Good morning. We're going to
be in the 16th chapter of Acts, both hours this morning. If you'd
like to turn with me there in your Bibles, and I'm just so
very hopeful the Lord will cause his word to be a great prophet
to us. Scripture tells us that All the Word of God is inspired
of God and is profitable. Profitable. I need the profit
of God's Word given to me this morning, and
we have a great hope in that He's promised to do just that.
I want us to go before the Lord and ask Him to to make it profitable
to us by sending his spirit and making it effectual to our hearts. Most of you probably already
know, I've learned some time ago not to even make announcements
anymore because with social media as it is, everybody already knows
everything before I do. But Lynn Nybert had her double
transplant Friday night. And they started at 9 o'clock
Friday night and finished at 6 o'clock Saturday morning. They
got her off the ventilator yesterday and she was asking for her cell
phone. So that was a good sign. She's doing well and been very
little pain. I'm sure she's still on a lot
of pain medication. They will have to be there for
the next five to six weeks. They can't leave the hospital,
leave, I guess, the hotel or whatever it is right next to
the hospital. She'll have to stay right there
in case she has any problems. But right now, everything looks
well. And we're very, very thankful. I know you are. She's been suffering
a long time with a need for this. Also, I preached in Cottageville,
West Virginia, Friday night and yesterday morning. And the brethren
there insisted that I share their love with you. And they do love
our church. And if you ever get a chance
to fellowship with the brethren in Cottageville, Jimmy told Tom's
son goes to church there. had good services Friday night
and yesterday morning. Very thankful for the fellowship
that we're able to have with other churches. Let's go to the Lord and ask
His blessings. Our merciful Heavenly Father, we come before Thy glory and
Thy holy presence We thank you, Lord, that you've provided for
us a throne of grace whereby we can come and get help in our
time of need. Lord, we are a needy people.
We're in need of you to feed us with the bread of life. We're
in need of you to reveal to us the glory of Christ and assure
us of your grace and your love and your forgiveness. And we're
in need of you, Lord, Open the eyes of our understanding and
open your word and take those keys of David and open what no
man can shut. Open the windows of heaven. Come
down, meet with us, Lord. Lest all that we do in this place
be worse than in vain. Lord, we depend upon you to enable
us to worship you in the power of your spirit and according
to the truth of your word. Lord, we thank you for the successful
surgery that you gave to Lynn, and we pray for your continued
hand of strength and healing to be upon her. Give her a full
recovery. Lord, we thank you for our brethren
in Cottageville, and we pray as they meet and continue their
conference this morning that you would be pleased to bless
their fellowship and every place where your people are gathered
together and your gospel is preached. Lord, we ask for your mercy and
for the pouring out of your grace and your spirit. And we ask it
in Christ's name, amen. All right, you have your Bibles open
to Acts chapter 16. We'll begin reading in verse
16. And it came to pass as he went
to prayer, a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of dimination,
met us, which brought her master much gain by soothsaying. The same followed Paul and us
and cried, saying, these men are servants of the Most High
God, which show us the way of salvation." Now here's a young
woman possessed with a demon, who follows the Apostle Paul
and Silas and makes this mantra over and over and over again.
Listen to these men. These are the servants of the
most high God, which show us the way of salvation. Verse 18. And she did this many
days. But Paul, being grieved, turned
and said to the Spirit, I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ
to come out of her. And he came out the same hour.
