Acts 1.1–11 and John 15.18–27
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 3 July 2022
There are three main things stopping people from becoming Christians. The first cause is that many people have little knowledge of what Christianity is. Sometimes they think they do, but their knowledge is confused. Accurate knowledge is needed or, as Jesus said, they will die in their sins. The second reason is thinking the Christian Faith isn’t true. The third is that many people are afraid of the Christian life; they do not want it to be true. These three reasons why people avoid Christianity, I want to address today.
Jesus met with his followers for a period of six weeks after his resurrection from the dead. The hopes he had awakened in them through his kingdom preaching had all been shattered by his death. Now he is alive again, and so are their hopes, and it is interesting to see what shape they took.
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
Acts 1.6
Jesus has just told them they were about to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, which is as they expected it would be with the coming of the kingdom of God. Jesus had often told them he had come to release the Holy Spirit. The other thing that attached to their hopes of the kingdom was the restoration of Israel to its former glory, hence their question: “Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” It was a natural question, and Jesus is not critical of them for asking it. He simply says, “Not yet.” That will come in the Father’s good time; in the meantime—
He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
Acts 1.7–8
They are to be witnesses of what they have seen and heard, to their own people, and to the rest of the peoples of the world. Jesus unveils an age of witness, which neither they nor the other Jews expected before the coming of the new world. To understand this, we need to go back to the Old Testament.
In the Book of Isaiah—seven hundred years before Jesus—God revealed that he was going to do a great work of salvation and make himself known to the world. He pictures the nations gathered together, and challenges them to bring forth their witnesses to testify or witness about what they and their gods knew of what would happen. They knew nothing. But God’s servants knew, because it had been revealed to them.
All the nations gather together, and the peoples assemble. Who among them can declare this, and show us the former things? Let them bring their witnesses to prove them right, and let them hear and say, It is true. “You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the LORD, and besides me there is no saviour… and you are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and I am God.
Isaiah 43.9–12
Part of the strange work God would do involved the sending of a servant who would suffer terribly—even die— yet be the means for many to be saved. So now, in the aftermath of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, he says to his servants, “You are my witnesses—through you the world will learn of the great thing God has done. This fits perfectly with what Jesus had told them before his death:
This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a witness to all nations, and then the end will come.
Matthew 24.14
We see that we are living in the age of witness. You could say that the world only continues to run its course so that all the nations can hear about Jesus and be invited to join his kingdom. When the task is finished, he will return, and the new age will begin.
It is quite extraordinary that Jesus foresaw this two thousand years ago, when his apostles were only twelve men without influence, money, or power. It should help to convince us that we are not dealing here with a man-made thing, but a genuine work of God.
But now we must ask how this connects with the Church, for in this sermon series we are exploring the nature and mission of the Church. So, I want to begin by saying the Church is a witnessing Church, though the churches today—you and I—are not witnesses in the same way the apostles were. They were chosen to be with Jesus from the very beginning of his ministry, and to witness his dying and rising. They could speak with perfect certainty of the things they had seen and heard. We cannot. However, for the gospel to be proclaimed to the whole world as Jesus intended, the witnessing must go on. There are two ways this can happen. First, we can point people to the apostles’ witness in the New Testament. Inviting people to read a Gospel, or the Acts, or one of the New Testament letters is putting them in direct touch with the apostles’ witness. The Church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets: that is what Paul says in Ephesians. This is where the work of the Bible Societies and organizations like the Gideons is so important, making the Bible available everywhere.
The second way we can join in the work of witness is to tell our own story of how God became real for us. Paul was not a witness of Jesus’ death and resurrection—not in the same way the other apostles were. But three times his story is told in Acts, and it is compelling. Of course, he had seen and heard the risen Jesus. We cannot claim that, but we all have a story.
