Mission of the Seventy

Sermons by Dr. W. Marshall Davis
Pastor of the First Baptist Church, Rochester, PA

Last Words

Acts 1:4-14

March 15, 2009

This is the third sermon exploring the topic of the church’s mission to our community. Like the last one, this also is a famous passage. Acts 1:8 is often quoted as Jesus command to the church to go out in missions: “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” The context of this famous command of Jesus is the Ascension, when Jesus bodily ascended into heaven. Jesus died on Good Friday, rose from the dead on Easter Sunday and then appeared to his apostles over a period of forty days. The verse immediately before our passage says this (verse 3) “He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” After this period of forty days, Jesus bodily ascended into heaven. Right before he physically left this earth he gave the apostles these last words. This command that we are going to be looking at today is what Christ’s followers are supposed to do in this interim period after Jesus ascension to heaven and before his return.

This is something we are supposed to do as a church. Verse 4 begins with the words “And being assembled together with them, He commanded them….” The context of this command to go out is that they first came together. They were a gathered community of faith. They were assembled together as a church. So this command of Jesus is part of what it means to be a church. It is something that we do together as a church that believes in Jesus and is obedient to Jesus. With this context in mind lets look at what these apostles were supposed to do. There are three things.

I. First, they were supposed to Wait on God. Look at verses 4-5 “And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me; for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” They were supposed to wait on God. Waiting is just as important as acting. We can’t do anything unless God leads the way. Jesus says in John 5:19 “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.” Jesus did nothing unless God instigated it. If that was true of Jesus, how much more true is it of us?

We need the leading of God before we do anything. If God is leading us, all we do is worthless. Psalm 127:1 says, “Unless the LORD builds the house, They labor in vain who build it; Unless the LORD guards the city, The watchman stays awake in vain.” We have to wait on God. That is what Jesus told his apostles to do.

1. First, they were to Wait for the Promise of the Father. Verse 4 “And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me.” This Promise of the Father is the Person of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said in John 14:16-17 “And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever— the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.” We have been promised the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God indwelling the believer. Every Christian who has been born of the Spirit has the Holy Spirit in him. “He dwells with you and will be in you.” We have God in us. In the innermost part of us, the Holy of holies of our soul called our human spirit, dwells the Holy Spirit of God. He came to dwell in us the moment we invited Jesus into our lives as Lord and Savior. He is the guarantee and deposit, the down payment of our salvation. And he guides the Christian in the way we should go. We need to wait for this guidance of the Holy Spirit. To step outside of that guidance is to fail.

2. They were to wait for the Power of the Holy Spirit. Verse 5 “for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” This is the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Different churches and denominations have different interpretations of what it means to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Pentecostals believe the baptism of the Holy Spirit is accompanied by the supernatural gift of speaking in tongues. Baptists take our direction from Jesus’ experience of being baptized with the Holy Spirit at his water baptism. When he was baptized in water by John the Baptist, it says that as he came up from the water the Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove and remained upon him from that time forth. He was immersed in the Holy Spirit like he was immersed in water. That is what it means to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. It means to be covered with the Holy Spirit. Everything Jesus did from that time forth was in the power of the Holy Spirit. Not only is the Holy Spirit inside us, the Holy Spirit fills us and overflows us and empowers us for ministry. This is the power that is behind this command to go out in mission.

3. Third, they were to Wait for Prayer to be answered. To find this in our passage we have to skip down to verse 14. After Jesus ascended to heaven, the apostles and others were again assembled together. “These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers.” This is more than just apostles here. They are assembled together in the upper room, it tells us in verse 13, and they were praying. They were waiting for God to answer their prayers.

I hope you are praying for our church. I hope you are praying for us to reach out into our community, obeying Jesus’ command to love our neighbor. I believe God is leading us to reach out to our neighborhood. It is not a program. To tell the truth, I do not trust programs. I have been in pastoral ministry for 35 years now. I took my first part-time position as a pastor of a small church in my first year in seminary in 1974. I have been part of many denominational programs and non-denominational programs. They are in my opinion mostly humanly devised plans to imitate the work of the Spirit. I have seen programs come and go. I no longer trust them. I trust only the Holy Spirit. I trust prayer. I trust Jesus who promised “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” If we pray according to God’s will, we will receive what we ask for. If we pray to be able to fulfill this mission directive of Jesus, we can be certain we have what we ask of him. We need to watch, and pray and wait.

II. The second major thing that the apostles did in our passage is Wonder. They wondered about the Future. Look at verse 6 “Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” It is very interesting to me that this is what is on their mind at this time. They were wondering when the Kingdom of God would come. Jesus had taught them the Lord’s Prayer, which said, “Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth it is in heaven.” They had been praying this for three years. Was the kingdom going to come now? Jesus had died and rose again. It seemed like a good time for the Kingdom to come.