And when her master saw that the hope of their gain was gone,
they caught Paul and Silas and drew them into the marketplace
unto the rulers and brought them to the magistrate saying, these
men being Jews do exceedingly trouble our city and teach customs
which are not lawful for us to receive, neither to observe,
we be in Romans. And the multitude rose up together
against them, and the magistrates rent off their clothes and commanded
to beat them. And when they had laid many stripes
upon them, they cast them into prison, charging the jailer to
keep them safely, who, having received such a charge, thrust
them into the inner prison and made their feet fast in stocks. The Lord was, we saw last Sunday,
had forbid the Apostle Paul from preaching the gospel in Asia
and sent him across the Aegean Sea into Macedonia to preach
the gospel in Philippi. And so the Lord is at work here. Lydia has come to know the Lord. And a church is beginning to
be built. This is the original seeds of
that church, which Paul writes to much later in the book of
Philippians. And so We see God's at work. God's building his church. He's
fulfilling that promise that the Lord made to us when he said
upon this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell
shall not be able to prevail against it. Now, the first lesson
and the first important point that we understand from this
passage of scripture is that when God is at work, Satan gets
busy. He gets busy. He will do whatever
he can to thwart and to confuse the work of God. And in one sense, we can be encouraged
to know that this is, you know, the devil's not concerned about
where the gospel is not being preached. He already has complete
control of that place. But if he can cause confusion,
and division in a place where the gospel's being preached,
then he will. And we're reminded of how the
Lord said to Peter, Satan has asked to sift thee, but be of
good cheer, I prayed for thee. Let's not forget that the devil
is God's devil, and he's on God's leash. And the Lord will use
him to prove the work of the Spirit. You see, if Satan is
able to destroy whatever work there is, then it wasn't of God. It wasn't of God. The Lord will
always get the victory. He said, the gates of hell shall
not prevail against my church. The Lord allows him to try the
work of God to see if it will stand. This woman was possessed with
a demon. These are not primitive, uneducated
people trying to explain that which is spiritual with natural
language. They are not calling it, now
the word here means to be mad. That's when it says that she
was, that she was, how does it, what is the word that's used
here in In verse 16, the damsel was possessed
with the spirit of divination. That phrase means to be mad,
means to be out of your mind, but notice that this is God's
word. The Lord's not trying to explain
away these spiritual powers and influences with just psychological
language. This is a real spiritual power
and influence in this woman's life. And that's important for
us to be reminded of because the Lord warns us in Colossians
chapter 2 to not intrude into those things which we have not
seen. And he's particularly talking
about getting too deep into angels and devils and all those sorts
of things. And we'll leave the exercising
of those demons to the apostles. They had special powers and special
authority to do that. We're not gonna go there. But we are going to be reminded
of what the Lord has warned us of in the reality of these powers
and these influences. Angels and demons are real It's important for us to know
who our enemies are and who our friends are and To take our side
accordingly in 2nd Corinthians chapter 11 verse 14 the Lord
tells us that these demons take on the form of angel of light,
they take on a form of a minister of righteousness, they pretend
to be from God, but in the end they are out to destroy, if they
can, the work of God. Turn with me to the book of James, James chapter 3. Verse 13, who is a wise man? And here's who the Lord's speaking
to. He speaks to wise men. Who is a wise man and endued
with knowledge among you? Let him show out of a good conversation
his works with meekness and with wisdom. But if you have bitter
envying and strife in your heart, glory not and lie not against
the truth for this wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthy,
sensual, devilish. Now I want to warn us not to
point our finger at someone else who fits this description and
call them devilish. Let us guard our own hearts and
make sure that the spirit that we have is not a spirit of division. This wisdom, look at verse 16,
for where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every
evil work. Now the Lord's making it clear
to us that confusion and strife and evil work and division, these
are the works of the devil. And that's what was being attempted
in Acts chapter 16. The devil came along when God
was at work trying to bring strife and division. Listen to Proverbs 26. Matter
of fact, just turn there with me if you don't mind. Proverbs
26, verse 20. Here's a very, very simple I'll finish reading this passage
in James 3 before we look at that. But the wisdom that is
from above is first pure and then peaceable, gentle, easy
to be entreated, full of mercy and of good fruits without partiality
and without hypocrisy, for the fruit of righteousness is sown
in peace to them who make peace. So Satan's all about dividing
and conquering and God is bringing his people together in peace,
having the unity of the Spirit in the bond of love. That's what
the Scripture says about what God's doing. Here's the evidence
that God is at work. You have your Bibles open to
Proverbs 26, verse 20. Where no wood is, there the fire
goes out. So where there is no tailbearer,
and that word tailbearer means whisperer or gossiper, where
there is no talking, the strife ceaseth. As coals are to burning
coals and as wood to fire, so is a contentious man to kindle
strife. Oh, here's the work of the devil,
strife and division and contention. This is his work. This is what
he was trying to do here. And the Lord has sent him and
allowed him to try the work of the Spirit, to prove it, whether
it be of God. And that's true in our homes.