I used to train preachers. I built their confidence by getting them to tell their story. One chap stood in front of the class and burst into tears. “Nothing has ever happened to me,” he said. But that wasn’t true; we soon had him telling his story. You cannot live without having a story. Every man and woman and child who comes to faith in Jesus has a faith-story, and it is worth telling. It is a whole lot easier to tell your own story, than to preach a sermon. It may not be the gospel, but it may contain the gospel. What is it you came to believe, and what brought you to believe it? Your story may be the carrier wave which enables someone to hear the gospel in an unthreatening way. Hopefully, they may then want to explore one of the Gospels themselves, or come to church and enquire. Our hope is that in every church the message of God might be spoken and explained, that our church might be what Paul calls, “a pillar and buttress of the truth.”
We have answered our first question: how can they learn? But how can they know it is true? Here the idea of witness comes to our aid again. In our Gospel reading Jesus says to his apostles:
But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.
John 15.26–27
Jesus calls on his followers to bear witness to what they have seen and heard. Their witness is not just to inform people of what happened, but to convince them that it did happen—that it is true. Part of their witness would be his death and resurrection, and their meaning, but also Jesus’ miracles and teaching. How can I know Christianity is true? Not through philosophy; not through science; not through psychology, though all these things can support Christian claims and beliefs. But there were witnesses to what Jesus did, including that they saw him alive again after his death. Paul finished his speech to the Athenian philosophers with the words:
The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.
Acts 17.30–31
The word “assurance” could as well be translated as “proof.” God does not ask us to “just believe;” he provides evidence. “Just believe!” is not a Christian thing; the Bible is full of appeals to evidence. But we cannot get away from the reality that most of the evidence is the testimony of witnesses.
You may wonder whether this is enough. We would perhaps like to offer people a proof, like in mathematics, but God has not seen fit to do that. He has given us witnesses. If we do not believe them, the loss is ours. It is like we are on an island: someone has come from the outside to warn us that an earthquake and tsunami are coming. We should board the ship that is waiting in the harbour. It will take us out to deep water. If we demand proof before we come on board, we will die. God is offering us a way to be saved from the destruction coming on the world, and the great judgement of the last day. If we want to play hard-to-get, we have only ourselves to blame when we are caught up in the destruction.
We now have the answer to our second question: how can people believe it is true? The answer is that God has provided witnesses, and we have their witness in the pages of the New Testament. I may have told you before about the retired engineer from Sydney whose back started hurting him when he was in Cape Town. When he returned, he discovered he had cancer of the liver. They offered him chemo- and radium therapy, but he decided he did not want the end of his life to be spoiled by nausea. He phoned me in Cape Town to say he had decided against the treatment. “After all,” he said, “if you are going to die, what does it matter if you die on Tuesday or Thursday.” Towards the end, he was interviewed by his church minister, who asked: “What accounts for your quiet confidence?” His answer—he was a man of few words: “I believe Jesus died and rose from the dead; I don’t believe those guys just made that up.” Read the Gospels yourself, and listen to the witnesses. Do you really think they made Jesus up?
But you need to know that if you become a follower of Jesus, you are letting yourself in for trouble. I said earlier that there are some who do not want to be convinced. They wish that Christians would just shut up. We cannot, of course, because we believe a tsunami is coming.
Last week we looked at the first half of John 15 and saw what Jesus said about bearing fruit. If we are attached to him like the branches are to a grape vine, if his word is in us, if we are praying, obeying, loving, and are conscious of our privilege as his friends, knowing his plans and seeking his kingdom, sooner or later we are going to collide with the world. It is this which Jesus addresses in the second half of John 15.
If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.
John 15.18–19
Jesus knew his disciples would find themselves out of step with the world. John’s brother James was killed because of his faith. Many of his Christian friends were persecuted because they would not go along with the intense nationalism that swept Judaea in the sixties. John is now living in Ephesus and will soon fall foul of the imperial authorities, and be banished to live on an island.
