"Devoted" - Preaching at Harderwyk - Acts 19 - August 1, 2021

Resources For "Devoted" Series From Each Harderwyk Preacher

I. New For This Week

From Counterfeit Gods by Tim Keller

“What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.” (Keller, p. xix)

“A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.  An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought.  Ist can be family and children, or career and making money, or achievement and critical acclaim, or saving ‘face’ and social standing. It can be a romantic relationship, peer approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even success in the Christian ministry.” (Keller, p. xx)

Mark Sayers on Expressive Individualism  - CLICK HERE for the entire post. 

Mark Sayers helpfully sums up several beliefs that swirl around in an expressive individualist society. These 7 summary statements come from Sayers’s book Disappearing Church.

1. The highest good is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.
2. Traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.
3. The world will inevitably improve as the scope of individual freedom grows. Technology —in particular the internet—will motor this progression toward utopia.
4. The primary social ethic is tolerance of everyone’s self-defined quest for individual freedom and self-expression. Any deviation from this ethic of tolerance is dangerous and must not be tolerated. Therefore, social justice is less about economic or class inequality, and more about issues of equality relating to individual identity, self-expression, and personal autonomy.
5. Humans are inherently good.
6. Large-scale structures and institutions are suspicious at best and evil at worst.  Forms of external authority are rejected and personal authenticity is lauded

Then finally from Tim Keller’s “How to Reach the West” here are some narratives of the modern west.

• Identity: “You have to be true to yourself.” 
• Freedom: “You should be free to live as you choose, as long as you don’t hurt anyone.” 
• Happiness: “You must do what makes you happiest. You can’t sacrifice that for anyone.” 
• Science: “The only way to solve our problems is through objective science and facts.” 
• Morality: “Everyone has the right to decide what is right and wrong themselves.” 
• Justice: “We are obligated to work for the freedom, rights, and good of everyone in the world.” 
• History: “History is bending toward social progress and away from religion.”

Sermon Outline From Celebration - CLICK HERE for outline, including The Cross Chart - And to watch the 30 minute video "1904 - The Awakening in Wales," CLICK HERE.  Recorded in 1981, Dr Orr relates stories that he heard first hand from people who had been a part of the Welsh Revival.

II. From The Commentaries On This Passage

In regards to Paul’s interaction with those who had only received John’s baptism in Acts 19:1-7 John Stott writes this in The Message of Acts:

“Consider now the answers which Paul received to his questions. In answer to his first, they said that they had ‘not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit’. This cannot mean that they had never heard of the Spirit at all, for he is referred to many times in the Old Testament, and John the Baptist spoke of the Messiah as baptizing people with the Spirit. It must rather mean that, although they had heard John’s prophecy, they had not heard whether it had been fulfilled. They were ignorant of Pentecost. In answer to Paul’s second question, they explained that they had received John’s baptism, not Christian baptism. In a word, they were still living in the Old Testament which culminated with John the Baptist. They understood neither that the new age had been ushered in by Jesus, nor that those who believe in him and are baptized into him receive the distinctive blessing of the new age, the indwelling Spirit.

Once they came to understand this through Paul’s instruction, they put their trust in Jesus of whose coming their teacher John the Baptist had spoken. They were then baptized into Christ, Paul laid his hands on them (giving his apostolic imprimatur to what was happening, as Peter and John had done in Samaria), the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. In other words, they experienced a mini-Pentecost. Better, Pentecost caught up on them. Better still, they were caught up into it, as its promised blessings became theirs.”

I. Howard Marshall offers this reflection for us on Acts 19:18-20 in Acts: An Introduction and Commentary:

“Nevertheless, the process of purification of Christian thinking from paganism was assisted by what had happened. Christians are not fully converted or perfected in an instant, and pagan ways of thinking can persist alongside genuine Christian experience; the history of the church in Corinth shows that Christians took some time to be persuaded that sexual immorality and idol-worship were ultimately incompatible with Christian faith (1 Cor. 6:9–11). Sooner or later there must come a point when believers realize the need to confess the sinfulness of their practices; if it is possible to go further and remove the cause of the temptation, as in this case, so much the better. The demonstration of the futility of pagan attempts to master evil spirits led many of Paul’s Ephesian converts to realize that the pagan magic to which they were still attached was both useless and sinful. They therefore brought the various magical handbooks and compilations of invocations and formulae to which they were still clinging and made a final break with them by publicly burning them. The particular fascination of this kind of rubbish for the Ephesians is demonstrated by the fact that magical books were known as ‘Ephesian letters’. The value of the ‘rubbish’ was high—corresponding to the wages of 50,000 workmen for a day’s work apiece—but this is not necessarily an exaggeration in city conditions, nor when compared with what ordinary people today may spend on similar knick-knacks and frivolities. On this high note Luke ends the account of Paul’s successful ministry in Ephesus, although the story of what happened in Ephesus is not yet complete.”

III. Ongoing Resources

1) Spiritual Formation Resources Page - CLICK HERE - This is still a work in progress, but be a part as we look to build

2) Scotty Smith’s Heavenward Daily Prayers - CLICK HERE to see the daily prayer blog of Scotty Smith.  You will see an option to have them delivered to your email inbox each day as well.  

3) Simple Lectio Divina Overview - CLICK HERE for a simple introduction of the spiritual practice of a more personal way of experience the Word through contemplation and reflection.