That's true in our own hearts. That's true in our church. And
so here's the lesson that the Lord would have us to learn.
I was encouraged this past weekend. I know a lot of you all are on
social media. Please be careful. Please be
careful. If you feel like throwing up,
go in your closet and do it privately with the Lord. Don't do it publicly
on social media. Don't do it. It's out there for
everybody to see and have to smell and have to listen to,
and they're not interested. Keep it to yourself. Keep it
between you and God. This is so important. You think
you'd sit there in anonymity in the privacy of your own little
office working out something and send it out? No, you might
as well get a bullhorn. I wouldn't say anything on social
media. You couldn't stand up here and say on Sunday morning. Now, I'll just leave it at that. Be careful. These things are
not of God and they're not profitable and they're not good. I was encouraged
to talk to some young adults in their late 20s, early 30s. They said, you know what? We
just, these are believers. We just got completely off of
social media because we got sick and tired of hearing what professing
believers were putting out there. And I thought, well, good for
you. We were so offended by what we were seeing from professing
believers that we just gave up on it. Here's the work of the
devil, brethren. And this is a word of caution
that God's given us, isn't it? It's a word of warning. God's
all about the unity of the spirit and the bond of love and peace
among his people. And if Satan can put his foot
in the door and cause confusion, and it'll be by strife and by
talk, you just stop talking to one another and gaining, you
know, support for your side against another. That's just, that's
so divisive. Is it not? Where no wood is,
the fire goes out. As coals are to burning coals
and wood to fire, so is a contentious man. God hates the... This is real stuff here. The
Lord tells us, resist the devil, and he will flee from thee. 1
Peter 5, verse 8, casting all of your care upon him, for he
careth for you. Be sober, be vigilant, because
your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, is seeking whom
he may devour. He would devour us if he could. The Lord says, cast your care
upon him. put on the whole armor of God,
Ephesians 6 verse 11, that you may be able to stand against
the wiles of the devil. He's very clever. He's very wily. He's very deceitful, mean-spirited. Ephesians 4, 27, neither. God's
speaking to his children here. He says, neither give place to
the devil. Don't give place to him. When
he starts talking to you about something you know is being divine,
just say, you know what? We're not going to give place
to this. This is none of my business. I'll pray with you. This is important. If God is at work, and I believe
he is, I believe God's at work here, I believe God has given
us the gospel, he's given us one another, he's given us an
opportunity, and you can be sure where God's at work, the devil's
gonna try to mess it up. He is, and the Lord is warning
us here. Hmm. We have a responsibility to the
gospel, the unity of peace to one another. And the scripture
says that God hates those who sow discord among brethren. Oh Lord, don't let me do that. Second lesson we learn from this
passage of Scripture is that we cannot be identified or associate
with a spirit that's not of God. Paul discerned that this woman
was possessed with a spirit that was not of God, and he could
not have her endorse him in fear that someone would see him associated
with her. And we have that happen all the
time. You know, I get invitations to ministerial meetings, and
if I went to them, I'd just be endorsing, you know, a false
gospel. You get invitations of your family
members to go to a false gospel church, and as soon as you go
in and sit down, you've identified with them. And the Lord warns us against
that. We cannot let anyone imagine that we endorse error. We're to try the spirits to see
whether they'd be of God. Scripture's clear on that. Turn
with me to 1 John 4. 1 John 4. Verse one. Beloved, believe not every spirit,
but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many
false prophets are going out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of
God, every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in
the flesh." Now that That is the declaration that Jesus Christ
is fully God and fully man. He was fully God and fully man
in his incarnation, in his birth, in his life, in his death, in
his resurrection, in his ascension. He is fully God and fully man. And the gospel of God's free
grace is the only message that really truly believes that. As
I reminded you last Sunday, every religious organization will claim
to believe that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, and
they will dress themselves in purple, but they will either
deny his humanity or they will deny his deity. They will deny his deity when
they say, well, you know, he really can't get anyone saved
unless we help him out. We've got to do our part in order.
