Let’s turn back in our Bibles to the book of Acts, chapter 9; page 918 in the pew Bibles. We’ll look tonight at just one verse – chapter 9 verse 31.
In my youth, all the best bands were jam bands – DMB, Panic, Phish – there were some others along there. Some of you know what I’m talking about. The hallmark of a jam band was in the live concert, the songs could sometimes go on twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen minutes and there would be this instrumental interlude in the song that sometimes you would pick up little hints of another song and then at some point along the way, before you knew it, they had transitioned seamlessly into the next song to come in the concert. The jam was the transition from one song to the next.
Well Acts 9:31 is a transition verse and it’s getting us from what we looked at so far in the book of Acts and its giving us a glimpse of what’s to come, not only what’s to come in the book of Acts but what’s to come in the history of God’s church, even as it goes into the future. And so we’ll look tonight just at this one verse, and we’ll look at it along those same lines – past, present and future. Our three points though, will be the supply, the way, and the standard. The supply, the way and the standard. I also confess, you may have already noticed, that I stole something from David Strain today. I stole his sermon title! “Safe and Sound” was our sermon title for Psalm 119 this morning about being safe and sound in the One whose word is forever established in the heavens. This verse is about the church being safe and sound; that it is safe, it is strong, it is at peace, and it is healthy; it is on solid ground. It is sound. It is functioning as God intends it to function. So with those things in mind, let’s go go the Lord in prayer and then we’ll read this verse together. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank You for Your Word that You have given to us. And we pray that in this one verse, it would stand out in our hearts and minds to see what You have done and what You will do and what You call us to do now, the way You call us to live as Your people, as the church. We ask for faithfulness. We ask for the same Spirit that You gave in the book of Acts and to the church there, that You would give the Spirit tonight to help us understand and to apply Your words. And we pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Acts chapter 9, verse 31:
“So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our God endures forever.
So first, the supply. And we come to this point in our study of the book of Acts, we’re actually coming to a break tonight. After tonight, we will take a couple of months off from the book of Acts and pick it back up in the new year. And so this verse makes a good transition verse, a good stopping point in our study, to look back at what’s happened so far and to look ahead at what is still to come. And what it tells us here in Acts 9:31 is that the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria, had been established. It was being built up; it had peace. I think the first thing for us to notice about that is that the church had been built up throughout Judea and Galilee and Samaria. That’s a big deal. That in itself is a really big deal. And the word that we find here for “church” in this verse is the word “ecclesia.” It refers to a congregation or an assembly. This is a gathering. And any group, any gathering that included Judeans and Galileans and Samaritans, together, is a big deal because naturally those groups did not get along with one another.
In some sense, you could say that they didn’t need Jesus if they were all alike ethnically and politically and economically. Of course there would have been challenges along the way and they needed Jesus, but those are natural affinities that would have connected people together, politically, ethnically, economically. What makes this miraculous, what makes this supernatural, is that it is a collection of people from Judea, Jerusalem, Galilee, Samaria. They had nothing in common with each other in many ways. We see in the book of Acts that the church is a gathering of rich and poor. We saw an Ethiopian eunuch come to faith in Christ and become a part of the church. We saw last week in Acts chapter 9 a Middle Eastern terrorist in Saul come in to be a part of the church and receive the forgiveness and grace of God in being brought into fellowship with the people. This is a miraculous thing. It’s a supernatural thing. It’s a big deal. And this group, the church that we read about in Acts 9:31, they had peace. They were being built up. They were established. We are told that they enjoyed “the comfort of the Holy Spirit.”
What we need to notice about that is that all of those things that were blessings in the church at that time, all the things that we read about in this verse, are things that Jesus had promised would come to them. And you remember that Jesus had said to His disciples before His death and resurrection, He said, “I will build My church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” He said to them later on before He was to leave them, He said, “Peace I leave you; My peace I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” And in John chapter 14, we read about Jesus promising to send to them the Helper, the Advocate, the Comforter. That’s the Greek word, “parakletos,” the “paraclete.” Well that’s the same word that we find here translated as “comfort” in verse 31; it’s “paraklesis.” So all of these things that we find in this one verse, all of these words that we find here – church, build up, peace, comfort, Holy Spirit – all of those things we find coming from the mouth of Jesus before they are ever found coming among His followers. And what we have seen from the very beginning of the book of Acts, the last words that Jesus said to His disciples, He said to them, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria.” And here we come to chapter 9 and we find the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up.
