Jesus Is Not Dead, Absent, Boring, or Predictable
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | Well, if the book of Acts proves anything, it proves that Jesus Christ is living and reigning and orchestrating everything for the flourishing of his bride, the church.
00:00:14.000 | This means that Jesus is not dead, and he's not absent, and he is certainly not boring or predictable.
00:00:21.000 | Jesus can turn any circumstance around.
00:00:24.000 | Here's how John Piper explained it in a 1991 sermon on the conversion of Paul.
00:00:29.000 | Now, what I want to happen in this message is that your heart would be encouraged from the truth in this text that Jesus is alive and that he turns things around.
00:00:40.000 | That's the phrase I want you to take away.
00:00:42.000 | Jesus turns things around.
00:00:45.000 | Or another way to put it would be, I want you to go away with a kind of open-ended expectancy about your heart, your mind, your personality, your family, your work, your world, your city, your school, that Jesus turns things around.
00:01:02.000 | That believing in the Jesus of the book of Acts means believing that he breaks in and turns things around.
00:01:10.000 | I think one of the most debilitating, one of the most devastating feelings in the human heart is fatalism.
00:01:21.000 | And what I mean by that big word, fatalism, is that it'll never change.
00:01:26.000 | I won't ever change.
00:01:28.000 | She won't ever change.
00:01:30.000 | My kids won't ever change.
00:01:31.000 | My job won't ever change.
00:01:33.000 | This city won't ever change.
00:01:35.000 | School won't ever change.
00:01:37.000 | The world won't ever change.
00:01:38.000 | Abortion won't ever change.
00:01:40.000 | You name it, we're stuck with it.
00:01:42.000 | The powers are too deeply entrenched.
00:01:44.000 | We're just going to have to gut it out.
00:01:46.000 | It ain't going to change.
00:01:48.000 | That's fatalism.
00:01:49.000 | And I think that's an attitude that Jesus doesn't like at all because it's kind of practical atheism.
00:01:55.000 | It doesn't reckon with the God of the book of Acts who comes in and changes things.
00:02:00.000 | I think the message of the book of Acts is that that is not true.
00:02:03.000 | Fatalism is not true.
00:02:05.000 | I think that's the message of the book of Acts.
00:02:08.000 | Jesus is not dead.
00:02:09.000 | He's not silent.
00:02:11.000 | He's not disinterested.
00:02:12.000 | He's not weak.
00:02:13.000 | He is alive.
00:02:14.000 | He is powerful.
00:02:15.000 | He butts in and he changes life.
00:02:18.000 | He works new things.
00:02:22.000 | He does not like being put in the category of a boring, predictable person.
00:02:28.000 | He's not boring and he's not predictable.
00:02:30.000 | He is full of surprises.
00:02:33.000 | Jesus changes things.
00:02:35.000 | He turns things around.
00:02:37.000 | Churches, nations, families, personalities, peoples, enslavements.
00:02:42.000 | He changes.
00:02:43.000 | He turns people and nations and systems and problems around.
00:02:48.000 | He reverses things.
00:02:52.000 | Let's look at it in the text.
00:02:53.000 | The persecution that we're about to see the end of here began back in chapter 8.
00:02:59.000 | Verse 1.
00:03:00.000 | It says, and on that day, that is the day when Stephen was killed, a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem.
00:03:07.000 | And they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria.
00:03:11.000 | But Saul, verse 3, Saul laid waste the church entering house after house.
00:03:17.000 | He dragged off men and women, committed them to prison.
00:03:21.000 | And I can imagine had I lived in that church in that day, that tiny little beleaguered church compared to the huge Roman Empire.
00:03:31.000 | And given the average human personality of not being a hoper and an optimist, I would have said, well, this is just the way it's going to be.
00:03:43.000 | The Romans are against us.
00:03:46.000 | Pilot.
00:03:47.000 | The Jews are against us.
00:03:48.000 | Namely the Sanhedrin.
