Pure Life Ministries Podcast

Tongues of Fire: The Early Church Part 4

When the truth is preached with boldness in the fire of God, people will either respond in repentance or will be filled with rage. Oftentimes this results in believers being martyred for their faith by those who are under Satan's control. This is Part 4 of our short series, "Tongues of Fire: The Early Church."

Broadcast on:: 19 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

Hey, this is Patrick with Pure Life Ministries. When our hearts are truly transformed by God, significant changes should be occurring in our lifestyle. But this goes far beyond just stopping porn use or avoiding illicit scenes in movies. How we spend our time, where we go, what we pursue in life, everything, should be radically altered as we begin to walk on the narrow way. And many Christians just don't think deeply enough about the way they live, and it's not uncommon for those in the church to base their daily decisions off the media and the culture rather than on the moral principles of Scripture. We want to see that change. Please join us on Saturday, October 12th at 10am Eastern on our YouTube channel for another episode of Pure Life Live. I'll be sitting down with Pure Life's President and Founder, Steve Gallagher, and our Executive Director of Counseling Programs, Jordan Yoshimine, to discuss the influence of the media we ingest, the limits we should put on our devices, the impact of spiritual atmospheres in and out of the home, and much more. Our hope is that this will help you learn to lead a lifestyle that honors God and helps you get free or stay free from sexual sin. We'd also love to respond to your questions about this topic, so send those to live@purelifeministries.org. When the truth is preached in the fire of God, people will either repent or be filled with rage. Oftentimes, this results in believers being martyred for their faith by those who are under Satan's control. This is part four of our short series, Tongues of Fire, the Early Church. Steve Gallagher has joined me in the studio. Steve is the founder of Pure Life Ministries. Steve's good to see you again. I'm happy to be here, Mike. Steve, we want to continue our discussions in your series, The Early Church, and we're looking at the book of Acts. And one of the things going on in the book of Acts is that we see some tensions arising within the early church. Talk to us about what those are. These tensions you see come forth in Acts 6 really come out of the Jewish community itself. They're in Jerusalem because you have two different communities of Jewish people. You have those who are from Palestine, from Judea, from Jerusalem, they've lived their whole lives there. And then you have Jews that have returned there from out in the Roman world somewhere. Those are the Hellenized Jews. And what really causes the problem is mostly the Pharisees because they are so disdainful of Jews living outside of Judea. So all of a sudden you have 3,000 Jews getting saved and many of those are Hellenized Jews. So they are bringing that same tension into this new church. Not as bad. I mean, definitely there's a difference because when you have Christ in the mix, people are going to be more humble and loving and so on, but still underlying that are some struggles that comes forth in the church. So in this chapter we see this tension coming forth in dealing with widows in the church where some of the widows from the Hellenized portion of the community are feeling neglected. And so what the apostles do is they appoint seven deacons to kind of manage the affairs of the church while they can focus on ministering. Well, in your talk you really laid out that this was the beginning of the structure of the church. Talked us a little bit about what that structure in the early church was. Yeah, it did just kind of unfold this way and you see the Holy Spirit at work behind the scenes, you had the twelve apostles and they kind of governed everything. And now these deacons are appointed to kind of administrate what we would call the supportive services, the back-end stuff behind the scenes, whatever. And then you have the congregation and they also play a role in the function of the church. You know, in other words, they'll end up voting for offices and so on. So you have these three tiers being established in the early church already. Well, Steve, as the story moves on, it goes into the account of Stephen, who was actually one of the deacons in the early church. And as we know, the Lord really used him, but it provoked an attack upon him by the Hellenized Jews that you mentioned living in Jerusalem. Tell us about that. Stephen was very bold with the gospel and he apparently was out preaching. The Lord was working mighty miracles through him and Satan always attacks when God is working through an individual. And so in this particular case, we read of this Hellenized group of Jews who begin debating with Stephen. And what's interesting about that is that Silesia is one of the provinces these Jews are from and who is from Silesia, Saul of Tarsus and knowing what Saul's personality was like, it's very likely that he was involved in these debates, which means he was involved with distorting the things Stephen was saying, you know, to be able to persecute him. Well, Steve, for those who don't know the story, they became infuriated with Stephen and drug him before the Sanhedrin. Tell us what happens next. Well, he's standing before these 70 venerable leaders of the nation and he gives a long sermon and basically what he does is he recounts the entire history of the Jewish nation. Now to us in our Western mindset, we would be like, why is he going to all this detail? You know, TMI, too much information. Right. And why is he telling all these different aspects of the story? But see, that was the way the Jews operate it. They would have been completely comfortable with that and it also established the fact that Stephen was orthodox in his thinking, you know, so it helped to establish some credibility. But when he gets to the end of the message, then he zeroes in on them and how they have been like their fathers who have rebelled against the Lord throughout the entire history of the nation and, you know, he really just nails them, calls them stiff-necked hypocrites. Well, as full of pride as Jesus made it obvious to us that they all were, we can only guess what their reaction was. Well, they got furious, of course. You know, this is the way it always is. When the Lord uses you to express something that is wrong inside a person's heart, his inner world, a person is going to do one of two things usually. They are either going to respond to the Lord or they're going to get mad. And that's what happens here is they go into an absolute rage. If it wasn't so true, they may have not gotten so angry, but he nailed them and they went into a rage, they grabbed him up even though they knew that the Romans could easily come right in there and crucify every one of them for doing something like this. They were committing murder. But even in spite of that, they just shut that out of the mines. They were so filled with rage and they grabbed him, drug him out of the city because you couldn't kill someone within the sacred bounds of the city and they stoned him to death. Yeah. I appreciate the fact as you close this talk on this particular story that you saw a connection between what was happening here with Stephen and how it is with people today. Well, Stephen was the first martyr and, of course, the word "marter" in the Greek means witness. He was the one who would testify the truth. And that's what we've been called to do. And depending on what the spiritual environment is during our times, is going to determine the reaction we get from people. I've gotten that hateful anger many times for bringing forth a strong message or whatever. And in the days ahead, I think what we're going to see increasingly is the stronger and more powerful the testimony, the more rage the enemy is going to unleash against us. All right, that wraps up our short series, Tons of Fire, The Early Church. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time. [MUSIC]