What does he mean by “the world?” The original meaning of the Greek word kosmos was a brooch: an ornament beautifully patterned with gold and precious stones into an attractive design. Our English word “cosmetic” comes from this. The Greeks looked at the universe and the world and thought they were looking at something similar, the work of a master craftsman, beautiful and functional. “Kosmos” became one of the common words used by the Greeks to describe the world and the universe. There are others: “ge” was the land or earth, “oikoumene” was the world of people. “Kosmos” meant the world as a system. Christians would soon find themselves at odds with the God-denying system. The world-system is always changing, of course. In some countries it may be very God-conscious, as it was in Israel, and as it is in Muslim countries today. It may be godless, as it is under communism, or in Buddhist or secular countries. The point is, there is no place for God’s king, his Son the Lord Jesus Christ, and that means there is no place for the true God. As Jesus said, “If they hate me, they hate my Father also.” Secularism—is the name of the system today in most western countries—some call it humanism. Patrick Sookhdeo, in his book, The New Civic Religion, explains how Humanism is taking over the world. In the first Humanist Manifesto, Humanism saw itself as a new religion which would displace Christianity. Later revisions of the Manifesto, realizing that religion is seen negatively by many, have denied it is a religion, though this hasn’t prevented them from claiming tax advantages as though it is. It certainly is an alternative religion, working tirelessly to establish itself in government, in the professions, and in schools.
Humanists do not believe in God. Instead they think that humans have invented or imagined the existence of God. They feel that any belief in a God … is dangerous to society and holds back the development of humans as a species.
I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity …
Patrick Sookhdeo, The New Civic Religion, 39
The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of “love your neighbour” will finally be achieved.
John Dunphy in The Humanist Jan/Feb 1983, 26. From Sookhdeo.
This is Humanism, an organized movement, which has established itself by stealth and partly by dishonesty. Most people don’t know they are being manipulated by a very clever movement, but I don’t think we can blame it all on Humanists. It is the spirit of our age, bigger than any one organization. It is the whole way of thinking of the world as it is. It shouts at us through the TV screen, and we meet in every day in the people we rub shoulders with.
But how are we to compete with it? We are an easy target. We state upfront who we are, and what we believe. And we are competing with a movement which appeals to people’s natural desires, shamelessly uses propaganda, and is always inventing catchy slogans to deceive. Forty years after Dunphy’s pronouncements Christianity is hardly a “rotting corpse,” but it is more and more marginalized in the public sphere. Christian schooling is at risk. Public statements of a Christian nature are ridiculed or vilified, and people punished for making them. Kids at many schools are indoctrinated with secularist ideas. But most serious, even where Christians are still free to speak, people do not want to know. They do not want it to be true, for it threatens their lifestyle. So even the testimony of the witnesses is not going to be listened to. Does Christian faith have a future?
It is here that God comes to the rescue. As well as providing witnesses to give evidence of Jesus and salvation, he has given a further witness in the person of his Holy Spirit.
But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.
John 15.26
We are not alone. The Holy Spirit works alongside us opening people’s hearts, drawing them to himself, and giving them the inner conviction of the truth of the gospel. How else would any of us have come to faith?
I am struck by that phrase of Dunphy: “the rotting corpse of Christianity.” From outside that is how it will be seen. I am reminded of Paul’s words,
We are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance of death to death, to the other a fragrance of life to life.”
2 Corinthians 2.15–16
The smell of death is how Christianity strikes many, but the Holy Spirit changes it to an aroma of life.
We must not be frightened by the power and influence of the world. We are a witnessing community and must not lose our nerve. Most of all we must not change our message to please the world. The world will die; Babylon will fall. How many “systems” have come and gone since Jesus spoke those words: ‘On this rock I will build my Church and the powers of hell will not prevail against it.” The Word of God will stand forever. The great surprise is what we also learn in John’s Gospel, that “God so loved the World that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” He has given his Son, he has provided his witnesses, and he gives his Spirit, all to save this muddle-headed, confused and confusing, murderous world.