Turning your scriptures with
me to Acts chapter 20. I'd just like to begin by reminding
us of that verse that is so significant in this sermon and in this chapter. and such a great description
of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ and that ongoing
work in the lives of his people. Verse 28 of Acts 20, take heed
therefore unto yourselves and all the flock over which the
Holy Ghost has made you overseers and feed the church of God which
he hath purchased with his own blood. I'd like us to think about
our friend Eutychus I know it's a silly thought, but I often
sort of wonder what it's going to be like in heaven when we
get to meet these people. And seeing the Holy Spirit has
chosen to give us Eutychus's name, then it would be nice for
us to at least say, well, we heard about you. Imagine meeting
Obadiah. He'd say, did you read my little
book? In the mercy of the Lord, when
we get to glory, none of those things will ever be a problem.
And none of those things, there is nothing, there is nothing
in heaven's glory to cause us from this perspective to be anything
other than delightfully looking forward to it, brothers and sisters
in Christ. So let's just read this short account of our friend
Eutychus. Let's start in verse 7 of Acts
20. And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples
came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready
to depart on the morrow. So Paul was heading to Jerusalem
and to Rome, and he knew, as these chapters unfold, he knew
that he was going to die, and this was the last time he was
going to be with these people. And Paul preached unto them,
ready to depart in the morrow, and continued his speech until
midnight. And there were many lights in
the upper chamber where they were gathered together. And there
sat in a window a certain young man named Eutychus, being fallen
into a deep sleep. And as Paul was long preaching,
he sunk down with sleep. and fell down from the third
loft, so this is a three-storey building that they're in, and
in the top floor of this three-storey building, and was taken up dead. He really was dead. Luke is a
doctor, so this notion that somehow he's just in a coma or in some
sort of a swoon is not what the scriptures are saying. And this
is the response of the Apostle Paul. This is the response of
those indwelt by the Spirit of God as they shepherded the Church
of God. And Paul went down and fell on
him and embracing him said, trouble not yourselves for his life is
in him. When he therefore was come up
again and had broken bread and eaten and talked a long while,
even till the break of day. So he departed, and they brought
the young man alive, and were not a little comforted." That's
an understatement there. You can imagine what sort of
a celebration that was. How would Eutychus have felt?
How would Eutychus' mum and dad have felt, and his friends have
felt? What a cause for rejoicing in
the faithfulness of our God. What a cause for us to see that
what that word means, that word bought in Acts 20, 28, is that
the blood-bought church of God is a church that's reserved for
Him, a church that's preserved for Him. It's a people for a
possession. And they exist in this world
for many reasons, but they exist in this world to show and to
reveal the faithfulness of our God, the faithfulness of our
Saviour, the faithfulness not only in calling His people to
Himself, but in the case of Eutychus of restoring people to the fellowship
of God's people when they have fallen asleep and slumbered. We talked earlier about the compassion
of our great Saviour, and He's filled with compassion to His
people. And what a faithful husband the
Church of God has. What a faithful Saviour. What
a faithful friend. He's a friend of sinners. Faithful to His Father. Faithful in honouring his father's
name. What were the first words we
hear of the Lord Jesus Christ in his incarnation? He told his
parents, didn't you know, I must be about my father's business.
He must be about his father's business. And his last words? It is finished. It is finished. He'll gather his people. He will redeem his people. He
will shed his precious life's blood for his people. He will
in faithfulness obey all the laws of God. In faithfulness
he'll love God with all of his heart and all of his mind and
all of his soul and all of his strength. In faithfulness he'll
love his neighbour, he will speak the truth to his neighbours.
