Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] I was at that age in life when you're not quite sure if you're a teenager or a child. You know, all guys remember that time where you still kind of wanted to play, but it wasn't cool.
[00:00:22] It was. You know, you were.
[00:00:25] I was still into, like, playing with my Ninja Turtles, and my friends were smoking cigarettes. So it was a tough.
[00:00:35] But I remember specifically the time when it hit me that I wasn't quite.
[00:00:43] My friends weren't the same.
[00:00:46] We were just.
[00:00:48] We were leaving church, which was always fun to have been released from church.
[00:00:59] And we were on our way out. My friend and I were out on our way out to the parking lot.
[00:01:05] I was probably 11 or 12.
[00:01:09] And a stray dog wandered into the parking lot.
[00:01:14] And it looked a little suspicious, like it had, you know, ulterior motives.
[00:01:24] And I said to my friend. And I thought about it. I thought, maybe I shouldn't say this, but I said to my friend, don't worry if that dog gets near us. I've got some nunchucks in the car.
[00:01:36] That was the sentence.
[00:01:40] It wasn't a lie.
[00:01:42] I had some nunchucks. They were toy nunchucks that. If you don't know what a nunchuck is, then you didn't grow up right, is all I'm saying. You weren't raised right, but it's basically two sticks with a chain in the middle, and you get to sling them hither and yawn and smack people with them.
[00:02:02] And it was Michelangelo, if you're in. You know. Anyway, so I told him this. I was like, I've got nunchucks in the car. And he was like, sweet. You got nunchucks in the car. And I was like, yes. He's still one of us.
[00:02:16] He's not the smoking cigarettes kid.
[00:02:20] He's still one of us. We're ready to, like, we're gonna pretend. We're gonna play. And I got my. I opened this up now I'm not gonna attack this dog with these things. I just wanted to get him out. And we're gonna play with them.
[00:02:35] Open the trunk to my parents car. And he goes, those are plastic.
[00:02:42] Just.
[00:02:43] Just an arrow through the heart of my childhood. It's like, well, yeah, but it'd be pretty dumb of my parents to buy me some.
[00:02:53] Whatever normal nunchucks are made of nunchucks.
[00:02:57] Like, why would. Of course they're plastic. I'm 12.
[00:03:02] But he just looked at them and was just like, those aren't real.
[00:03:06] Those are plastic.
[00:03:08] I just remember thinking, like, I took these things so seriously. That I thought I could ward off a hound.
[00:03:17] And he saw them and saw them for what they were. They were plastic. He wasn't lying.
[00:03:24] What he hurt was not my nunchuck's feelings, but mine.
[00:03:30] This little child who thought like, well, this thing I have is real.
[00:03:34] And it turns out wasn't.
[00:03:36] And I had to kind of get over that.
[00:03:41] I don't carry those around anymore, mainly because I lost them years ago.
[00:03:47] But there is something to like realizing, like, oh, this thing I thought was super important. It might not have been all that important.
[00:03:57] And there are some characters in scripture that we've talked about. Last week we talked about Chloe. She had this small little part in Scripture, but a big part in the kingdom of God.
[00:04:07] And then there are others that. Now, today's guest, I think you know him because if you've had any Bible trivia, you know who replaced Judas. That's like one of the main. Like when we're gonna go do Bible bowl, or like the Bible, you go to Quiz Bowl. That's a good one. Which.
[00:04:28] Who replaced Judas as the 12th apostle.
[00:04:32] And we say Matthias. And we ring in because we know our Bibles.
[00:04:37] And Matthias is one of the first things that happens in Acts. He replaces Judas. Now, if you don't know who Judas is, Judas betrayed Jesus and brought the leaders of the Jewish leaders to Jesus to arrest him.
[00:04:57] He betrayed Jesus for money.
[00:05:00] And so Judas is out of the picture. Matthias comes in.
[00:05:08] I don't know about this passage.
