You Make Me Brave

[podcast]http://www.revkwon.com/podcast/acts-brave.mp3[/podcast] Have you ever felt like you needed to be more brave? I remember when I was eight or nine years old and I was living in Jamaica and I was invited to a fight. The invitation was this: fight or give my lunch to a big, fat, hungry kid. I don’t know why, but I decided that I should share my lunch with the big, fat, hungry kid. I could have fought the kid, even though he had to have been a hundred pounds more than me, but I decided instead to sit with the scariest kid on the playground and eat with this guy. I think after that, people started to call me brave, but I never understood why. But that incident got me thinking—how many other occasions could I have been more than what I was and actually be brave?  I’m sure if you start thinking about your own lives, you have some of these similar thoughts. Some people here may be telling themselves, if I could just be brave enough to say, “no.” Goodness, you just can’t say “no” because you’re not brave enough to disappoint the person asking. Your life would just change if you could say, “no.” Maybe, you’re the person that wasn’t brave enough to admit you were wrong. Or you weren’t brave enough to say that you were sorry. As a result, somebody else suffered because of you and people’s feelings were really hurt. Man, I could give you endless numbers of stories of where I wasn’t brave and how every single instance where I fail to live up to that bravery, I die a little bit on the inside. What about this: you weren’t brave enough to try. I can recount times where I was so cowardly that I didn’t even bother trying because I was afraid of the certain failure. The last two weeks, in this series of the book of Acts, we learned that God gave us power, who is the Holy Spirit. In fact, Jesus says to us that we must use that power to be His witnesses in Jerusalem (which is our immediate surroundings), Judea (outside our normal pattern of life), and to the ends of the earth (where we influence). But the way God allows us to use power is in the form of opportunities. Last week, we said that there were abounding opportunities if we would just seize them in the faith of the power that is within us through the Holy Spirit. Today, I want to share with you that because you have power and you have these opportunities, all we need to do is come up with the bravery to go and do it. Write this down: Bravery is one part God’s grace and one part God’s power. That means that bravery has nothing to do with your level of fear. What you fear has nothing to do with how brave you can be. I want you to understand that all of us can be brave because we have the power of God flowing through us in the Holy Spirit. We prayed for that in week 1. I pray that for you guys all the time. Your teachers pray for that when they say prayers for you. If you have God’s grace and His power then you are brave. There is nothing else required for bravery. Let’s read today, the story of Stephen. Stephen is the first person to die for faith in Jesus Christ. Traditionally, August 3 is actually the day we celebrate Stephen’s bravery in the church. So here we are, learning about the man who taught men to be brave. Let’s go to Acts 6:8. ⁸ Now Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power, performed great wonders and signs among the people. ⁹ Opposition arose, however, from members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called)—Jews of Cyrene and Alexandria as well as the provinces of Cilicia and Asia—who began to argue with Stephen. ¹⁰ But they could not stand up against the wisdom the Spirit gave him as he spoke. (Acts 6:8-10). I want to give you some background here. Stephen was chosen to run a welfare program for the church. There were widows in the church, a lot of them, and because the numbers of Christians kept growing, the disciples couldn’t keep up with taking care of all of them. So they got Stephen, who Luke says was “full of God’s grace and power” to run the operation. You see how that works? The disciples picked a brave man to seize the opportunity that God gave them to meet needs. This is how Stephen was able to be a witness for God. Let me go back to the story. Stephen performed “great wonders and signs.” I want to take this phrasing as one of two things. I want you to understand this in two ways. First is this, Stephen, because he was filled with the power of God through the Holy Spirit, was now doing exactly what Jesus said he would be doing—which is greater things than the miracles he performed. Moreover, I want to say that Stephen was doing things that people just couldn’t understand how it was humanly possible. This alludes to his holiness—that is, how connected he is to God and God’s power, but I’m going to get back to that a little later. I want you to keep this in mind because it’s important. Bravery allows you to be holy; but not in the religious sense, I mean “holy” in the denotative sense, that is to say, “set apart.” Being brave, one part God’s grace and one part God’s power allows you to be set apart or do things that are set apart from the ordinary. This is Stephen. This is you. I want you to tell three neighbors: BE BRAVE TO BECOME HOLY. But now we see in verse 9 that “opposition arose.” The only problem was that he couldn’t be touched. You see that in verse 10? Write this down: People who show bravery are often shunned by a fearful opposition. I want to continue with the story, verse 11. ¹¹ Then they secretly persuaded some men to say, “We have heard Stephen speak blasphemous words against Moses and against God.” ¹² So they stirred up the people and the elders and the teachers of the law. They seized Stephen and brought him before the Sanhedrin. ¹³ They produced false witnesses, who testified, “This fellow never stops speaking against this holy place and against the law.¹⁴ For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs Moses handed down to us.” ¹⁵ All who were sitting in the Sanhedrin looked intently at Stephen, and they saw that his face was like the face of an angel. (Acts 6:11-15) I just wanted you to see verse 15. He had a face like an angel. Here there’s also two implications that I won’t go into, but I’m just going to say that it has to do with Stephen’s holiness and the opposition didn’t really know what to do because they all really wanted to be like him, but they secretly hated him for being awesome. Because he was awesome and they all were secretly wanting to be like him, they had asked him, “is it true?” What was true was that they he was sharing a new life with people who have been reinvented by Jesus. So he begins his long soliloquy. I’m not going to get into the whole thing, but I do recommend that all of you read in full, but I’m going to give you the Jonathan notes version of it. Stephen makes one thing very clear to all who hear him: Bravery is required to follow Christ with your life.

