August 27, 2023 | Acts 8:26-40 | Pastor Chris Baker
Good morning, church! Since this is the fourth Sunday we don’t have children’s church today so we’ll all be staying together right here and studying Acts 8.
Parents, I want to remind you of a handful of things as we open God’s Word together. Our children’s team has prepared some activity bags just for you. We don’t do that to keep your children occupied, we do it to help them learn and I’m grateful for the folks who put those together every week. We have a mother’s room just outside the sanctuary if you need to change a diaper or feed a baby or anything like that please make use of that space. There’s a livestream of the sermon playing there so you won’t miss much. Lastly, we could the noise coming from you pew for the next 40 minutes or so as a blessing. We’re thankful God has given us a next generation to disciple and gatherings like this play a huge role in that discipleship process. So don’t stress if your kids aren’t perfectly quiet during the sermon. I hope they’re able to learn something right alongside you today.
As a matter of fact, today is the perfect time for us to all be together because we’re talking about something that a truth that is for every single Christian today.
We’re spending three weeks on evangelism. Evangelism is explaining the gospel in a way that calls lost people to trust Christ for salvation. We saw last week that it is the responsibility of every Christian, no matter how old you are, how new you are to the faith, or how deep your Bible knowledge is. Evangelism is for everyone.
Our text is evangelism in action. Acts 8:26-40. We get to be a fly on the wall observing evangelism and as we do I’ll point out three components of evangelism. Three things that have to happen if we’re going to explain the gospel in a way that calls lost people to trust Christ for salvation.
Let’s read together.
Read Acts 8:26-40
Pray
Introduction
In the middle of Kentucky there is a facility that guards one of the most closely kept secrets in the United States.
The secret is hidden in a small room behind a very plain door. It look looks more like a broom closet than a vault. Yet the walls are two-foot thick concrete. The safe containing the secret weights 770-pounds. The building needed to be renovated a few years ago and the secret was transported offsite in an armored car accompanied by armed guards.
Only one person in the world knows the combination for the safe containing the secret. What could possibly be so valuable as to require this kind of treatment, you ask?
A handwritten list of 11 herbs and spices that make up the coating for Colonel Harlan Sanders famous fried chicken. KFC has seriously invested in guarding this secret. No one knows what goes into the colonel’s chicken. One person has the safe combination. Two other people know which 11 herbs and spices are used. In fact, KFC purposely uses two different companies to make the recipe for them, one company does one part, the other company does the other and then a "computer processing system" blends it together.
(https://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-vault-where-kfc-guards-the-colonels-secret-1650566046)
What goes into KFC chicken is an elaborately-guarded secret. If you think you know the secret, here’s what I invite you to do. Just fry up your guess and drop it by the office this week. I’ll be happy to evaluate it for you, I prefer extra crispy.
I share this with you not because I’m interested in fried chicken—though I guess I am. I share this with you because I fear we treat the mechanics of evangelism as something of a secret. Most people cite some fear or lack of knowledge when asked why they don’t practice evangelism very often. We either fear the outcome or feel we’re unqualified.
Evangelism isn’t a secret. What goes into evangelism isn’t hidden away in a vault somewhere. It’s made evident right here on the pages of Scripture for us.
This scene gives us three components of evangelism. It's a scene that is remarkable because of some of the circumstances, but the heart of what happens in Acts 8:26-40 is exactly what happens in every evangelistic relationship. It’s a template for how evangelism happens.
God is unlikely to speak to you through an angel like He did to Philip—but He might. That’s not normative. It’s not normative that God carries you away to the next evangelism opportunity at the end like He does Philip. But the rest of this passage is surprisingly normal as far as our evangelism efforts go.
We’ll see three components: supernatural preparation, gospel presentation, and a caring confrontation.
The beginning of our passage reminds us that evangelism—salvation itself—begins with God. Not with man.
Supernatural Preparation (v.26-29)
26 An angel of the Lord spoke to Philip: “Get up and go south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is the desert road.) 27 So he got up and went. There was an Ethiopian man, a eunuch and high official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to worship in Jerusalem 28 and was sitting in his chariot on his way home, reading the prophet Isaiah aloud.
29 The Spirit told Philip, “Go and join that chariot.”
There’s a hymn in our hymnal written by Josiah Conder in 1836 and it begins this way:
My Lord, I did not choose You
For that could never be
My heart would still refuse You
Had You not chosen me
That’s raw, it’s honest, and it’s true of everyone sitting in this room. Left to our own devices, we would not choose God. Romans 3 makes that abundantly clear.
God works first. There’s a supernatural preparation that takes place before evangelism happens and it happens just as much in the heart of the evangelist as it does in the heart of the lost person.
