The Faith That Does Save
Acts 8:25-40
Take your bible, if you will please, and turn to the eighth chapter of Acts beginning about verse 25. And we're talking about Philip and his encounter with an Ethiopian eunuch. We've entitled the message "The Faith That Does Save". Whenever the bible has narrative scripture, whenever it is as opposed to theology in Romans, narrative and historical we want to look into the history of it and the narrative of it and see where the principles are that can become spiritual principles. And so we take a narrative passage like this and try to milk it dry of all the potential spiritual principles that a in it. And I might say that I have found so many here that I have long ago this week given up on the possibility of contributing all of them to one message which I know makes your heart glad. But anyway, that's how it is.
We'll endeavor to pick some of them and you see what the Spirit of God teach you. You know, you don't want to become so bottle‑ fed that you can't allow the Spirit of God to teach you even as we go through this passage. Just don get off on such a tangent that you don't listen. We don't allow that. Acts chapter ? verse 25 to 4O gives us the next step in the movement of the church. You'll remember that the church was formed on the day of Pentecost as God called out a group of men and women to form a body of believers that could carry the message of Jesus Christ to the world. Jesus gave orders to that early church that it should begin in Jerusalem then it should spread an would spread to Samaria and Judea and you'll remember that it spread as a result of persecution. The church fell under persecution led by the apostle Paul who at this time wasn't Paul but Saul persecuting the Christians. It scattered them, they bore the gospel to Judea and Samaria. The early part ? chapter ? we remember that Philip had begun to preach with other believers all over Samaria. Verse 4 of chapter ? says, "They went scattered abroad everywhere preaching the word". And the next verse says, "Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ unto them". Then, at that point Judea had been really exposed to the gospel and so had Samaria. Philip continued to preach. Many were saved. Miracles were done. The gospel had taken step two in the phases that Jesus laid out in Acts 1 verse ?.
Step three, then, was to go to the uttermost part of the earth. And that we see initially in our verses beginning at verse 25. As Philip is used to bring the gospel to the first Gentile and the church reaches out.
Now backing up just by way of review, last time we learned also that whenever the gospel is preached you can always calculate there will be two results. There will always be the true and the false, you see. You can just count on it. That's always how it's going to be, the wheat and the tares, the faithful and the phony all the way down the line. The good soil and the poor soil. And so we saw that as Philip preached in Samaria he came across some stony ground, he came across some tares one by name of Simon. Simon was a sorcerer or a magician. We saw last time that Simon had the faith that does not save. It says in verse 13 of chapter ?, he believed and he was baptized and he continued with Philip and it all sounds good. But it wasn't saving faith and Peter exposed him right to the face in verse 21 he said, "Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter, for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee". Now some people might assume that Simon was just a wandering Christian. He is not a wandering Christian he cannot be for no Christian no time needs to plead forgiveness. That's a set fact. That's a positional truth taken care of at the moment of salvation. The conditional forgiveness offered in verse 22 is proof positive that this man was never a believer.
And so Peter exposes him and he says in 23, "Thou art in the gall of bitterness tor the bile of bitterness) and in the bond of iniquity". You belong to sin. And he was exposed on the spot. Now Peter had not only come up there to expose people like Simon which he did so aptly but Peter had also come from Jerusalem when Jerusalem Christians heard that Philip was seeing these great results in Samaria. They wanted to send a couple of the apostle Peter and John namely, to check the work out to help Philip and also to confer the Holy Spirit, so there would be a tie‑in between the Samaritan church and the Jerusalem church in terms of the Holy Spirit, so there would be one body. So they came and they did that and we went into it last time and now it was time for them to return to Jerusalem, I love this, verse 25 just kind of ends off this little encounter with Simon as Peter and John go back, it says: "And they when they had testified and preached the word of the Lord returned to Jerusalem and preached the gospel in many villages of the Samaritans". The fantastic thing about these early Christians is that there is constantly this thing connected with them. They were always preaching. The went everywhere preaching. Peter preached and when he was done preaching he went preaching. He preached when he was there, he preached when he went somewhere else. They were just like a whole lot of little preaching machine set loose everywhere. Wherever you stuck them you got a sermon which is great. It was never of question of what do I do it was only a question of where do I do it. They always knew what to do. The Spirit of God had filled them and when you're filled with the Spirit you speak the word with what?
Boldness, Acts 4:31 and that's what they kept doing no matter where you put them they did it. And so Peter and John after they had done what they came to do, preached and then they took off and preached some more to the village of the Samaritans. And we can believe that great things happened as they went. And so Samaria received the gospel.
