put the question to your own conscience: are your wealth, your health, and your faith things you built by your own ability?

Faith is acknowledging that God holds the initiative. He made heaven and earth and all things for humankind; he governs them, and he works to save souls. We did not ask God for salvation. So our church offices are not ours either; God gave them so that he might use us as is fitting. The church, likewise, does not belong to us but to God. We must recognize that caring for the poor, serving, and giving are all things we can do only because the Holy Spirit fills us and has given us mercy and compassion. If human beings take God’s place at the center, they will fall into corruption and come under the power of Satan.

It was God, Stephen told his hearers, who had led Abraham into the very land where they now lived. Abraham, whom they revered, became their ancestor because God chose him; in the same way, Jesus Christ, whom they had killed, came by God’s plan and God’s work. His whole long sermon was meant to say this.

John 15:16

16You didn’t choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatever you will ask of the Father in my name, he may give it to you.

1 John 4:10

10In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Stephen stressed that although God loved us first, the Pharisees, the scribes, and the priests did not know that love, because they did not truly love God. When God’s children think of Jesus, gratitude wells up naturally from the depths of their hearts. Stephen knew what God’s love is like, and so he could return the love of the cross by dying a martyr.

God called us when we knew nothing, made us understand his word, and will lead us into heaven, our Canaan. The God who called ordinary Abraham and made him the father of many nations has called us, who could not discern the darkness, named us his children, and given us holy thoughts and the word of eternal life.

The point Stephen pressed in his sermon was that the God who called Abraham is the God of glory and of eternal life. God is not an idea or a concept, Stephen declared, nor a visible idol, nor a god believed in only in the abstract. He is the living God who sheds the light of his glory forever, worthy to receive glory for ever and ever.

That great, majestic, and almighty God is the one Stephen saw with his own eyes. When Stephen looked up steadfastly into heaven, he saw the glory of God and his throne. He had seen God’s glory for himself; what reason had he to fear death? Having met God, he could not live as a friend of the world, nor could he bear to keep the word to himself.

Revelation 4:1-2

1After these things I looked and saw a door opened in heaven, and the first voice that I heard, like a trumpet speaking with me, was one saying, “Come up here, and I will show you the things which must happen after this.” 2Immediately I was in the Spirit. Behold, there was a throne set in heaven, and one sitting on the throne

The apostle John also saw the throne of God with his own eyes and recorded that beautiful sight. The throne of God is the command center that plans and directs everything that will happen on this earth: the persecution of the saints by the Antichrist in the last days, the final judgment of the wicked who tormented the saints, and even the Lord’s return. Nothing is moved by any ruling class or particular individual; everything is accomplished from the throne of God. Because of this, as God showed John, the prophetic word of Christ, his revelation, will be fulfilled without a word added or taken away.

God’s appearance was described with three precious stones: jasper, sardius, and an emerald like a rainbow. The jasper represents the glory of God’s holiness; the sardius, the glory of his justice and judgment; and the rainbow, seen as an emerald, the faithfulness of his promise, showing that God is good and beautiful.

The apostle John saw twenty-four thrones around the throne. The white garments of the twenty-four elders are robes that only those made holy through the righteousness of Jesus Christ may wear, proof that they have been sanctified by the blood of Christ. Each of the twenty-four elders wears a crown of gold, and that crown symbolizes the honor and glory the church will enjoy in heaven. Our hope and our glory, then, are not on this earth but in heaven.

Heaven is a real place. It is where God’s people must one day go when they lay aside this body, so we must live with our eyes on the unseen world. This world will one day be burned by the fire of God’s judgment, but the saints will live in a new heaven and a new earth where God’s righteousness and glory dwell.

Isaiah 43:7

7everyone who is called by my name, and whom I have created for my glory, whom I have formed, yes, whom I have made.’”

God says that those called by his name were created for his glory. One of the angels God made rebelled against him in order to seize his glory, and was cast out of heaven to become Satan. The fall of the angel he had created most beautiful of all shows us how good and how loving God is. The angels were created for God’s glory and given the task of singing praise to exalt his name; but the glory they enjoyed was so great that they could not bear it, and they poured it all out. Rather than repent, they drew still more angels into sin and rebellion, and in the end they were cast off by God. The love God pours out on his saints is just as great.