You see what this is? This verse is a report, this is an inventory of all of the promises that Jesus had promised to His people that were now coming to fulfillment. This is an inventory of promises fulfilled. This is a monument to how Jesus has kept His word to His disciples and to His people. Now you know how a lot of times you will see maybe an investment commercial or a retirement package or something like that, and it will have in the fine print, it will say, “Past performance is no guarantee of” – what? – “future results.” And they have to say that. They are required by law to say that because there is a risk inherent in any investment because nothing is a given. But that’s not the case in the promises kept by Jesus. When we see these promises that are kept by Jesus, they are a guarantee of future results. They are a guarantee of what is to come. The gifts of peace and comfort and strength in the past, those things should give us hope and encouragement. They should give us eyes to look for and expect and to be ready to enjoy those very same things into the future. Because Jesus promises them, He provides them, and that guarantees them for the future as well.
Those are the things that we long for in this church. Those are the things that we long for in our lives. And if you have been a part of the church for any period of time at all and know the blessings of coming together as God’s people and sitting under His Word and singing His praises and bringing our prayers before Him, you know the comfort and the strength and the peace that comes as a part of God’s church. Now by the way, it almost goes without saying, doesn’t it, I think we’ve seen this over and over again throughout the book of Acts, that the church is God’s plan for His people, and there is no indication, there is no hint of a Christian apart from the church. The church is God’s plan. And it’s in the church that God provides, that Jesus provides these blessings of peace and comfort and strength. These blessings come from Jesus. It sounds simple to say it, but that’s what this verse is making clear to us. It’s that these promises and these blessings come from Jesus.
And where we see these promises coming to fulfillment, where we see these blessings provided in our life, in our lives, in our community, then what should we do? How should we respond? We’re to respond with gratitude, with thanksgiving, with praise to God. What better way to prompt gratitude than what we find in this verse. This verse is making a list, it’s making a report of all the things that Jesus has provided to His people. That’s what we do to prompt gratitude in our own hearts. We make a list of all the things that God has done, all the things that Christ has provided in our lives, and we offer them back up to God in praise and thanksgiving. We look back and we see the way He is faithful to His promises, even when there are plenty of other things that we could dwell on.
That was the case in Acts, wasn’t it? There were things, difficult things, hard things that they could have dwelt on. Things like being thrown in prison, being put to death, being kicked out of house and home and homeland and scattered to different areas. They could have dwelt on those things, but the heartbeat of the book of Acts, the thread that we find over and over and over again, the summary reports that we find throughout this book is God’s goodness and the faithfulness of Jesus to His promises to His people. And think about that as we are coming into a time in our national celebrations of Thanksgiving. We are thinking about gratitude; we’re thinking about thanksgiving. We’re also in a time in our church where we are thinking about God’s Word and our teaching theme for this year is God’s Word.
And we can make a connection there. If we have a hard time cultivating gratitude or thanksgiving in our lives, could it be that we have a neglect of reading God’s Word in our lives? And we need to read God’s Word, we need to commit to spending time in God’s Word so that we can be reminded of all of His promises, all of the things that He has promised to us, so that we can be attentive not only to the promises but we can be attentive to the ways in which they are fulfilled and carried out in our lives. We need God’s Word regularly in our lives in order to cultivate gratitude in our lives. We see that in these verses and we need that own perspective in our lives and in the life of the church. This look back that we see, it shows us the supply of Jesus to His church, and that fosters encouragement, trust, gratitude, praise.
But it also points us forward. It points us forward. You see here that the church at this point, it was in Judea and Galilee and Samaria, but that was not all of Jesus’ plan, was it? There’s something missing from that verse, isn’t there, because what Jesus had called for was for them to be His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and – what – the end of the earth. There’s more to the story to tell. And the message of Jesus, the ministry of Jesus, it has to go beyond Samaria. It has to go to the end of the earth and this verse actually tells us how that will take place. It shows us the way of the expansion of the church. It was by doing what they were doing in this verse. It is by walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit. In other words, this verse shows us the way.