We’re parachuting into Philip’s life today, so let me give you some background on who we’re dealing with. This isn’t Philip from the gospels who was called to follow Jesus in John 1:43. That’s Philip the Apostle. This is Philip the deacon from Acts 6. He’s one of the seven who were chosen to help preserve unity when conflict arose in the early church.
That means Philip was known as a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit. He lands in Samaria due to persecution in Jerusalem and when he gets there he shares the gospel.
Earlier in Acts 8:4 So those who were scattered went on their way preaching the word. 5 Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them.
We need to pause just for a second for a reminder. The biblical pattern teaches us that evangelism is what God’s people do. It’s not just something the most spiritual people do. It’s not something only specific people do. It’s a responsibility for every single follower of Jesus.
Some people may be especially good at evangelism, but that isn’t because it’s a spiritual gift. It’s a spiritual responsibility.
There are spiritual gifts given through the Holy Spirit when we trust Christ. You can find those in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12-14. But evangelism isn’t one of those. Paul writes in Ephesians 4 that evangelists are gifts, gifts to the church to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. That means that your work as an evangelist is a blessing to the people sitting around you and to the people outside these walls who desperately need to hear the good news of Jesus.
Evangelism is what God’s people do. It’s what Philip does when he reaches Samaria. He even shared the gospel with an influential false teacher and saw him repent of his sins and trust Christ as his savior.
Samaria was being turned upside down by the gospel. The church was growing and people’s lives were being changed. This was a city experiencing the type of revival that most of us only long for. And then in verse 26 something happens that makes no human sense whatsoever.
God sent Philip away to the middle of nowhere. Church, when evangelism happens there is supernatural preparation in the life of both parties—the disciple who is doing the evangelism and the lost person who needs to be saved.
By supernatural I don’t mean ghosts or UFO’s or anything like that. I mean that the reason is beyond what we can see in creation. It doesn’t make sense for Philip to leave his responsibilities in Samaria by human standards. But he’s not bound to human standards. He’s bound by God’s standard. God says go, so Philip got up and went. That’s obedience.
Why do we evangelize, church? Because God said go. So we go. And if you read the rest of Acts 8, you’ll see that everywhere Philip went he was engaged in the work of evangelism.
The call of the Great Commission at the end of Matthew 28 is to make disciples everywhere we go. That process begins with evangelism and evangelism begins with supernatural preparation.
Not just of Philip, though. God was working in Philip’s life, but He was also working in the life of this Ethiopian government official.
We know this man was chosen before the foundation of the world, according to Ephesians 1:4, to belong to God—to place his faith in Jesus Christ alone for salvation.
The salvation of this one man was God’s purpose for calling Philip out of Samaria and into the middle of nowhere.
This is where God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility meet in salvation. No one gets saved unless God calls them (John 6:44). We know that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, so remember what Paul wrote in Romans 10, Chuck read it for us at the end of last week’s gathering:
Romans 10:14 How, then, can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher? 15 And how can they preach unless they are sent?
Somebody has to go and when you go, you’ll find someone who is lost. Just maybe that’s the day God is calling them to salvation. That’s what happens here.
This Ethiopian was an important man. Much more important, worldly speaking, than Philip. His modern title would be something like Secretary of the Treasury. He was curious about God. He wasn't Jewish, but he had been studying the Jewish scriptures. He even went to Jerusalem to find out more about this God of the Israelites. But he left feeling empty.
God prepared him to hear the message of the gospel. There was supernatural preparation in the heart of Philip and in the heart of this Ethiopian.
When they meet, we see the next component of evangelism. That’s a gospel presentation.
Gospel Presentation (v.30-35)
30 When Philip ran up to it, he heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you’re reading?”
31 “How can I,” he said, “unless someone guides me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. 32 Now the Scripture passage he was reading was this:
He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb is silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
33 In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who will describe his generation?
For his life is taken from the earth.
34 The eunuch said to Philip, “I ask you, who is the prophet saying this about—himself or someone else?” 35 Philip proceeded to tell him the good news about Jesus, beginning with that Scripture.
This is where so many of us struggle. We have good intentions when it comes to evangelism. We know the folks in our lives who aren’t believers. We’re intentional about being in relationships with them. We clearly live differently than they do. And sometimes we hope that is going to be enough.
If you’ve been around church life very long, you’ve probably heard a version of this quote:
Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.
It is always attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, even though he never said it. It means that proclaiming the gospel by living as an example is somehow better than a spoken gospel presentation.
And church, by all means practice the gospel. Live the gospel. Live among the lost with a different worldview. Live among the lost with a Kingdom ethic. Put others ahead of yourself. Those are great things.
But for people to be saved, we have to tell them the good news.