And of course their understanding of the kingdom of God involved the people and land of Israel. “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” A lot of commentators read these words and think the apostles still had it wrong. They say that the apostles still misunderstood Jesus after all this time. That they were still expecting an earthly Kingdom whereas Jesus had taught a spiritual kingdom. How many times have I read interpretations like that? How many times have you heard or read interpretations like that? If that were really the case, wouldn’t Jesus have corrected them here and say, “No, no, no, you still misunderstand.”? But he didn’t, because they did not have it wrong. There is going to be a kingdom of God on earth. Christ is going to return to earth and rule on earth. The Son of David, the Messiah will sit on the throne in Israel. The prophecies of the OT prophets will be fulfilled. The prophecy of Micah 4:1-3 will be fulfilled:

¹ Now it shall come to pass in the latter days
      That the mountain of the LORD’s house
      Shall be established on the top of the mountains,
      And shall be exalted above the hills;
      And peoples shall flow to it.
       ² Many nations shall come and say,

      “ Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
      To the house of the God of Jacob;
      He will teach us His ways,
      And we shall walk in His paths.”
      For out of Zion the law shall go forth,
      And the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
       ³ He shall judge between many peoples,
      And rebuke strong nations afar off;
      They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
      And their spears into pruning hooks;
      Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
      Neither shall they learn war anymore.

The book of Revelation calls it the millennium, a thousand years of peace under the reign of Christ on earth. The apostle did not get the kingdom wrong; they got the timing wrong. They asked Jesus, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” They were hoping it was going to happen right then. What did Jesus answer? Verse 7 “And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority.” Jesus was saying the timing of the kingdom was not for them to know. And it is still not for us to know. I believe in the prophecies of scripture concerning the return of Christ and the coming kingdom, but I do not believe that we can know the times or the seasons which God has set by his own authority.

2. A second thing that they wondered was how Jesus would return. In our passage, the apostles watched as Jesus bodily ascended into heaven. They stood there with their mouths open in awe wondering about his return. Two angels appeared and said to them in verse 11 ““Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven.” The angels could read their thoughts. They knew they were wondering about Christ’s return, so they answered their unspoken question. They said that Jesus would return in the same way he went into heaven.

That is very helpful for us. It means that Christ is not going to come spiritually or invisibly. He is not going to be born as a baby again. He is not going to be reincarnated as some New Age spiritual master. He is going to come the way he left. He is going to come bodily and visibly. He is going to come to the same place he left from. Zechariah 4:4 says, “And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, Which faces Jerusalem on the east.” This gets rid of a lot of speculation. We don’t have to worry about the timing of his return because it is not for us to know the times or seasons. We do not have to worry about they manner because it will be in exactly the same way as he left. The apostles waited. They wondered. And third

III. They Witnessed. They were commanded by Jesus to Witness to Jesus Christ. Verse 8 “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

1. They were toWitness in Jerusalem. They were to witness right where they were then. We are to witness right where we are now. You don’t have to go the foreign mission field to be a missionary. We witness where we are. Rochester is our Jerusalem. Your neighborhood is your Jerusalem. Your workplace is your Jerusalem. Your school is your Jerusalem.

2. They were to Witness in Judea. That was their country. Our country is the United States. The US is our mission field. There are millions of people in our nation who do not know the salvation offered by Jesus Christ. This salvation was won for them on the cross by Jesus 2000 years ago and they do not know about it, because no one told them. Our nation is our Judea.

3. They were to Witness in Samaria. Samaria was ethically different from these Jewish apostles. Samaritans were seen as racially different. They were seen as religiously different. They were seen as foreigners. In the story of the ten lepers who were cleansed, Jesus said, “Were there not any found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?” They were looked down upon. Jews had no dealings with them. Remember when Jesus had a long conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well the woman was surprised because “For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.” The scandal of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan was that a despised Samaritan was pictured as more compassionate than religious Jews. Our Samaritans are those who different than us and looked down upon by society. These are the ones Jesus came for. These are the ones Jesus told his apostles to witness to. These are our Samaritans.

4. Finally they were to Witness to the end of the earth. I like the way the old King James phrases it “unto the uttermost part of the earth.” We do not have to travel overseas to the uttermost parts of the earth to witness to the truth of the gospel, but some people have to go overseas. Foreign missions is not optional for Christ’s church. We must be part of it. When people like Steve and Laura Hanson, who were part of our congregation, go from here to Lithuania, we are part of it. When Duane and Joy Lauver, and Tom and Danielle Brendle come and speak to us and we support them, we are part of it. When we support the Cooperative Program of Southern Baptists, we have a role in sending thousands of missionaries going to the uttermost parts of the earth. We are to be witnesses “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” May God empower us with the Holy Spirit to do so.