00:03:49.000 | The priests are against us.
00:03:51.000 | They empowered Saul to have these letters to go and drag people into jail.
00:03:54.000 | There's just no hope.
00:03:56.000 | It's too negative, too dangerous.
00:03:58.000 | There's nothing but persecution all around.
00:04:00.000 | It's been this way for quite a while.
00:04:02.000 | It's probably going to be this way until the Lord comes back.
00:04:05.000 | And so there's really no sense of hoping that things might turn around.
00:04:10.000 | That's the way we tend to be.
00:04:12.000 | There are a few wonderfully chronically faith-filled hopers around, but not many.
00:04:19.000 | Most people are given to seeing the darkest side and the most pessimistic view on things and just conclude it's not going to change.
00:04:29.000 | And the book of Acts is written to show you that that's not true.
00:04:32.000 | That is not true.
00:04:34.000 | Jesus is alive.
00:04:36.000 | He is almighty.
00:04:38.000 | He is infinitely wise.
00:04:39.000 | Infinitely creative.
00:04:42.000 | Infinitely resourceful.
00:04:43.000 | And he intrudes into this world and he turns things around.
00:04:48.000 | That's the message, I believe, of the book of Acts.
00:04:51.000 | He is not, and he dislikes being thought of as boringly predictable.
00:04:57.000 | He is not.
00:04:59.000 | He is full of surprises.
00:05:00.000 | So suddenly, here in the book of Acts, suddenly, out of the blue, Jesus decides to take the chief persecutor of the church and make him the chief advocate of Christianity.
00:05:13.000 | Now isn't that like Jesus?
00:05:15.000 | Whom shall I pick on here to reverse the state of affairs called persecution?
00:05:20.000 | Aha! I will take Saul, the one who's breathing out murders and threats, and I will stop him dead in his tracks.
00:05:26.000 | And I won't just kill him.
00:05:28.000 | That'd be easy.
00:05:29.000 | That would relieve the church.
00:05:31.000 | Kill him.
00:05:32.000 | Get him off the scene.
00:05:33.000 | I could do that.
00:05:35.000 | But I won't do that.
00:05:36.000 | I'll do something better and worse.
00:05:38.000 | As far as Paul's concerned, or Saul, I will make him into a chief exponent so that the hunter becomes the hunted and the persecutor becomes the persecuted and the killer becomes eventually the killed.
00:05:53.000 | And I will reverse everything in human history on this afternoon on the Damascus Road.
00:05:57.000 | Nobody can conceive of Christianity as we know it, apart from what Paul wrote in the New Testament.
00:06:03.000 | What Jesus was about to do in one split second on an afternoon on the way to Damascus nobody dreamed of in the early church.
00:06:10.000 | All the pessimists were about to eat their words, who said, "It'll never be the same. We could never know peace again. We're all going to be beat down forever."
00:06:19.000 | And God reached in and reversed things.
00:06:23.000 | And here's the way Luke in this story drives it home.
00:06:27.000 | He describes Paul's conversion.
00:06:29.000 | Then he describes Paul's preaching.
00:06:31.000 | Then he describes today Paul's being persecuted to show the reversal is complete.
00:06:37.000 | The persecutor becomes the persecuted.
00:06:40.000 | Look at verse 23.
00:06:42.000 | Luke says that the Jews in Damascus plotted to kill him.
00:06:46.000 | And then he has to escape in verse 25 through the wall in a basket.
00:06:51.000 | That was so scary and so humiliating for Paul.
00:06:54.000 | He writes about it over in 2 Corinthians 11 as one of the low points of his life.
00:06:59.000 | Then in verse 29, Luke tells us that the Hellenists, once Paul gets down to Jerusalem, are also seeking to kill him.
00:07:08.000 | So the hunter is now the hunted.
00:07:11.000 | And to escape this time, he has to be sent out of the country on a boat to Tarsus.