I like how former Wheaton College president Duane Liftin put it:
It’s simply impossible to preach the Gospel without words. The Gospel is inherently verbal, and preaching the Gospel is inherently verbal behavior.
And don't take that word preaching to mean just what I’m doing here. That just means to speak the truth. Again, it’s what we’re all called to.
So why do we struggle with this piece?
It could be because we aren’t walking all that closely with Christ ourselves. When we’re not being obedient in other areas of life, it stands to reason that we won’t be obedient in evangelism. If we have unconfessed sin it’s going to choke out our desire to evangelize.
Or maybe you fear the other person’s response. Research shows that only one in four unchurched persons will be resistant to faith discussions; 75 percent are open. It’s not likely someone will get angry at you for sharing the gospel, but if they do should it really bother you that much? Jesus told us that would happen, didn’t He?
(https://research.lifeway.com/2016/06/28/unchurched-will-talk-about-faith-not-interested-in-going-to-church/)
John 15:18 “If the world hates you, understand that it hated me before it hated you. If you get rejected, you’re in good company. And let’s be honest, church, we risk very little when we share the gospel. We’re not going to go to jail. You’re probably not going to lose your job or get physically assaulted. That has been true for thousands of Christians across time and they have evangelized anyway.
One of my prayers for our church, especially as I studied this week, is that our fear of sharing the gospel would melt away and we’d begin to turn the meaningless conversation we have with lost people week-in and week-out into conversations that matter for eternity.
That’s what Philip does in the text! I’ll admit, God serves up a big fat softball to Philip here, doesn’t he? His first meeting with the guy and he’s reading a Messianic passage from Isaiah! God, that’s almost too easy.
You probably won’t walk into work tomorrow to a lost person with the Old Testament flopped open in front of them asking you to help them understand it. But God has placed you in relationship with people who struggle. Philip’s response is to use God’s Word to address this man’s spiritual needs.
When your co-worker, family member, or friend who is lost tells you their problems what do you respond with? Because God absolutely gives us opportunities to steer conversations to the gospel if we’re paying attention. When your friend is anxious about the future, when their marriage is falling apart, when they face the death of a loved one, all those normal struggles are opportunities for us to point lost people to the gospel.
You might not feel comfortable speaking the gospel. That’s okay. Evangelism is a skill that requires practice. Remember, success isn’t in how eloquent you are. It’s not even in the person’s response. It’s just in obedience. We’re not called to make converts. We’re called to make disciples and only Jesus can do that. So as long as you try, you can’t fail.
But we do want to grow in this spiritual discipline and that takes practice. When we finish our study, the worship team will come back to the stage and they’ll lead us in another song. They’re talented instrumentalists because they practice. You do NOT want me to sit at that piano. I have no talent and I’ve committed to absolutely zero practice. I’ll be bad.
Your first gospel presentation might be bad. And God will be pleased. Because you were obedient.
We want to grow in this, we we need to remember there are four elements that need to be present in a gospel presentation. Philip told the Ethiopian the good news beginning with that Scripture in Isaiah. His presentation would have included truth about God, Man, Christ, and called for a response.
Your gospel presentation won’t be exactly like mine. There’s no magic formula. But if we’re going to Biblically explain the gospel we need to speak the truth about God, humanity, the work of Jesus, and then call for a response.
God
The gospel begins with God, so a clear gospel presentation must explain who God is. God is the creator of all things (Gen. 1:1). He is perfectly holy, worthy of all worship, and will punish sin (1 John 1:5, Rev. 4:11, Rom. 2:5-8).
God is perfect. And because of His goodness, He cannot allow evil to go unpunished. THat would be unjust.
And that brings us to the truth about humanity.
Man
All people, though created good, have become sinful by nature (Gen. 1:26-28, Ps. 51:5, Rom. 3:23).
Romans 3:23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God;
From birth, all people are alienated from God, hostile to God, and subject to the wrath of God (Eph. 2:1-3).
Mankind is sinful. Mankind, even at its best, is guilty in the eyes of a holy God.
If that's the end of the gospel, it's not good news. It's the worst news. But there's more.
That’s where Christ enters the story.
Christ
Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man, lived a sinless life, died on the cross to bear God's wrath in the place of all who would believe in him, and rose from the grave in order to give his people eternal life (John 1:1, 1 Tim. 2:5, Heb. 7:26, Rom. 3:21-26, 2 Cor. 5:21, 1 Cor. 15:20-22).
Jesus Christ became our substitute sacrifice. We earned death for ourselves. The one debt we could never repay no matter how hard we try. Ephesians tells us we are dead already in our sins. What can dead people do? Nothing. When we could do nothing to save ourselves, Christ took our punishment for us.