He's faithful even unto death. The death of the cross. Faithful
in being made a curse for his people. Faithful in being made
sin. Faithful in honouring that covenant
surety arrangements that he made with his father before the foundation
of the world, where he took full responsibility in the Psalms,
Psalm 40 and Psalm 69, and many other places. He said, these
sins are mine. Isn't that a remarkable thought,
brothers and sisters in Christ? My brethren, beloved of the Lord,
your sins were His in reality, not pasted on and God does not
play pretend with things so serious. They really were His sin. They really were His. Our God is faithful. It's good to ponder how faithful
he is, isn't it? I can read some scriptures to
you. Deuteronomy 7, know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is
the faithful God. He's faithful and he abideth
faithful, says Paul in 2nd Timothy. He cannot deny himself. Psalm 89 verse 8 says, O Lord
God of hosts, who is a stronghold like unto thee, or to thy faithfulness
round about thee? Thy compassions they fail not,
they are new every morning, says Jeremiah in Lamentations 3, great
is thy faithfulness. God is not a man that he should
lie, he's faithful to His Word. Have He said and shall He not
do it? You see we can't over trust God
and we can't outrun the sense of expectation we should have
that He will be perfectly faithful to everything that He said. We
are rejoicing in the rain after the drought, but we should also
be rejoicing in the fact that God said in Genesis 8, seed time
and harvest will continue to the end. He'll continue to preserve
this world and preserve life on this world until the last
of his blood-bought children are brought to him. So we can
cast all of our cares. My point is that we can cast
all of our cares upon a faithful God. He's faithful to his promises. He's faithful to all that He
has said. He's faithful to His people. He never forgets. He never falters. And never will a word that He
has sent out return to Him void. He always does. He always acts
with purposefulness. There are no accidents. There
is no such thing as luck or chance in this world. I wish we'd wash
our mouths out with soap when we follow the world in saying
things like, it was lucky. There's no such thing as luck.
The purpose of God was fulfilled. I love how he spoke to those
Corinthians, those Corinthians who seemed to almost practice
every wickedness that you could possibly imagine in a church
these days. No church today would own itself
as a church of God if they behaved the way the Corinthians did.
And yet, Paul writes remarkably to them in verse 9 of chapter
1 of Corinthians, he said, God is faithful by whom you are called
into the fellowship of his son. So God is faithful in calling
people and God is faithful in putting them into fellowship
with his son and God in faithfulness to that is putting them in fellowship
with each other which is what we see here in Troas. All of these people brought together
But in the story of Eutychus, we see that God is faithful in
preserving his people. He's faithful in preserving them. And when the children of God
get to glory, what will he say? Well done, thou good and faithful
servant. Now that's remarkable, isn't
it? That's remarkable. Only a new creation, only a blood-bought
child of God who saw that the Lord Jesus Christ was all of
his righteousness, and not only that, but the Lord Jesus Christ
was all of his faithfulness, could do anything other than
be horrified by a statement like that. But God's children rejoice
in the fact that He is faithful. He's faithful in afflicting us. The psalmist in Psalm 119 verse
15, Thou in faithfulness have afflicted me. It's a very, very good thing,
isn't it? to try as best as the Lord would allow us to see the
hand of God in absolutely everything and to see His hand in the afflictions
that are before us. It says in another psalm that
He makes our bed in our afflictions. He lays us down. He has in the
purpose of those afflictions not only to remind us of the
the very, very real and finite limits of our abilities and to
reduce them to absolutely nothing. But our afflictions and the troubles
and trials that people have in this world are just yet another
opportunity for God to show His faithfulness. Paul said to the
Thessalonians in chapter 5 verse 24, faithful is he that calleth
you, he will do it. So God's children commit as Paul did, I know whom I have
believed. And I'm persuaded, I hope you're
persuaded, I'm persuaded, I'm persuaded that he is able to
keep that which I've entrusted unto him. What have you entrusted
unto him? I trust that you've entrusted
and continue to entrust absolutely everything, your eternal soul. Can you entrust that into his
care? Can you entrust all of your journey
from here to that momentous occasion when you must leave this earth
and go to eternity? Trust him. Trust him. I'm persuaded. God's children are persuaded