[00:05:11] D.J. can tell you.
[00:05:13] I've wrestled with this for months because I have a perspective on it that I'm going to share with you today.
[00:05:21] But I have no idea if I'm right.
[00:05:24] But it'll preach.
[00:05:27] So I may be wrong about this, about this understanding of Acts, but I hope you offer me a little bit of grace in this, because the way I read Acts, there's a big event. There's two big events. At the very beginning, there's Jesus conversation with his disciples, his instructions to his disciples.
[00:05:52] And then when Acts two, when the. When what sounds like a rushing wind, and the Spirit shows up and fills the disciples, and they speak in other languages so that everyone can hear them and understand them.
[00:06:06] And they preach about Jesus to these people. And at Pentecost, 3,000 people were baptized into Jesus. Name Jesus as the Messiah on that day. Those are the big events. Jesus says, go and wait. And the Spirit. Go and wait for the Spirit. The Spirit showed up and did its work.
[00:06:28] That's the big events in Acts 1 and 2.
[00:06:32] And then there's this one where they pick a new apostle.
[00:06:41] They pick a new guy to join the group.
[00:06:49] And I think it's thrown in to make a point.
[00:06:58] Here's Jesus.
[00:07:00] Jesus shows up.
[00:07:03] Acts, chapter one, verse three. It says, after his suffering, he presented himself.
[00:07:10] He presented himself to them alive by many convincing proofs.
[00:07:17] He appeared to them during 40 days and speaking. And speaking about the kingdom of God. And while staying with them, he ordered them. These were his orders.
[00:07:28] Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait.
[00:07:35] Wait there for the promise of the Father.
[00:07:41] This, he said, is what you have heard from me. For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. Exactly. Actually, 10 days from now, see Jesus with them for 40 days. There's 50 days between Passover and Pentecost.
[00:08:03] So he spent 40 days with them. And so they've got 10 days, 20 to do. The hardest thing it is to do for human beings.
[00:08:14] Wait, have you waited before?
[00:08:23] Go to a restaurant and your free chips don't come out fast enough.
[00:08:32] They're called waiters.
[00:08:35] It's built into the name.
[00:08:38] You wait. That's fine.
[00:08:40] For some reason, we don't like it. We don't like what's. We go to a.
[00:08:44] We go into, like, a restaurant, a nice restaurant, let's say Bubba's. And we'll say. We'll say. What we ask is, what's the weight?
[00:08:54] And they tell us the weight. And that's the first exchange of value that happens.
[00:09:01] They say, here's the weight. And we say, well, is. Do I have enough weight in me for that? Is this food worth the wait?
[00:09:14] There's a lot of things that aren't worth the wait.
[00:09:18] But waiting is incredibly difficult for us.
[00:09:22] We don't like it.
[00:09:24] But that is actually Jesus only command to them.
[00:09:31] He doesn't say, wait and have a committee meeting about who's going to join the apostles, who's going to get to be named in the pamphlet. Whenever we send it out, he just says, wait, and the Spirit will show up.
[00:09:49] Wait.
[00:09:52] They don't wait.
[00:09:56] They actually.
[00:09:57] Peter says, all right, well, we've got some orders of business that we need to take care of.
[00:10:03] He preaches a little mini sermon about how it's very important that there's 12 of us. And here's some scriptures to back it up.
[00:10:12] We have some scriptural references. And he says, we need to have. We need to have somebody thrown in here.
[00:10:23] He said so. He actually says this in Acts 1:21. He says, so one of the members who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us. One of us, one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection. Now there's 120 or so people with them. They're all kind of encamped here.
[00:10:52] They've all seen the resurrection. He's trying to give some man a special place. And it comes down to two Joseph, called Barsabbas, who is also known as Justus, which I would vote against him just for, like, we don't need that many AKAs.
[00:11:15] Well, what do we call you? Joseph and Matthias.
[00:11:22] These are the guys.