And now it's time for another step, the step to the uttermost part of the earth and it occurs as Philip meets a man from Africa, an Ethiopian eunuch. Now in this encounter with the Ethiopian we see some great things.
But before we get into it let me just draw a thought out that hit me as I looked at this. You know, for a long time the plan of God has obviously been to reach the world with the saving truth all the way through the old testament and God always designed at the beginning in the old testament for all of this communication to come through Israel. Remember Israel was not a reservoir Israel was a channel. God didn't expect to dump everything on Israel and then just sort of pet them and stroke them and say ‑ You're My favorite everybody else can just, you know, hide somewhere it's really you that I'm enjoying. That wasn't it at all, but a lot of people think that's how God was related to Israel. He only saw Israel as a vehicle to reach the world but Israel kept up clogging up the channel. Israel never really did t job. You can imagine what must have gone on in heaven this day when finally the fresh channel was cut known as the church and they finally stepped out and reached the first Gentile. I don't know what went on in heaven but I'm sure something broke loose. And in the old testament Israel was suppose to reach the Gentiles but they got trapped on two extremes. The one was a real separatistic nationalism where they didn't want Gentiles horning in on their God. They liked the fact that God was their God and they weren't too sure they wanted any Gentiles having anything to do with Him at all. That's a very common thing today, incidentally, one of the leaders of Judaism recently said that there are 14 million Jews in the world and we don't want anymore. We are not about to proselytize and we're really angry with Christians for doing the thing that we don't do. They don't want anymore. They didn't want anymore then for the most part. Remember God said to Jonah, I want you to go and preach to the Ninevites, they were Gentiles and Jonah didn't want to do it in fact he got on a ship and went the wrong direction and you know the story he took a short trip on a long fish and finally wound up being vomited ,
up. Somebody said, ‑ Anything as nauseating as Jonah would cause a fish to vomit. Anyway, he vomited Jonah up on the shore and finally he got the message and went to Nineveh. He preached and the whole city repented and Jonah went out on the side of the city and said Kill me, God, if there's anything I can't stand it's Gentile belief. Now that's how up‑tight they were about opening up the message of God to the Gentiles. But you have the other extreme, if it wasn't that separatistic nationalism then it was such a mixture that they corrupted their own faith. They then brought Baal in and they all started worshipping Baal. They couldn't seem to find the happy medium being there with the message without getting corrupted by the people they were trying to reach. So it was either shut your mouth or get lost in organism. There wasn't any happy medium. And so it must have been a glorious day in heaven when finally dear old Philip went down there where the Spirit told him to go and reached that first Gentile and Eusebius the historian say ?
This man, this Ethiopian, according to the tradition of the Abasian church became the founder of the church of Jesus Christ in Africa. And what seemed like an insignificant little move opened up and opened up a dimension of the church and the gospel of Jesus Christ to the continent of Africa in the form of the Abasinian church, the historic church of Africa. And so it was a great experience and it must have been a great day in heaven when it all came to pass. God had so long desired the gospel to go to the Gentiles.
Now we see with this man the faith that saves. This is one of those messages that just kind of leaps off the page at you with spiritual principle that apply in so many different cases. But there are three basic things .
that I want you to see under this concept of the faith that saves.
Number‑one, the faith that saves must have the proper preparation. Two‑the proper presentation and three, then will come the proper personal response If the preparation is right the presentation is right you get the right response. Now first of all let's look at the preparation. If it is to be real saving faith, I mean, if a person puts his faith in Jesus Christ and God and all of this is to really be legitimate, if it's a real new birth, if it's real salvation, if it really happens the preparation has to be right. Let's look at verse 2?. "And an angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip saying, Arise and go toward the south", now go down to verse 2?, "Then the Spirit said unto Philip Go near and join thyself to this chariot". Now just pulling those two thoughts out of there we see the first factor in the proper preparation, the sovereign work of whom? Of the Holy Spirit. You see, salvation begins with the Spirit of God. Salvation is God's work it is not man's work. The initiative is in the grace of God, it is in God's will. Nobody deserves salvation. Nobody earns it. Nobody of his own accord finds it or discovers it. God dispenses it according to His grace and sovereign will in the framework of grace. In I Cor. 2:14 we read a familiar verse, "But the natural man", now we mean man in his natural sinfulness, man apart from God, man in rebellion, man dead in sin, man without spiritual capacity. Just man in his naturalness. "Receive not the things of the Spirit of God they are foolishness unto him." They just don't make sense at all. Remember over in I Cor. chapter 1 the apostle Paul says that when you try to preach Christ crucified to the Gentiles it's foolishness and to the Jew it's a stumbling block of foolishness. And so the natural man in his own naturalness cannot understand God. It's all foolish. "Neither can he know because these things are spiritually discerned." And