That's denying his absolute sovereign omnipotent deity and power. or they will deny his humanity
when they say, well, you know, he's so highly exalted, he cannot
really sympathize with you and your need, and he wasn't really
God's perfect man. And so you've got to have a priest,
and you've got to have an elder, and you've got to have a saint,
and you've got to have somebody else that you can go through
in order to get to God, because Jesus Christ can't really identify
with you. And so in every religion you
have prophets and priests and men that have set themselves
up, and everybody, you know, priestcraft is practiced in every
religion. Every religion. It's not just
practiced in Catholicism, it's practiced in the Reform religion.
You say they believe, you know, they set up elders, you got to
go through them, you got to go through this man or that man
in order to get to God. What are they doing? They're
denying the humanity of Christ. They're denying the fact that
he is able to sympathize with our weaknesses. He was tried and tested in every
way that we are, and yet he said not. God's perfect man. So try the spirits. Are you upholding
the full deity of Christ? Are you upholding the full humanity
of Christ? And these things are too wonderful
for us. They're mysterious. We don't understand them any
more than you understand the two natures in your life. Children
of God, you know you have two natures. Where did they come
together? I don't, you know, I can't figure
that out. And yet we have a perfect nature
in Christ that is without sin. And we have a fleshly sinful
nature that can do nothing but sin. And here we are in one personality
struggling. And we say with, we say, Rebecca,
why am I thus? Why am I thus? Lord, I don't
understand why I'm the way I am. And the Lord says, because there's
two nations in you. You have two natures. That's
why. You be careful. As the devil
can get in his foot in that old nature, he will. Third lesson that we learn from
this passage of scripture is that error is often and usually
identified with what is not said. What did this woman say that
was wrong? Let's go back and look at it
again. Verse 17, these men are servants
of the Most High God, which show unto us the way of salvation. Anything wrong with that statement?
Not a single word of it. But what she didn't say is that who the Most High God
is and what the way of salvation was. You see, she was exalting
these men, wasn't she? She wasn't exalting Christ. She
was lifting up these men. I had a dear sister send me a link
to a message recently. She said, you know, I listened
to this message because I found it online and everything he said
seemed to be true, but there's just something missing. Could
you listen to it and tell me? And I listened to it. I said,
yeah. I said everything he said was
true. And that message could have been preached anywhere without
offense. No one would have been offended
by it. Everything he said was true. But he didn't really define
the sinful nature as it really is. He talked about sin as if
it was just a behavioral problem. He didn't really expose sin for
what it is. Absence of all righteousness. And every fiber of our being,
being sinful, he didn't make that. Now that's offensive, isn't
it? You tell a person that they're
a sinner and they're going to be greatly offended by that.
Tell a man that he has no righteousness whatsoever, that he's nothing
but sin, and it offends his dignity. He wants to believe that he's
got something about him that's good. That message wasn't that,
you see, you can use the word sinner and say that Christ came
to save sinners and never define what a sinner was. That's what
this woman's problem was. She just had this mantra, these
men are the servants of the most high God, and they come here
to show us the way of salvation, but she didn't define any of
her terms. You tell men that the truth of
the gospel can only come by divine revelation, that a person, regardless
of their abilities or their intellect, can never, ever come to the knowledge
of Christ apart from the Lord's intervention. The Lord opening their hearts,
as he did for Lydia. The Lord opening the gates of
heaven, as he as he tells us about in the book of Isaiah and
coming down and revealing him. So it's no way we can come to
him. But you tell men that the truth of the gospel
can only come to them by divine revelation and that they cannot
achieve that knowledge left to themselves. And it offends their
wisdom. It offends their intellect. It
offends their, you know, they just, the gospel is offensive.