[00:11:26] Then they prayed, which is good, and said, lord, you know everyone's heart, show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.
[00:11:42] And then they shot dice.
[00:11:49] They just.
[00:11:53] God said, it's Matthias.
[00:11:56] Now, there is some. There is some in the. In the original language. There's some, like a little ambiguity here as to whether or not they were actually casting lots or were they getting people's opinions.
[00:12:10] It's probably the latter, but it's just funnier to see him just.
[00:12:17] You lost.
[00:12:22] But almost all translations say they cast lots and it fell upon Matthias and he was added to the 11 apostles.
[00:12:33] Oh, my goodness. Now that Matthias is the 12th apostle, what I bet he goes on in Acts to do so many more things not mentioned again, not once.
[00:12:51] Matthias is the result of the first church committee meeting.
[00:13:02] It's what they. It's how they filled their time while they were waiting.
[00:13:08] Now, it is important. Yes, it is very important. Let's have. Let's have somebody to. Officially, he is a witness to the resurrection. He has an important role.
[00:13:18] But this little bit of a committee meeting that happens in. In between the command to wait before that the Spirit will show up and then the Spirit showing up.
[00:13:33] It's not the real deal.
[00:13:40] Peter said, well, we've got to do this. Who said, you got to do it?
[00:13:45] And he pieced together some scriptures to say, well, we've done it. We've got to do it. See, here's some texts, and they dealt with themselves.
[00:14:00] I think churches get in the most trouble whenever. Whenever they just think they've got to do it on their own.
[00:14:09] When there's no. There's no. If we could just get the right messaging out there, if we could just get the right programs together, we can get the children's program doing this particular thing. I've Heard you can go to these church growth seminars where large churches bring in these speakers and a bunch of people from small churches to say, here's how you guys can look like us.
[00:14:35] That's always just a boost of morale for us. Small churches, they're like. They're giving out fog machines and stuff. It's just great.
[00:14:45] But you go to these and they'll be measuring dimensions of the building itself.
[00:14:52] Well, tell me about what the children's wing looks like.
[00:14:58] My goodness. I went to. I've been at churches where the children's wing is just inside that room.
[00:15:06] It's just a room where the kids go.
[00:15:10] It's not a wing.
[00:15:12] No, there's nothing against that, but the spirit moves in all sorts of places, does great things in all sorts of places. And we don't. We don't have to get the committee meeting right so that it will.
[00:15:28] A lot of times we just wait and God does something great in that place.
[00:15:38] God is constantly doing great things in unfortunate events.
[00:15:47] The first time I got fired from a church, there was a.
[00:15:50] Y' all laugh every time I say that, and I don't like it, but it was. It was. It's just. Anyway, we left. We had to. When you get fired as a preacher, you have to sell your house.
[00:16:06] Like, it's such a funny. Like, if you get. If you get let go. Like if you get let go from Walmart, you can go somewhere else.
[00:16:17] You just keep living there.
[00:16:19] But, like, if you. In a small town, if you get fired as a preacher, they're like, we want you out of this town.
[00:16:27] You get fired from a place, it's so unnerving.
[00:16:32] So we had just bought a house. We bought a house in August and they fired us in December.
[00:16:39] We had bought our first house. Rachel and I, we.
[00:16:42] We were. We didn't have any kids. We bought our first house. And.
[00:16:48] Yeah, and they, they.
[00:16:55] They told us to move. And there was a.
[00:17:02] Do you remember 2007 and 8, when it comes to houses? Y' all remember that?
[00:17:11] Ian's back there shaking his head. Were you alive in 07? Yeah, he was. No, I don't.
[00:17:18] It was a horrible time to be selling. The housing market crashed. No one could get a loan for a house. You had to buy it with cash or nothing.
[00:17:30] And we were trying to sell this house that we owed more money on than it was worth to people who couldn't afford it.