he is spiritually dead. So to begin with man cannot approach God because of his own naturalness he is incapacitated. II Cor. 4 adds a second which is a double blindness. II Cor. 4:3, "If our gospel be hidden it is hidden to them that are lost in whom the God of this age", who's that? Satan. "Has blinded the minds of them who believe not lest the light of the glorious gospel should shine unto them." So you see they're blinded by their naturalness and they're blinded by Satan himself. So men exist in double blindness They couldn't see salvation at all because they're incapacitated therefore the initiation of salvation is not the work of man it's the work of the Spirit of God who breaks through the barriers. You see, in John 14 these same truths as Jesus says to His disciples, When I go away I'm going to send a comforter unto you, the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive. T can't see Him neither do they know Him. You see, the whole thing of salvation is locked out of the naturalness of man. Now keep this in mind, one of the most important things that you need to remember in terms of the ministry of the Spirit of God and salvation is this, ‑ All that the Spirit is and all that the Spirit does is wholly outside the observation of the unsaved. Have you go that? All that the Spirit says and does is outside the observation of the unsaved in their naturalness. And with such limitations it is not only unreasonable but it is obviously unscriptural to suppose that some individual unaided by the divine initiation of the Holy Spirit could ever come to Christ on the basis of saving faith. Couldn't be done. In Ephesians 2:1 it says, man is dead in sin. Dead men don't respond to anything. John 6:44 Jesus simply said this, "No man cometh unto Me unless the Father", what? "Draw him." You see, it must be God's initiating act to break the barrier that is put there by naturalness and Satan himself. The Holy Spirit can move in and when the Holy Spirit shatters the barrier then all that was mystery becomes light. And that's the glorious work of the Spirit.
Now the Spirit begins to work in this case with the Ethiopian by just getting Philip going the right direction. It doesn't say anything about what the Spirit has already done in the heart of the Ethiopian but He's done His work there too. But now He's working on Philip and this just gives us a general view of the fact that salvation is really initiated in the work of the Spirit. The orders are very specific too. It's kind of interesting it's almost like Elijah and Elisha, verse 26 let's look at it. "And an angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip", now some say the term angel which can also be translated messenger means really the Holy Spirit although it's not used as such other places it's probably best to think of it just as an angel sent by the Spirit of God, but anyway, "The angel of the Lord spoke unto Phil the Spirit of God moves in and speaks. We find also down in verse 2? that the Spirit of God speaks again. But the Spirit anyway says, "Arise and go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza which is desert", or which is a desert road, desert area. Now Gaza was a city of the Philistines. It had been originally built as a fortress. And right through the middle of old Gaza ran the road that ran from Jerusalem to Egypt Gaza was approximately ?O miles southwest of Jerusalem and the road went through Bethlehem, Hebron and through Gaza and into Egypt. So it was a very much traveled road. And there were other roads going east that intersected it. So it was a very important road. Gaza about ?6 B.C. had been destroyed totally and a new city had been built some west toward the sea but the old road still ran through the ruins of Gaza. And so the Spirit of God says to Philip, Now you go down to this old fortress in that old area down there, the desert road I have something I want you to do. And it's interesting that he doesn't even tell him, He just says, Arise and go toward the south the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza which is desert. He told him where to go, He didn't tell him what to do but I told you earlier why. They knew what to do. Right? They always did the same thing. They got up in the morning and started preaching. So He didn't need to say Go and preach, Phil He just said, Go, Philip, you know what to de when you get there just do what you always do. It's amazing how many times Christians need to be reminded to what we're supposed to do. Verse 29, have you ever, let me .
before I say that, have you ever come away from a conversation saying, Boy, I should of witnessed to that person? It's an afterthought which is kind or a nice way of saying, ‑ Ah, I think I might have forgotten ‑ when you know in your heart you didn't forget at all. You know yourself better than that you really didn't have the boldness to do it, I mean, that's how I am. Let be honest. Anyway, he knew what to do he didn't have to be told. Verse 2?
"Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near and join thyself to this chariot". Now I don't know how many chariots went by but God pointed out this chariot and said, That's the one, Philip, go join it. Now watch, you'll see that God uses human instruments but we only participate He initiates.
participate He initiates. God had designed the conversion of this unit as God designs the conversion of every man who is ever saved. And so the salvation of one sinner is worthy of the attention of God. And when a sinner is converted, any sinner any time it is because of a direct purpose, a dire plan and a direct strategy in the mind of God. It is no accident. God is not sitting up in heaven saying, I hope those folks come to salvation, I ho they get saved. God is doing it. So the faith that does save, then, begin with the right preparation and that begins with the sovereign work of the Spirit. The Spirit does his work. He sets everything in motion so you have the sovereign work of the Spirit.