And if it's preached in its entirety, then it's going to offend some
people. And so men have figured out a
way to adjust their language so as not to be an offense. And
they will say that God's sovereign without describing or defining
sovereignty, or they will say that Christ died for everybody. God loves everybody and you know
there. If you tell men that the forgiveness
of their sins is only by the shed blood of the Lord Jesus
Christ and nothing else will put away their sin in the sight
of God, it offends their pride. You know, I've got, I've got
something I can offer God. If you tell men that their only
hope of acceptance before God is to be found in Christ, that
they left to themselves have nothing to offer God and that
they can never be acceptable in the sight of a holy God, well,
that offends their love of self. They don't want to hear that.
The gospel's offensive. And the problem with what this
woman was doing was that she was leaving a whole lot out,
and she was calling attention to some men rather than calling
attention to Christ. We preach Christ and Him crucified,
and if He's lifted up, He's going to offend the natural man. And I had a Pastor, tell me this
weekend, he's got a brother in his church that says to him every
Sunday, he says, Pastor, thank you for offending me. Thank you
for shaming me. Thank you for reminding me what
a sinful wretch I am, because that's the only hope that I have
for my salvation. The only time I ever look to
Christ is when I'm reminded of how I have nothing outside of
him. Our Lord, in Luke chapter 4,
went back to his hometown where he knew everyone in that little
village of Nazareth. And he had been in the synagogue
in that city every day of his life. He was a keeper of the
law. And he showed up there after
he began his public ministry and they handed him the book
of Isaiah and he opened it up and he read from Isaiah chapter
61, the spirit of the Lord is upon me. Every Jew in that synagogue,
those were his friends. Those were his family members.
Those were people that he had known all his life and he had
never been an offense to any of them. Not a single person
there had any reason to have any anger toward him whatsoever. He had never done anything but
treat every person there with kindness and love and compassion. He had been a giver all his life
to every person there. And they wondered when he read
that passage, because they knew that that was a messianic passage,
they wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of his
mouth. They thought, Is he? Could it be? One of our own? And then he defined his terms. And he said, in the days of the
prophet Elijah, there were many widows in Israel that were in
great need and distress, but God showed mercy on none of them
except the woman of Sarepta, who was a Gentile. And in the
days of the prophet Elisha, there were many lepers in Israel, Jewish
lepers, but God showed mercy on none of them except for Naaman
the Syrian. And how their attitude could
shift so quickly. Oh, they were enraged. They were
full of anger and fury. to kill him. They took him out
of the city, would have thrown him over the... They wanted to
put him to death. And he walked away from their
presence. Where'd he go? You see, that's the offense of
the cross. What was our Lord saying to those people that he
had loved all his life? God is sovereign. He will have
mercy upon whom he will have mercy and whom he will. He will
harden God's not dependent upon you for anything. You're dependent
upon him for everything. You have nothing to offer God. If he doesn't show mercy upon
you, you have no hope whatsoever. Now, wait a minute. You mean I can't make any contribution
at all? That's what our Lord said. What he said. We're just, well, you see, that's the message
that offends men. I was listening to a message
by Henry Mayhem this weekend, and he said, have you seen the
four nuns of scripture? And I, having been a Catholic,
I thought, there's no nuns in the Bible. What are you talking
about? And he went to Romans 3, verse 11, and he read, there
is none righteous, no, not one. There is none that seeketh after
God. There is none that understandeth. There is none that doeth good,
no, not one. There's the four nones of scripture.
And that none includes you and me, doesn't it? None righteous. None seeketh after God, none
has any understanding. There is none that doeth anything
good. Paul and Silas. The final lesson
we learn in this passage suffered for the gospel's sake. And we're
going to see in the next hour that they rejoiced over the privilege
and blessing of being able to count worthy for that suffering. I pray the Lord will, as I said
at the beginning of this hour, make his word profitable to our
hearts. Let's take a break.