Back in seminary, Derek Thomas would talk about the tyranny of the Sunday bulletin. And he would say that because of the timing that was needed to have something in print for the bulletin on Sunday, you have to commit to a text and a title several days, maybe even a week or more before you know what you are going to say about that text and title. And so the bulletin holds you to what you commit to. And so Derek called that the tyranny of the Sunday bulletin. Well there’s a funny thing that happens when you commit to preach on just one verse of the Bible. And the first thing is, is you wonder if there’s enough in just this verse to preach a whole sermon on just this verse. But the funny thing that happens, is the more you look at it and the more you study it and the more you meditate on that one verse, you start to think to yourself, “I think this is the most important verse in the whole Bible!” And that’s been me this week because I was second guessing whether to preach on just this one verse, but the more I looked at it, I started to think, “I believe this is the key verse in the whole book of Acts.” Now if that’s overstating the matter, forgive me for that, but what we have seen throughout this study so far are these two things – the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit all along the way. We’ve seen it. This is the pattern of the book of Acts so far.
You see first there is this remarkable display of God’s power and glory, and then it’s followed by a note of the peace and the harmony that was enjoyed by the people at that time. So for instance, at the very beginning of the book of Acts, what do we have? We have Jesus ascending into heaven in the cloud and the disciples are in awe. But then they go and they are together in one accord and they are devoting themselves to prayer. They have experienced the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. Or at Pentecost there was the mighty rushing wind and the filling of the Holy Spirit and the speaking in tongues and the awe of the crowds that saw all that was happening around them, and then that was followed by the devotion to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship. They were breaking bread together. They were praying together. They were being together and having all things in common – the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.
All the way until we come to Acts chapter 9 and that’s what we saw last week in the conversion of Saul. What did Saul see? He saw the bright light and the vision of the risen Lord. On the way to Damascus, he fell down to the ground. He was blinded; he was shaken. But at the end of that episode, we find that Saul is received into the disciples in Damascus. He is later received into the apostles in Jerusalem and he is going out boldly proclaiming the good news. It’s the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit over and over and over again. Almost every episode in the book of Acts so far is bound by these two principles that we see in this verse – the fear of the Lord; the comfort of the Holy Spirit. And so this verse is a summary of what has happened, but it also provides the way forward. How will the church continue to multiply? How will the church go all the way to Rome and even beyond? How will the church reach the end of the earth? Well it’s by the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.
You know, one of the early designations of the Christian church – and we’ve seen it back in earlier verses of this chapter – Christians were called, the church was called “The Way,” as in “the way of the Lord” or “the way of God.” Jesus Himself had said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but through Me.” Isaiah had said, “This is the way, walk in it.” And so we saw it back in verse 2 of this chapter that Saul was looking to arrest any he found belonging to The Way. And The Way appears a few more times in the book of Acts, but think about this. How do you go along the way? How do you travel along the way? Very simply. You walk. And I think there is a correlation between what we find in this verse when it’s talking about the people of The Way – and how do they live? It’s by walking. It’s by walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit.
It’s almost like these are the two legs for walking along the way. These are the two legs for the church, for the way to go. One is an awe or reverence for the Lord. It’s a love, a devotion, a single-minded commitment to live a Christ-centered life. It’s to do things in God’s way for God’s glory. The fear of the Lord. But it’s also the comfort of the Holy Spirit. There is a concern for the heart of the people. There is love for one another. They are spiritually minded. They are living by faith. They are sacrificing and forgiving and bearing one another’s burdens. Those two things are paired together in this verse. That’s what we see happening in this verse. These were their priorities. They were worship, baptism, breaking bread together, obedience to God’s Word, prayer. They were sharing and caring for the needs of the vulnerable, the most vulnerable among them. They were committed to engaging in evangelizing the lost. There was a boldness in the church in the face of opposition and persecution. Those are the ways that the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit was displayed among the church in these days.
And that’s the way forward as well. That would be the way forward for them. What we will find in the rest of the book of Acts, that’s the way forward for us as well. How are we to carry on the mission of Jesus? How is the church to carry on the ministry of the Lord Jesus, the commission that He gives to us as His disciples? It’s by continuing to do these very same things and to prioritize them in all that we do. Not giving way to the fear of man, not giving way to the comfort of man, but by doing things for God’s glory and doing it God’s way. So this verse, it’s not only a description, it’s not only a description of what had taken place, but it’s also a prescription and it’s saying what must continue to happen to see the church built up and to see the church multiply. It’s by walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit.