00:07:17.000 | And the upshot of this dramatic reversal of one man's life is a dramatic reversal of the whole scene in the church life.
00:07:25.000 | Verse 31 of our text.
00:07:28.000 | "So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was built up."
00:07:35.000 | Nobody would have dreamed of it.
00:07:38.000 | It wasn't going to happen.
00:07:40.000 | "We were on a downward spiral to trouble and persecution and scattering and violence."
00:07:47.000 | Get yourself ready, pull in your belt, brace yourself.
00:07:50.000 | Trouble forever.
00:07:52.000 | He changes it.
00:07:54.000 | Jesus decides, "I'm not going to let it be that way anymore.
00:07:59.000 | I'm going to bring peace for a while upon the church."
00:08:02.000 | And he takes Paul, turns him around and changes everybody's attitude towards the church.
00:08:08.000 | No more persecution. Strange.
00:08:11.000 | Just keep your antennas up, brothers and sisters.
00:08:14.000 | Jesus is doing things in this world, in Senate court hearings, and in all kinds of movements.
00:08:21.000 | He is doing things you never dreamed he might be doing in your life and in this world.
00:08:28.000 | And today, he's just as alive as he was then.
00:08:33.000 | You know, it's almost trite to talk about the USSR and the stunning speed with which changes have come about in the Soviet Union.
00:08:44.000 | Used to be Union.
00:08:46.000 | But now there are independent states.
00:08:49.000 | There is a claim to democracy.
00:08:51.000 | There is an openness to Christianity.
00:08:55.000 | Who would have dreamed three years ago?
00:08:58.000 | I just want to scream. I did scream one time.
00:09:01.000 | In 1988 in Denver.
00:09:04.000 | Some of you have listened to that tape on prayer.
00:09:08.000 | Where I wanted to pull my hair out. I still do when I hear this sort of thing.
00:09:13.000 | Where presumed missions specialists with their bent towards sociological fatalism say,
00:09:21.000 | "By the year 2000, this number of percentage of countries will be limited access or creative access or hard to reach.
00:09:27.000 | And there will be X number of the people groups outside the realm of the possibility of entering by any kind of normal missionary activity."
00:09:33.000 | I just want to scream and say, "How do you know?"
00:09:36.000 | That's why I do scream whenever I say that.
00:09:38.000 | I say, "How do you know that? Come on. Tell me where you get the pride to presume, to predict,
00:09:45.000 | that 80% of the unreached nations are going to be behind limited access walls by the year 2000."
00:09:52.000 | Jesus reigns. He changes things.
00:09:56.000 | He turns things around. Read your Bible.
00:09:59.000 | He is alive. Or are you a practical atheist?
00:10:03.000 | That's what I say when I get in the presence of those people.
00:10:08.000 | What a clip. Wow.
00:10:10.000 | That was taken from the sermon, "Jesus Still Turns Things Around," which was preached on October 13th, 1991.
00:10:16.000 | And the clip was sent in to us by Kenda Moss in Fairfield, Ohio.
00:10:19.000 | Kenda, thank you for this clip.
00:10:21.000 | You listeners are sending in some really great sermon clips.
00:10:23.000 | Please continue to share those with me so that I can share them with the entire listening audience.
00:10:28.000 | Email us the sermon name.
00:10:30.000 | And if you have it, a timestamp of when and where the clip appears in the audio message.
00:10:35.000 | Go to our online home and send us an email from DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:10:40.000 | There's a little button you'll find to send us a question or to send us a clip.
00:10:45.000 | Pastor John returns tomorrow to address whether or not a doctor should help a patient die if the law permits it.
00:10:51.000 | It's an interesting conversation happening for Christian physicians right now in Canada.
00:10:55.000 | And one of them wants to hear John Piper on the topic.
00:10:58.000 | That's tomorrow.
00:10:59.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:11:00.000 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:11:02.000 | [music]
00:11:04.000 | [end]
00:11:06.000 | [music]
00:11:08.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]