2 Corinthians 5:21
21 He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
We have no ability to get to God, but God got to us through Christ. His sacrifice on our behalf made it possible for God to see us as righteous. But for that to happen, for us to be in right relationship with God, there has to be a response.
Response is the fourth component. We’re calling it the caring confrontation for the bigger picture of our sermon today. Look at verse 36:
Caring Confrontation (v.36-40)
36 As they were traveling down the road, they came to some water. The eunuch said, “Look, there’s water. What would keep me from being baptized?” 38 So he ordered the chariot to stop, and both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water, and he baptized him. 39 When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him any longer but went on his way rejoicing. 40 Philip appeared in Azotus, and he was traveling and preaching the gospel in all the towns until he came to Caesarea.
I call this a caring confrontation because it needs to be both of those things. The gospel is confrontational. It calls sinners to abandon their way of life, repent of their sins, and admit they need someone to save them. It calls them to submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
That’s the part of the message that got Paul, Peter, James, Stephen, and so many others killed. But there is salvation in no other message. So the gospel is confrontational, but the confrontation needs to be careful and caring.
We don’t actually get to see the confrontation in this text. For whatever reason, Luke left out the response. Response is the fourth component of the gospel presentation. We know it happened, because Philip baptizes this man. We just don’t see the moment of change in the text.
You might even notice your passage jumps from verse 36-38. This passage is another textual variant. We talked about those two weeks ago, so I won’t spent a ton of time belaboring the point. But if you look at the oldest and best manuscripts we have of Acts they read in the Greek just the way the CSB versions in the pews read in English. We initially discovered some manuscripts that turned out to be younger—that means closer to our time and further from the original author—that inserted a line about Philip asking the Ethiopian if he believed. He said yes, so he was baptized.
We know that happened. It’s just not recorded in the text. We know Philip, as skilled an evangelist as he was, would have called for a response.
Response
Because God calls everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and trust in Christ to be saved (Mark 1:15, Acts 20:21, Rom. 10:9-10).
To be saved, you must repent. That means a change of mind that results in a change of action.
That's the way Paul preached the gospel. He said in Acts 26:…I preached that they should repent and turn to God and demonstrate their repentance by their deeds
The gospel requires a response. To be saved requires response and change. One red flag in gospel conversations is when someone says, I've always been a Christian. That simply can't be true. No one is born a Christian, no one is a Christian because you go to church or because you've always gone to church. Being part of a Christian family doesn’t make you a Christian.
Romans 10
9 If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation.
Repentance and faith are the starting point for our salvation. And those things happen at a definite point, so we have to include a challenge to respond in our presentation of the gospel.
And after that challenge comes baptism. We see that in verses 38-39. This was a desert road, remember. God probably orchestrated this meeting to happen at the one place on this road where there was water to baptize, and Philip baptizes this man by immersion after his confession of faith. That’s the same model we follow here.
Our statement of faith reads this way: Baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus. It is a testimony to his faith in the final resurrection of the dead. Being a church ordinance, it is prerequisite to the privileges of church membership and to the Lord’s Supper.
Baptism is a public declaration of our spiritual response to the gospel. It’s a picture of dying to sin and rising to new life because of Jesus substitute sacrifice on our behalf and it can be a really helpful way to measure our faithfulness in evangelism. Not always, because God isn’t driven by numbers, but generally if we are faithful to engage in evangelism we will see folks being baptized.
So my encouragement today, church, is to practice. Take these three ingredients, if you will, for evangelism and begin practicing it.
Let your prayer life reflect spiritual preparation. Pray that your heart would break for the lost. Pray for the hearts of the lost people in your life.
Practice your gospel presentation. Mark passages in your Bible that emphasize the goodness of God, the fallenness of man, the sacrifice of Christ, and the call to respond.
Some folks do think the Bible is some kind of secret. When you can show them it’s not a secret to be guarded, but a truth that demands to be shared God will work and they’ll respond.
Let your concern for the souls of your lost friends and family cause you to confront them with the truth of the gospel.
Evangelism involves supernatural preparation, gospel presentation, and a caring confrontation. Here’s the very simple truth, church: Jesus commanded evangelism. You sit here because God worked through someone who obeyed that command. Jesus didn’t present us with options. He commanded evangelism. Go, make disciples. Don’t go make excuses.
If you’re looking for application from this text, here it is. Pray that God would prepare your heart to love the lost people in your life enough to share the gospel with them. Grow closer to God as you study His word to build your gospel presentation, and then trust that He is going to give the growth. He is going to hold true to His word and save sinners for His glory. He’s been doing it since the fall of man in Genesis 2. And He has invited, no commanded, you to be part of it. Let’s pray.