that he is able because they've been made to realise they have
no ability in themselves. So here we have this blood-bought
flock, this blood-purchased flock. They are reserved by his blood. But here in the story, of Eutychus we see that true
saving faith is reserved and perseveres because it's preserved
by God. True saving faith is the gift
of God. He called these people to himself,
our Lord Jesus Christ. And we must remember that the
Acts are called the Acts of the Apostles, but in reality they
are the Acts of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is yet another demonstration,
and it's like an acted parable, isn't it, before us, of the faithfulness
of our God. Paul was about, as we see in
the rest of this chapter and in the following chapters, Paul
was about to embark on a journey which was going to cause him
to have very, very severe trials. He
was going to have the trials of the brethren who were going
to be upset about him. He had the trials and the anxiety of
knowing that the Ephesian church was going to be racked by false
teachers, even from amongst their own midst. This church that he'd
laboured for and cared for and he'd loved them and he'd written
to them and he'd been with them and cared for them in all sorts
of remarkable ways, physically and spiritually. and he knew
that it was going to be ravaged by wolves. He had all of those
cares before him and he was going to Jerusalem and he knew that
afflictions and bonds were awaiting him. He didn't know about the
ship and he didn't know what trials were going to befall him
in Rome. And how do you prepare someone
for the trials to come? You put them through trials. and you make them realise that
God is faithful. When He says He's preserved them,
when He says He reserves them for Himself, He'll show Himself
as He takes His people through the trial, that He's there with
them and that this trial works patience. It causes us, as James
says, to remember that God is faithful. You know how James
spoke of those trials, these trials that come upon you. The
trying of your faith, says James in 1 verse 3, worketh patience. Patience waits, doesn't it? I'm
notoriously impatient and my poor wife has to put up with
it. But real patience waits, doesn't it? Let patience have
her perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire, wanting
nothing. And then he says, if any of you
lack wisdom, let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally
and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. I love that promise
of wisdom. from our God. The trials will
come. The trials will come. He'll try
the faith of his people. Throughout the scriptures we
have people again and again who are tried in their faith. Abraham
was tried by God in the most remarkable ways and yet when
he had a promise from God and no earthly reason to believe
that that promise could be fulfilled by anything in him. He was an
old, old man, and Sarah was an old, old woman, and they were
both long beyond the age of bearing children. And God took him outside,
and you see those stars up there, Abraham? You're going to have
that many children. Abraham's very name had mocked
him for that 80 or 90 years. His name meant father. And then
God added some letters to his word and it was the father of
many. And all that time, Abraham, you're the father. How many children
do you have, Abraham? None. You're the father of many. How many children do you have,
Abraham? None. But he had a promise from God. A promise from God that was fulfilled
in Isaac and is fulfilled this very day as the Lord Jesus Christ
gathers the faith children of Abraham to himself. His faith was tried when he took
Isaac up on that mountain. And he received him back from
the dead. That's what Hebrew says of it,
isn't it? He believed God. He really in his heart had killed
his son. And God showed him in the midst
of that and showed us through all of that the wonder of a faithful
God and the wonder of substitution in a lamb that dies in the place. Faith, as we see in this picture,
Faith gathers people together. It says there were strangers
and pilgrims, they're gathered together. Ephesians 4 speaks
of this body, this body in Troas, this body in Ephesus, this body
in Nara, the body in Florida, the bodies that we know of around
this world, that's a fitly joined together, says Paul to the Ephesians,
compacted by that which every joint supplieth. That's remarkable,
isn't it? Ephesians 4.16. You're all supplying. I need what God has given you. I need. We're all, as we see in
the story of Eutychus, we're all in need of each other in
a body. According to the effectual working
in every part and makes increase in the body to the edifying of
itself in love." Paul was there because he loved the Lord Jesus
Christ and he loved these people that had all gathered together
in this upper room to worship God, gathered by him. In true faith, gathers people together
