Acts 7:54-60

Acts 7:54-60
Theme: The Final Element of Revival is Passionate, Sacrificial and Joyful Worship

Read Acts 7:54-60

You are probably wondering “what on earth does the martyrdom of Stephen have to do with worship?!” I will explain, but first let me back up and give some context: Last week we held a series of revival meetings and on the Wednesday evening I preached on the topic “Why God Commands us to Worship Him”. Let me cite a couple of texts to show that God in fact does command the earth to worship Him:
• In Matthew 4:10, Jesus rebuked Satan and said, “Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only you shall serve.’ ” He was quoting God’s command to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6:13.
• 1 Chronicles 16:29 echoes that command, “Oh, worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness!”
• And you would also expect David to have a few things to say about worship; He wrote, “I will come into Your house in the multitude of Your mercy; in fear of You I will worship toward Your holy temple” (Psalm 5:7); David was glad when they said to him “Let us go into the house of the LORD” (Psalm 122:1).
• God expects everyone to worship Him, “All the earth shall worship You And sing praises to You; They shall sing praises to Your name” (Psalm 66:4).
• Even the angels are commanded to Worship Christ, “Let all the angels of God worship Him.” (Hebrews 1:6). They testify saying, “Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment has come; and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water” (Rev 14:7).
Last Wednesday I listed a couple of reasons for worshipping God (the benefits if you will). And let me qualify that by saying that worship is not about you. You don’t come into God’s presence to worship in order to get something out of it. The most idolatrous statement uttered in churches on Sunday morning is, “I never got anything out of the worship.”
There is an old story about a man who dreamed that an angel escorted him to church one Sunday. There he saw the keyboard musician playing vigorously, the praise team singing, the musicians playing their instruments with gusto. But the man heard no sound. The congregation was singing, but the sound was utterly muted. When the minister rose to speak, his lips moved, but there was no volume. In amazement, the man turned to his escort for an explanation.
“This is the way it sounds to us in heaven,” said the angel. “You hear nothing because there is nothing to hear. These people are engaged in the form of worship, but their thoughts are on other things and their hearts are far away.”

God is the audience and we are the performers and our performance is not our musical ability or how loud we sing or how well we know the song or how emotional we appear- our performance is the condition of our hearts. Nevertheless, there are some benefits that do come as a consequence of true worship:
1. God will answer our prayers when we worship Him. On the other hand, God will ignore our pleas, petitions and requests if we withhold worship (that includes worshipping with our tithes and offerings).
2. Satan and his angels hate worship and flee from it. But false worship is a demon’s nest. It is an invitation to Satan and makes him the choir director.
3. Worship makes us more and more like Jesus. False worship on the other hand, denies Jesus and makes us unrecognizable to Him.
But worship is not worship if it is not done in truth (a right knowledge of God), sacrificially, joyfully, and in unity. Otherwise it is a counterfeit. Counterfeit worship is full of error not truth; it is selfish not sacrificial; it is lifeless not joyful, it is divisive not unifying.

Counterfeit worship is a pretense; it pretends to believe but it flows from an unbelieving and rebellious heart. Counterfeit worship is idolatry it compounds the wrath of God against those who practice it. In fact, I believe that the judgment stored up for false worshippers of Christ will be far worse than the judgment stored up for those who simply reject the gospel altogether (at least they’re honest). Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for making such false worshippers:
15 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves (Mat 23:15).

A.W. Tozer wrote:
“Christian churches have come to the dangerous time predicted long ago. It is a time when we can pat one another on the back, congratulate ourselves and join in the glad refrain, ‘We are rich, and increased in goods, and have need of nothing!’
“It certainly is true that hardly anything is missing from our churches these days—except the most important thing. We are missing the genuine and sacred offering of ourselves and our worship to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.…
“My own loyalties and responsibilities are and always will be with the strongly evangelical, Bible-believing, Christ-honoring churches. We have been surging forward. We are building great churches and large congregations. We are boasting about high standards and we are talking a lot about revival.
“But I have a question and it is not just rhetoric: What has happened to our worship?

Without right worship, the church will never experience genuine, life changing, church reforming, soul winning, world changing, empowered Gospel preaching, martyr producing, God pleasing revival. Pastor Abdias said this on Friday- that the church will not experience revival because Christians do not want God because they’re afraid of what they’ll have to give up. They know what will happen if God shows up and they’re unwilling to give to God what He rightly demands of us- our lifestyles, our selfishness, our agendas, our riches… even our lives.

If we truly want revival in this church then our worship must always be kept pure and free of all idolatry, worldliness, malice, unforgiveness and bitterness for it to be pleasing to God and result in answered prayers, the disarray of Satan’s hordes and the sanctification of believers.