So there’s the supply, there’s the way, and then thirdly, there’s the standard. The standard. You know we live in a time where data and analysis are a big deal. Harvard Business School says that there are four types of data analysis. There is descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. And we see three of those in this verse, in chapter 9 verse 31. It’s descriptive because it tells us what Jesus has done. It tells us what happened. But it’s also prescriptive. It says what to do next. It says how we are to be faithful to Jesus’ call and mission. But then it’s also diagnostic. It’s diagnostic because this verse helps us to diagnose our ministry right here, right now. It helps us to look for signs of health and of being sound in our own gathering, in our own church. How are we doing as a church? How are we doing as a believer in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Spirit, in walking in those things? This verse should be the standard to which we measure everything that we do.
So I think this verse should cause us to ask some questions. Do we fear the Lord? And do we walk by the Spirit? Do we tremble when we think about the holiness and the glory of God? Do we recognize the gravity, the significance, the immense privilege of what we are doing here as we come together to worship, to come before God and to offer our praise to Him? It should fill us with an awe, a wonder. Do we pray? Do we pray together, and is that a priority among us? In our decisions and in the discussions that happen in committees and in meetings, are we doing things to search for and to submit to God’s Word with an open Bible before us? Or do we go to what’s merely pragmatic or what’s been established by precedent? How much are we concerned about what other people think or about what’s popular, what’s comfortable, what’s safe, what’s predictable?
Those things are not the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. The fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit give us different marching orders because these things are kingdom ideals. These are the ways of God’s kingdom. These are the ways of Jesus and of His kingdom which is not of this earth. But the thing is, we live in this world, don’t we? And the constant battle in all of our hearts is to go back to business principles or political strategies, entertainment options, instant gratification, short attention spans, and we adopt more of the ways of the world than we would ever like to admit. And we need a verse like this to be a diagnostic, to be a grid through which we view and look into our own lives and look into our own ministry here to see whether we are walking faithfully in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.
I heard someone tell a story recently about going back to his hometown in rural Alabama. He hadn’t been there in many years, and as he looked around, he looked around for a while and he was talking to a friend who had never moved away. And he said to his friend, “What happened?” His friend said, “What do you mean, what happened?” He said, “What happened to our hometown, with everything that’s changed?” And he said, “Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed here in fifty years. It’s the same old town it’s always been.” And he said, “Well what about on main street and with the abandoned buildings and the rundown storefronts and the general disrepair all around?” His friend had never noticed it. He didn’t notice it at all because it was so slow and it was so gradual, he didn’t take note of it. He had been there the whole time and he didn’t see how much it had declined.
Verses like this, Acts chapter 9 verse 31, aren’t they so helpful for us to stop and to focus on just one verse and to use it as a diagnostic, to measure ourselves, our standard. This is our standard – the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. We need verses like this to examine ourselves to see if we are walking in this way, and if not, to turn us into the right way and to walk in it and to diagnose the ways in which maybe we have subtly, unsuspectingly adopted and embraced the ways of the world around us, the priorities of the world around us. We need this to point us in the way of faithfulness, the way that is safe, and the way that is sound, and the way that brings glory to God.
I’ll just close with this. We’ve seen in the book of Acts this message about Jesus and it has gone out and it’s been received by all sorts of unlikely people. There have been doubters, there have been wanderers, there have been big sinners that have heard the good news about Jesus and about His love and forgiveness, and they’ve turned and been received into God’s people. God’s grace is much wider than we oftentimes imagine. And if you are here tonight, if you are here and you don’t know God’s love, you don’t know the grace of Jesus, know that it is for you, that it is wide enough for you. And that His love, His forgiveness, His grace, His mercy, His blessing is available to you if you would trust in Jesus and place your faith in Him. That’s the message of Acts. That’s the reason for this book. It’s because Jesus died and was raised, and that message needs to go to all sorts of people. And you are never so lost, you are never so dead in your sin that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. That’s what sends the message out. That’s what builds up the church. That’s what multiplies the church in the book of Acts. And if you are that person, know that the grace of God is available to you.
Now how are we, how are we as a church to be as wide as God’s grace goes and to receive those unlikely people? We need this verse – Acts 9:31. “The church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.” And would God continue to do that, would Jesus continue to be faithful to His promises among us as well. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we give You thanks for this word of encouragement, to look around us and to see the many blessings that we have received from Your hand. We thank You for this gathering of Your people here this night and in this place. We thank You for the peace and comfort and encouragement that You give to us through Your Word and as we fellowship and worship together. And we pray that You would do a work in us that would multiply those among us, that You would do a work through the good news of the Gospel to help others to hear the good news about Jesus and how wide is the grace of our salvation in Him. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.