[00:17:41] And we had. I mean, we tried so hard. We put it on the market in December.
[00:17:47] Rachel finished out a school year there, and we Just could not get that place to sell. We had professional cleaners come in, they cleaned it, they staged it, they removed the pictures of our family or just me and Rachel from. Because apparently like people don't like it whenever there's pictures of other people in there. That's what the stagers will tell you. They say, don't get your. Get. Get the pictures of your gross family out of the house. So people will buy this house.
[00:18:15] It's such an odd thing, but they. We had it all set up.
[00:18:19] No one was biting, no one was buying this house. And then the, the, the, the. The line under a water line under. In the foundation bust and flooded the place.
[00:18:33] It smelt awful.
[00:18:36] And they, and someone bought it.
[00:18:41] Go figure.
[00:18:43] But I really feel like that with God sometimes. I feel like sometimes we think God is a particular. Is a person who just needs everything to be perfect so that God can show up that. Let's get every. Let's get before God shows up. Let's get our house in order so that God, when God comes in, God can actually do something here.
[00:19:06] But God sometimes just wants, wants our mess.
[00:19:11] He's buying into our messiness that we, that they say we need somebody else to proclaim the resurrection. Let's find someone who is. Who is well thought of. Let's find somebody who is. Who has been here with us. He's one of us.
[00:19:27] He fits in good with the group.
[00:19:30] Matthias, man. Matthias, everyone says great things about you, from your neighbors to the dice.
[00:19:38] Matthias, come on in. Matthias is going. Matthias is going to proclaim the gospel with us. He's going to proclaim the resurrection. We found a good person to do it. And all the while God's looking at Matthias and then looking at this Saul character who's throwing Christians in prison, who does not believe that Jesus is the Messiah, who hopes that he can have them murdered.
[00:20:12] He goes, that's a good one.
[00:20:17] Just the messiest one out there.
[00:20:21] And we hear about him all throughout the world proclaiming the gospel.
[00:20:27] When the Spirit shows up, we will do amazing things. Not because we've prepared properly, not because we have our house in order, but because we've waited.
[00:20:45] We've waited on the Spirit. The command of Jesus in Acts 1 is go, wait. And the Spirit will come.
[00:20:56] And they go.
[00:20:57] And they can't wait very long before they have to start fidgeting with things, giving people titles and responsibilities and honor.
[00:21:12] And then God shows up and all heaven breaks loose.
[00:21:17] We don't hear from Matthias again.
[00:21:23] The Spirit of God will work with some crazy People, it's not always the ones we think deserve it.
[00:21:31] It's not always the ones that seem natural to us, and certainly not always the ones that look like us, sound like us, have lived like us.
[00:21:43] God loves to show up and surprise us with his spirit, with his presence, with his teaching.
[00:21:54] I think the trick is to be open to it, to not get so excited about committee, but just be open to the moving of the spirit of Christ in our life to be that wasn't it. That was a child to be open to God actually showing up and convicting us towards something.
[00:22:26] Committee meetings. You go in.
[00:22:30] I was at Harding lectures one time when I was a student, and Neil Pryor was on this. Neil Pryor was a New Testament teacher at Harding. He was sweet, sweet man.
[00:22:43] And he was sitting at the dais and they were asking these men, him and men like Eddie Clower and Jimmy Allen, just very diverse board of idios that day. And they said, what do we do at our church if we don't have any, like, elders, we don't have any men who are in charge. What do we do?
[00:23:13] And Neal Pryor said, well, probably should just once a month, get all the men together and have them make decisions that their wives approve of.
[00:23:32] Now, it shocked the Harding committee a little bit, but we all knew it was true that when you come into a meeting, you typically have a want.
[00:23:44] You have what you hope will happen at the end.
[00:23:49] You have the decision you wish that would be made. You want to influence that to be made.
[00:23:57] Sometimes people cheat and they say, you know, the spirit of God's really moving me to get my way. They don't say it in that way, but you know what I mean. The spirit of God's really moving me that we should make this decision. It's like, oh, really?