Number two in preparation the submissive will of Philip. The Spirit does the work but He needs a tool. I like that, don't you? He initiates we participate. I was in Rome and I'm a lover of art believe it or not and I love sculpture, good sculpture. And I went, of course, from one fountain to the next, you know, to see the great works of Raphael and Michelangelo and Bernini and others in Italy and I'll never forget, we went into the church, my wife and I and those that were with us to see Michelangelo's great Moses the one that somebody took a hammer to recently. And we went up to this great statue and it's just breathtaking .
to imagine the creativity and the genius of a man who could make Moses look like he's about to stand up and you just marvel at it. And then I begin to think and I thought continually, he probably created that masterpiece with a little wooden mallet and some funny. looking little pieces of metal. Some really inconsequential tool. And you know, I could take the same tools that Michelangelo used and make a mess but he made a masterpiece. You see.
You're a tool, you're a tool and that's all you are. Don't ever confuse you self with the artist. The Spirit is the artist. He's the craftsman. You're only the tool but you are a tool. It's nice to be a tool, isn't it? And so we participate and so you've got to have a willing Philip. Watch this, and he was really willing, the Spirit always uses human instruments, always. But there's a qualification to be used and that's holiness. We find that in II Timothy 2:2O and if you really want to be used listen to this. In a great house there not only vessels of gold and silver but also wood and earth and some to honor and some to dishonor. In other words, in your china cabinets a in your cupboards at home you have some nice dishes and some pretty crummy ones, got some old plastic scratched ones and then you've got your nice china, see. So when the good company comes you don't put out the plastic scratched ones, right? That have been on the stove and they've warped and all those things, you just ‑ well, in terms of what God wants to do they're all different instruments. And when God wants His best work done He pulls out His best china, verse 21; "If a man therefore purge himself from these he shall be a vessel unto honor sanctified and fit for the Master's use prepared for every work." You want to be God's good china you stay pure, you purge yourself from sin. So God uses holy tools, holy instruments to do His finest work. Can you imagine Michelangelo chipping away at Moses if at the end of his little tool there was a big crack, he would never be able to use that tool because it would have to be perfectly shaped. And isn't it interesting also that the artist probably shaped his own tool? So the Holy Spirit shapes us. All right, so He needed an available tool and he found one, verse 27 ‑ I like this, here's Philip: "And he arose and went", it doesn't say he fasted and prayed for three weeks he just went. It doesn't say he argued with God and said, Now Look, God, I've got a proposition for you, we've got quite a thing going up here in Samaria, publicity's out, I've got a press interview tomorrow, a big revival going on, now You must h somebody on Your team who's going from Jerusalem to Egypt who could hit that guy on the way down. Ah, that's a long trip and once I get there I've got come back and that's a good 125 miles, Lord, and I've got to walk and that' desert and I mean, there's lots of other instruments. But Philip was the right shape. God knew it, God wanted him and Philip didn't argue he arose and went. I like that because that's humility. I mean, he was in the lime light in Samaria. He was in the limelight. There was a mass of people coming to Jesus Christ but he was going to go down, not really knowing probably at this point what he was going to do and wind up talking to one man.
To drop everything and head for the desert seems absurd. At a time in Phil life when everything was strategic. But God not only calls men unto salvation He calls the instrument He uses to bring them to salvation. So verse 2?, jump down there for a minute, "Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near join thyself to this chariot", watch, "And Philip", what's the next word?
"Ran" Isn't that terrific? Have you ever thought what you'd do? It's such a strange chariot, that's a big wheel. I don't know that guy. That guy's some kind of big ‑ look at that caravan. I just can't go running up there and say, ‑ Hey, have you heard the four spiritual laws? I mean, that's a little out of context. Right? That man doesn't know me I don't know him, I'm not going to intrude on his privacy and invade his personal life. I just can't do that. No. God said, Go ‑ and Philip ran. I like that. I like that. But you know, boldness belongs to Spirit‑filled people. Acts 4:
we already read, what does it say? "And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke with", what? "Boldness" They were just going everywhere preaching and it was just another opportunity to preach. He was doing it anyway he just ran over and continued. Boy, the servant who can say I do always the will of Him who sent me is a happy servant. The Lord used Peter to reach Cornelius, Paul to reach the j