and true faith causes people to love the Gospel. They are
united by Christ in their love for the declaration of the character
of God in the Gospel. Do you love the Gospel? Do you need to hear good news
about something that a Saviour has done? I need good news. I need good news that's accomplished. I was telling some of the brethren
at our tea break about one of the tracts that was really common
and is probably still around to this day and it has this picture
of God on one side of this enormous chasm, this huge chasm like the
Grand Canyon and on the other side is you with all of your
sin and all of your depravity. And then across the chasm is
a cross And so you can cross the chasm by walking across the
cross. And you can get to the other
side by walking across the cross. I'm so, so thankful that our
God, our God doesn't expect us to take one step across that
chasm or take a million steps across that chasm. You see, in
religion, All of the doing and all of the activity of man is
to get themselves right for heaven at the end. Salvation begins
with you being perfectly fit for eternal glory. And it's not
because of anything you did or anything you promised to do or
anything you can do. It's all done in Him. And for
people like me, for sinners, I trust sinners like
us. That's really good news, isn't
it? That's the glory of the Gospel, isn't it? That Jesus Christ has
done it all. Salvation is of the Lord every
tiny little bit. It's not salvation of Him plus
me doing something. It's all of Him. And in the story
of Eutychus and his restoring, we see that not only does the
Lord do it all in that eternal covenant, but He does it all
in our walk in this world. He guards and guides the footsteps
of His people. And when we fall asleep like
Eutychus did, and when we tumble to our death as it seems to us
and the world around us, the Lord God comes and He restores. We have a glorious gospel and
it's about God's faithfulness and God's righteousness and God's
redemption and God's work on his son on the cross. And it
talks about God's salvation and not about something that we have
to do. See, faith gathers people together and faith loves the
gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. It loves the gospel that declares
the character of our God. The real gospel is a declaration
of who God is as revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ according
to the scriptures. And like Paul, real faith looks
forward to the day when faith will be no more. Paul knew that
he was going to die. And this is his last act. This is his last time with these
people. And this is his last act in Troas. But Paul said in
Acts 20, 24, he said, neither count I my life dear unto myself. that I might finish my course
with joy. I'm sure there was joy in Troas
that morning when we see Eutychus. God's faith that he gives to
his people, God's faith which is the gift of God unto salvation
is a faith that we will be seeing again and again. It's a faith
in that church that the Lord Jesus Christ has purchased for
himself. It's a preserving faith. We talk
about preservation of the saints and perseverance of the saints,
and in fact it's the same thing, isn't it? The saints persevere
because they are preserved, and they are preserved. Not because
of anything they do, they are preserved because of who the
Lord Jesus Christ is. They're preserved by his faithfulness,
the faith. The life I now live in the body,
says Paul, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me
and gave himself for me. So these miracles and these stories
that we see again and again in the works of the Lord Jesus Christ
throughout the scriptures and this remarkable miracle of Paul
raising this young man from the dead are pictures, aren't they?
They're just glorious pictures of how the Lord comes to his
people and he saves them. There is both a glorious picture and a glorious picture of preservation,
a glorious warning to us, isn't it, about falling asleep. Many of the Lord's chosen ones
can be like Eutychus, can't they? Eutychus, it says in our text,
he sat in a window. He sat in a window. I have been in those buildings
in the Middle East, in that part of the world, in India and other
places, and the heat, the heat that's generated by stack of
bodies put together in one room and the heat that's generated
by light and the heat that's the window is a place where there
is some comfort you would think and I have sat in windows like
Uticus so I have some sympathy for Uticus on a night like this. But a window is a picture of
a place on a boundary isn't it? So on one side of this window
is the lights, and there were many lights in there. There was
the light of the Gospel being proclaimed. The light of the
world was there himself, the Lord Jesus Christ. And believers
shine like lights, holding forth the word of light, says Paul
to the Philippians. Light and life was in there.