[00:24:13] Do you call your wife the spirit of God to her face?
[00:24:23] I'm going to write that down as something not to say in an elders meeting.
[00:24:30] We go into meetings with what we want. We know what we want.
[00:24:34] We know our way. We know what we have an agenda.
[00:24:39] The meeting has even said that you have an agenda. What's the agenda? The meeting has an agenda. Everyone has an agenda. And it may be different agendas, but the church doesn't function its best in committee.
[00:24:54] It functions its best in the spirit.
[00:24:58] It functions its best in the.
[00:25:01] We work as a church, and we're best when we're waiting on the spirit to move us, not shape us. As in, well, we figured out who the new apostle is, but we go out and we Start speaking the gospel in such a dramatic way that the people said, I think they're drunk. That happens in Acts 2.
[00:25:25] They get up and start speaking. And people say, they must be drunk. And Paul Peter says, no, we're not drunk.
[00:25:33] It's only nine.
[00:25:40] And he says, and then he preaches to them. He says, I'll tell you what's going on. I'm filled with Jesus and I've got a Jesus message to tell you.
[00:25:50] And we can get so wrapped up in committee that sometimes we preach church instead of Jesus.
[00:25:55] We preach that this is the way the church is supposed to be. Why?
[00:26:02] What we need to be preaching is that Jesus. Jesus was God, was with God, is now was with us, died for our sins, was resurrected, giving us hope after death. He is now king, uniting us as followers.
[00:26:18] That's our message.
[00:26:20] Not that we've got a good children's program, good youth program, good, good young, single, you know, Capricorn program. Like, we got specific groups for everybody.
[00:26:34] We've got the Messiah.
[00:26:38] We've got a God who loves us. We have a Spirit who indwells us together.
[00:26:48] Nothing can stop the kingdom of God from moving forward when we let the spirit take the reins.
[00:26:58] I don't know. I don't know if Matthias was important.
[00:27:02] I don't know.
[00:27:05] I think Luke's doing something funny here with the writing, the telling of the story.
[00:27:13] I could be wrong, but I do know this.
[00:27:17] I know that if we haven't done the. If we haven't spent the time in prayer, we waiting on the spirit of God to impact us and help us shape the world.
[00:27:31] We won't shape the world.
[00:27:33] We won't change our immediate surroundings. We'll have trouble, my goodness. We'll have trouble loving our neighbor. If we haven't waited on the Spirit.
[00:27:42] We'll certainly have trouble praying for those who persecute us and loving our enemies.
[00:27:47] We'll certainly have trouble turning the other cheek when slapped, when we won't look like Jesus if we don't wait for the Spirit to move.
[00:28:01] I want to have. I want our church, not Benjamin. I want our church to have the impact of Paul.
[00:28:10] Everyone our church comes in contact with knows that the gospel is what drives us and moves us, that the Spirit is what impacts us.
[00:28:22] And if we can know that that gospel is what this world needs. Not our committees, not our rules, not our traditions. The world doesn't need us.
[00:28:36] Sometimes we can say, you've got the only way to God through Jesus. But the only way to Jesus is me.
[00:28:43] That's a mistake.
[00:28:47] But what we are called to do to this world is to show them Jesus through our little community here, to show them something that's real.
[00:29:01] And I can guarantee you, they can always spot when it's plastic.
[00:29:11] If you need anything this morning, you need a church.
[00:29:18] You want to join our community? You want to give your life to Jesus through baptism? You want to give.
[00:29:24] You want prayers? There will be people in the back praying for you, whether you like it or not. And if you would like to approach them, they can pray.
[00:29:30] They can pray for you specifically. But whatever you need this morning, maybe you need the patience to wait or the courage to move forward as the Spirit leads. Whatever you need this morning, please come forward or go to the back. While we stand and while we sing.