• God told him, ‘Leave your native land and your relatives, and come into the land that I will show you.’ So Abraham left the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran until his father died. Then God brought him here to the land where you now live. (Acts 7:2-4)

Abraham was rich and he was comfortable and he was old. But he left all of that behind so that he could follow God in a tent. He was doing all of that out of hope. That’s brave.

• The second time they went, Joseph revealed his identity to his brothers, and they were introduced to Pharaoh. (Acts 7:13)

Do you know how hard it is to confront the people who betrayed you? And to top it all off—to continue to love them knowing what jerk faces they are?

• So God sent back the same man his people had previously rejected when they demanded, ‘Who made you a ruler and judge over us?’ Through the angel who appeared to him in the burning bush, God sent Moses to be their ruler and savior. (Acts 7:35)

Moses killed a man and ran away from the people he had tried to help. He came back and started an exodus out of the country that raised him. Pharaoh was more family to Moses than the Hebrews, but he undermined an entire nation. That’s brave.

• Years later, when Joshua led our ancestors in battle against the nations that God drove out of this land, the Tabernacle was taken with them into their new territory. And it stayed there until the time of King David. (Acts 7:45)

Joshua, one of my favorite characters in the Bible understood brave. This is the motto he lived his life by, “This is my command—be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9)

• Name one prophet your ancestors didn’t persecute! They even killed the ones who predicted the coming of the Righteous One—the Messiah whom you betrayed and murdered. (Acts 7:52)

Every single prophet in the Bible was brave. The reason they were brave was because they knew that they were going to die and that they would die horrifically at the hands of the people God loved so much. It was like a catch-22. Die by God, die by the people He sent you to love. Stephen knew it. He was about to die. He had to be brave. Let’s see the end of the story. ⁵⁴ When the members of the Sanhedrin heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. ⁵⁵ But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ⁵⁶ “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” ⁵⁷ At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, ⁵⁸ dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. ⁵⁹ While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” ⁶⁰ Then he fell on his knees and cried out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he fell asleep. (Acts 7:54-60) Your bravery now unlocks potential for others later. Do you see who was in the crowd? That’s right, a guy named Saul. Stephen’s bravery unlocked potential for other people later. Do you think that without Stephen, Saul, who becomes Paul, could have endured everything that he had to endure to be a witness for God at the ends of the earth? We see Paul named here, but he wasn’t the only one who saw this—the other disciples saw what happened to Stephen and they probably learned from him too. But it goes further than the 1^st century. Did you know Christians were often the very people that epitomized bravery in the medical front, during the plague, in war time, in peace time, in disasters and in turmoil because they understood that bravery didn’t come from them, but it came from the power in them from God. This is why we have a church today. Your legacy stems from that ideal of bravery. I want to go to our memory verse for today because this helps us understand that that what we do and why we do the things we do doesn’t have anything to do with us, but has everything to do with God. James 1:27 says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”