And on the outside is darkness. On the outside is the world. On the outside is danger. And
Eutychus pictures the fact that the Lord's people so often find
themselves on that boundary. And so often, like Eutychus,
you see in verse 9 of our text that he fell, he'd fallen into
a deep sleep. See, to be in a deep sleep is
to be alive, but unaware of where you are. and unaware of what's
around you, unaware of the dangers and unaware of the blessings when you're asleep. And then it says, having fallen
into a sleep, you sink down in a sleep. You sink down in a sleep. I don't know about you brothers
and sisters but I love the picture of Eutychus because so often
as we walk through this world and have to do with all of the
vagaries of our flesh and all of the trials that we go through,
so often our faith can slumber, so often we feel as if We are
dead to things that we ought to be alive to. Paul, I mean,
the Apostle John copied these letters to the churches, and
the church in Laodicea is the church that had fallen asleep. He says, I know thy works, I
know that thou art neither hot nor cold, I would that thou wert
cold or hot. So then, because thou art lukewarm,
so go to sleep. You need to be in a place of
comfort, don't you? For me, I need to be in a place
of comfort, I need to be in a place of dark, and I need to be in
a place where there's no noise. I need not to be stirred by things. I need, like that, like these
Laodiceans, we can be lukewarm. Because thou sayest, and what's
the cause of the lukewarmness? of the Laodiceans. What's the
cause of the lukewarmness of us? What causes us to fall asleep? You can probably think of many,
many reasons, but to the Laodiceans, because thou sayest, I am rich
and increased with goods and have need of nothing. I'm rich, I'm increased of goods,
and I have need of nothing. And they didn't know their state,
did they? Knowest thou not that thou art
wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked? The Laodicean church. had fallen into a sleep and they
had no idea of their true state. And they had no idea of their
true state because they had no idea of their great needs. See,
Paul was long preaching. This was the last time these
people were ever going to hear Paul. I remember Owen's story.
You probably heard it when the first time Owen heard Henry Mahan
preaching. And it was a little town called
Tumut. And Owen had driven across from
the coast to hear Henry preach. And Henry preached on election.
It was the first time Owen had heard the gospel live like that
and he was so excited about it. And as soon as Henry finished
preaching, he immediately said to Helen next to him, he said,
that was really too short. And Helen looked at her watch
and said, Owen, he's been preaching for an hour. He's been preaching
for an hour. Owen was so much in need and
so hungry and thirsty to hear the gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ an hour had gone by as if it was just minutes and he
was hungering and thirsting for more. Paul was long preaching. So often we can be like the Laodiceans
and many others typified in the scriptures The people of Israel had been
rescued out of the most extraordinary situation in Egypt, hadn't they? By a strong and mighty hand of
God. They had seen God's remarkable
wonders. They'd seen a whole superpower
destroyed before their very eyes. They had seen and met with God
on Mount Sinai. They'd seen that mountain tremble.
They'd been fed. Imagine that, going out every
morning and being fed with manna from heaven. going out and God
personally and particularly to you of all people in this world
had laid out your breakfast for you. And it tasted sweet. And it was pleasant and you could
do all sorts of things with it. The Israelites like us came to
grumble over the light bread, didn't they? Heavenly manner
became boring for them and they wanted more. In our fallen state,
we don't see our needs and we don't see the dangers around
us. But even the children of God are in danger like Eutychus
of falling asleep and to be sunk down in a sleep. But there is in our text a glorious
picture of the way the Lord reserves and preserves and redeems and
protects and gathers his people to himself. So what's the cure? How does God bring about this
cure? This man had put himself in that
state and by his own activities had put himself as it seemed
to the people in Troas, in that upper room, that he was dead
to them and gone altogether. And so often, so often those
who fall asleep, those to whom the Gospel no longer has a savour,
and no longer the fellowship of God's people is something
that they can cause, is a cause for great rejoicing in them,
they can fall asleep. And they fall like Eutychus into
a deep sleep and was taken up dead. He seemed like he was dead. Our Lord was there, wasn't he? The Lord came down. Paul came down. He went down