Yet though God called us to exalt his name and to be clothed with his glory, we cannot bear that grace and end in betrayal. That is why, when God calls and leads us as his children, he makes us pass through suffering, so that we may overcome sin and stand by faith. That suffering is like the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden of Eden: by our own will and by faith, we must not eat of it. God also gives us wisdom and understanding so that we can discern sin for ourselves and overcome it. But because that alone cannot clothe us with glory, he makes us vessels of faith so that we may share in his holiness.

When God helps our faith grow, he puts us through many experiences so that we can resolve our troubles with wisdom of our own, and he matures us so that we look for answers in his word. From where we stand, having to solve problems and find answers for ourselves is suffering that wears us down. Just as a person is born, eats, drinks, and grows, faith too must grow over time.

God took his time with Abraham, leading him until he grew into a man of faith. He began the training by making him leave his homeland, Ur of the Chaldaeans. By having him leave the place where his own flesh and blood, his parents, and everything he had built up all were, God put him through a severe training no ordinary person could endure. Home is where a few mistakes can still be forgiven. When God commands someone to leave such a place, he is commanding them to rely not on people but on God alone.

Faith begins in fear and loneliness. Look at Abraham’s life: he showed no great zeal to become the father of many nations. He stayed when God told him to stay and went when God told him to go. We might think that since God appeared to Abraham in person and told him to leave, he must have lived an extraordinary life; but Abraham simply lived his own life with diligence.

This is what faith is: living faithfully, within the word, the life we have been given. Rather than some special zeal, it sets entering Canaan as its goal and is the journey toward that destination. So obeying God’s command is what it looks like to trust God fully as his people.

We need not envy the faith of Stephen and Abraham, because as we obey God’s commands without complaint, we too come to fulfill our calling as they did. When the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud moved, the people followed; when the pillars stopped, the people of Israel lived in that place, even for years. They had to spend time with people they found hard to live with, however wearing it was, and even in difficult surroundings they stayed until the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud moved on.

This is how God trains his people to accomplish his purpose. We rush ahead impatiently, thinking this approach will get things done quickly or that method will work well; but unless God is at work, however fast we run, we only go around in circles. When we rely on God, who sees farther than we do and leads us, we can go much faster than by the way we thought was quick, and we can receive a more precious answer.

In this finite world no one can hold an eternal goal or an eternal possession, and no human relationship lasts forever. This world is like Haran, the place God told Abraham to leave. That is why our attention must be on the eternal Kingdom of God. The world where we stay for a little while is nothing more and nothing less than a training ground where we are born again as whole children of God. So we must have faith enough to entrust ourselves to God and to whatever he is doing.

God’s purpose is to lead us into the promised land. Once the training has begun, God does not stop it just because he pities us. He will be patient until we complete our training safely and become mature, and he will raise up the mature among us as brothers and sisters who help the weak.

Life may weigh on you so heavily that you cannot see an end to your pain; yet as long as you keep the word in your heart and follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, God will not let you fail. Weak as we are, unable to see even an inch ahead, we lose confidence, we may despair, and we may even want to deny God. But if you trust God alone and walk one step at a time, before you know it you will come to have the faith that receives the blessings of heaven.

This world, our Haran, is where we come to understand God’s will on the way to heaven, a stage on the journey toward our true homeland. Suffering is not God’s purpose; his purpose is to lead our souls into the promised land. Just as Scripture expresses the wish that we prosper in all things even as our souls prosper, we must hold fast to the faith that God will surely be at work, for without that faith we can neither please him nor bring him glory.

Though Stephen would be put to death by those who were enraged at him for preaching the word, he longed to tell them of the God he had met, the God who loves souls to the very end. Knowing that the word he had preached would not fall to the ground, he would have been content if even one of them came to receive God. As he told the people standing in their fury, stones in hand, how Abraham their ancestor had lived, Stephen grew calmer in the face of death. That is faith: living faithfully, within the word, the life we have been given. When we rely on God, keep our lives holy to exalt his name, and offer him songs of thanks, God will commend us as children of faith.

What did you think as you heard the word today? I am convinced that all the saints are under God’s protection and guidance. I hope you will never let go of the stream of prayer, nor of the stream of the word, because you must take up God’s work with still greater faith. May those blessed with wealth serve with their wealth, those blessed with health serve with their bodies, and those filled with faith watch over every corner of the church. When we humble ourselves and sacrifice, God will bless everyone in the church, from the youngest infant to the grown adults.

Friends, I hope you will receive many blessings and enjoy them. Life in this world is hard and wearying, but God’s blessing lifts you above every hardship; with it you will be well able to overcome. May you receive and enjoy more and more blessing, love, and grace. I bless you in the name of Jesus Christ.