What does worship mean to you? Is your worship pleasing to God?
After attending church one Sunday morning, a little boy knelt at his bedside that night and prayed, “Dear God, we had a good time at church today—but I wish you had been there!”

Romans 12:1 commands all Christians, “…in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.” This is not a suggestion- being a living sacrifice (with our wealth, with our relationships, with our agendas, with our bodies) is the mark of a true Christian and the only kind of worship that God will accept.

The mark of modern Evangelicalism in North America is worldliness. Worldliness is the opposite of worship. If your life resembles your unbelieving neighbour more than it does Christ, than you ought to “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves” (1 Cor 13:5). Let us not be like that wicked generation who honors God with their lips but their hearts are far from him.

True worship in the form of being a living sacrifice is not somber and gloomy. True worship as living sacrifices ought to produce overwhelming joy and emotion. John Piper says:
We live in a peculiar time. On the one hand, fascination with feelings is rampant. Psychology is the science of our era. Book after book helps us analyze our emotions and cope with their ups and downs. On the other hand, there is a widespread suspicion of emotion and embarrassment about expressing feelings, especially in the mainline churches (like ours). In response to this situation I want to say, first, that genuine worship is based on the mind's perception of historical and biblical truth. It has solid intellectual content. It is not the frenzied emotional product of manipulation or gimmickry. But that is not our problem. We are not in danger of emotionalism. Far from it. Our problem—and not ours only, but the problem of our Conference and of most evangelicals nationwide—is that we do not realize that there is no genuine worship where feelings for God are not quickened. There is not true worship where the heart is far from God. But the heart's approach to God happens in the quickening of our feelings for God. Therefore, where feelings are dead, so is worship.

This brings us back to Stephen and the purpose of this message: true worship that brings revival. Stephen is known for the fact that he was the first martyr to die for Jesus Christ.

Stephen was a deacon in the church; a righteous man full of the Spirit. He was likely on his way to becoming an elder. This was before Paul had even converted to Christianity. In fact, Paul stood by and held the coats of those who stoned Stephen.

What was Stephen’s crime? He preached the Word of God to those who pretended to be its defenders when really they hated to hear it preached because it condemned them and they knew it. The final straw for Stephen was when he turned to the priests and said,
You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you. 52 Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? (Acts 7:51-52).

It reminds of John calling the Pharisees a brood of vipers (and we all know what happened to John).

“Nice going Stephen! Now they’ll never invite you back to this church to preach.” Obviously Stephen had not taken a modern course on preaching at the seminary or they would have instructed him on the fine art of seeker sensitivity. In these sophisticated times, if you want to pack the church and gain a reputation and publish books about your best life now, you’ve got to preach to tickle itchy ears.

The reaction of the religious people to the Word of God was swift: stone him! And this is where the sweetest most intimate worship begins in a way that Stephen may never have known before.

David Brainerd the dying missionary describes a time after the thick darkness of depression when God revealed Himself to Brainerd in an deeper depth and higher height. He writes,
I was spending some time in prayer, and self-examination, when the Lord by his grace so shined into my heart, that I enjoyed full assurance of his favour, for that time; and my soul was unspeakably refreshed with divine and heavenly enjoyments. At this time especially, as well as some others, sundry passages of God’s word opened to my soul with divine clearness, power, and sweetness, so as to appear exceeding precious, and with clear and certain evidence of its being the word of God. I enjoyed considerable sweetness in religion all the winter following

The scripture says that when the Pharisees herd the words of Stephen, they were offended…
…they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed at him with their teeth. 55 But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, 56 and said, “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” (54-55)

Oh how they hated the worship of Jesus and with one accord they dragged him out of the city and stoned him to death and even in the midst of the agony of being stoned and imminent loss of life, Stephen was so conformed to being a living sacrifice and worship and he was so fashioned to the image of Christ that his dying words were as the words of Christ himself as he hung on the cross, ““Lord, do not charge them with this sin.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep” (v. 60).

That’s worship. Today, if we want revival then we need worship… true worship. And if we are to worship the Lord in a way that will cause him to send revival, then we ought to do it with hearts of repentance and forgiveness (so that even if they stone us we will intercede for them); we ought to desire and pursue personal holiness; we must preach the gospel and ought to worship as dying men so that heaven will be opened and we will, with the great martyrs cry out, “I see heaven opened and the Son of man sitting at the right hand of the angels”. And we ought to say it to our dying breath. Then we will have revival.

Do you want revival? Then you want to die!

O Saviour, precious Saviour,
Whom yet unseen we love;
O Name of might and favor
All other names above;

4 O grant the consummation
Of this our song above,
In endless adoration
And everlasting love;

5 Then shall we praise and bless Thee
Where perfect praises ring,
And evermore confess Thee
Our Saviour and our King.
Amen.