and he fell on him and embraced him. It's a great picture, isn't
it, of the Lord Jesus Christ. He came down from heaven. He
came down. He came down from heaven and
He came down from the glory of being in the presence of the
angels and being in the presence of His Father and He came down
from all of the glory of heaven and He came down to be the least
of men. He came down. He came down, as Philippians
says, he humbled himself. He humbled himself to obedience,
even to the death of the cross. And on that cross, when they
mocked him, they said to him, well, come down, Mark 15 30,
save yourself, Lord Jesus, come down from the cross. Let the
Christ, let Christ, the King of Israel descend now from the
cross, that we may believe in him. And our Savior wouldn't
come down. He came down to that place of
the greatest ignominy in the world. In that lowest of low
states, He came down. And in His coming down, it's
a triumph, says Colossians chapter 2. In that state, He destroyed
Satan. Sin met its punishment. His Father
was glorified. and all of God's people are accepted
righteously in the Beloved. Reconciled by the death of the
Lord Jesus Christ and brought together, this infinite chasm
is breached by the Lord Jesus Christ and He takes His people
across the other side. He came down. He comes down to
that place where sinners are. He came to the well in Samaria
where the sinner was. She'd been brought down by her
sin. She'd been brought down by her
wickedness. She had been brought down even in the presence of
the Lord by her pride in her knowledge and her religious attainments
and she was brought down before him. But Paul fell on Him and
embraced Him. The Spirit of God comes to dead
sinners and says, live. There is, there is in the Church
of God a call for us to look upon those that seem to us to
be dead with compassion. and to desire that we might embrace
them. Paul was about to leave these
brethren and he was going to leave them rejoicing because
of this glorious picture of the work of the Spirit of God in
restoring a fallen and a dead sinner back to life. You, my brothers and sisters
in Christ, will walk through this world and often you will
feel like you've fallen asleep. And there are times when you'll
sink down into sleep. And there are times when that
sinking down and that falling will cause you to seem to yourself
and to the world of believers around you as if you are dead.
The glory of the Gospel is the restoring power of our great
Saviour. They're in the Father's hands
and they'll never be plucked out of there. Satan is not going
to pluck them out of your Father's hand. Your sin is not going to
pluck you out of your Father's hand. They're kept by the power
of God through faith and they must and they will be preserved. like our friend Eutychus. Blood-bought
children of God will be preserved because the blood-bought children
of God are reserved for Him. The blood-bought children of
God will have the Spirit of God visit them and reveal the Lord
Jesus Christ to them again. Reveal Him raised from the dead,
restored to His place in glory. And His children are restored
from their fallings and kept by Him. The wonder of our gospel
is that God keeps His people no matter what the circumstances
around them are. The Lord Jesus Christ restored
that one that seemed dead to his sisters Lazarus. And he came to that tomb, didn't
he, and he just said a word, Lazarus come out. Lazarus come
out. Lazarus was dead to his sisters.
The Lord said something remarkable, didn't he? These miracles are
here that we might believe in the faithfulness of our God.
We might find ourselves resting and trusting in his faithfulness.
The Lord said to them at that tomb, he said, if you believe,
you will see The glory of God. You'll see the glory of God.
The Lord Jesus Christ knew these people, this family, and he loved
them. The Lord Jesus Christ loved this
family in Troas. He came, he comes, he weeps,
he rebukes, he restores, and he puts them back in fellowship.
where He gathers them to Himself again. May that be our portion, Heavenly
Father, as we walk through this world, sleeping and slumbering.
Let's pray. Now, Heavenly Father, we pray
that in our wanderings You would be a shepherd to our souls and
bring us back, Heavenly Father, into the fold of the Good Shepherd.
Heavenly Father, help us to be reminded again and again of your
faithfulness to your promises, your faithfulness to your people,
that we are kept by you and not by our own activities. Make us
to be watchful, Heavenly Father, of our slumberings. Do what you
know is right in our lives to restore us. from our slumbering and from
our falls, our Father. We thank you, Heavenly Father,
for your faithfulness, that your blood-bought children are kept,
preserved, and reserved in our Saviour. We pray you bless us,
Heavenly Father, for Christ's sake. Amen.