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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Acts 8:26–40.
Now an
angel of the Lord said to Philip, rise
and go toward the south, to the road
that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.
This is the desert place.
And he rose and went.
And there was an Ethiopian,
a eunuch, a court official of Candace,
queen of the Ethiopians,
who was in charge of all her treasure.
He had come to Jerusalem to worship
and was returning seated in his chariot.
And he was reading the prophet Isaiah.
And the spirit said to Philip, go over
and join this chariot.
So Philip ran to him and heard him reading
Isaiah
the prophet and asked,
do you understand what you are reading?
And he said, how can I
unless someone guides me?
And he invited Philip
to come up and sit with him.
Now, the passage of the scripture
that he was reading was this like a sheep?
He was led to the slaughter, and
like a lamb before its sheer is silent.
So he opens not his mouth.
In his humiliation, justice was denied.
Him who can describe his generation.
For his life is taken away from the earth.
And the eunuch said to Philip, about whom
I ask you,
does the prophet say this about himself
or about someone else?
Then Philip opened his mouth,
and beginning with this scripture,
he told him the good news about Jesus.
And as they were going along the road,
they came to some water.
And the eunuch said, see, here is water.
What prevents me from being baptized?
And he commanded the chariot to stop,
and they both went down into the water.
Philip and the eunuch and he baptized him.
And when they had came up
out of the water,
the spirit of the Lord carried
Philip away.
And the eunuch saw him
no more, and went on his way, rejoicing.
But Philip found himself at his Otus,
and as he passed through,
he preached the gospel to all the towns
until he came to Caesarea.
Well, good evening,
and welcome to the weekend
gathering of Christ Community Chapel.
My name is Zach.
I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm
so glad that we get to be part
of your weekend, which at least for us,
starts on Thursday night.
Especially welcome to those of you
that are here because a friend
or family member is getting baptized.
We're baptizing across
all of our services this weekend.
Thanks for coming and supporting them.
It's really, really kind of you.
We're excited to be part of that with you.
You know, we are in a sermon series
right now going through the book of acts.
We're calling it room for more.
We're calling it that for two reasons.
One is when you read the book of acts,
you cannot get away from this fact
that the God of the Bible
is always looking to make room for more.
In the beginning of the book of acts,
there are about 100 Christians.
By about chapter five, there are 5000.
By the end of the book.
The Gospel of Jesus has spread
all over the known world.
That's not by accident.
It's because God is always
looking to make room for more.
If we want to be a church that is
participating in what God is doing,
we're going to be a church
that is looking to make room for more.
But the second thing we mean by that
is that when you read the book of acts,
you also realize we need to make room
for more expectations about what
God wants to do.
The book of acts is full of amazing
miracles, full of of healing
and and provision
and amazing things that God is doing.
And it's a challenge to us
who tend to settle for a regular kind
of average experience of church
and of Christianity, the book of acts,
as calling us to something greater.
In fact, this whole sermon series
will culminate on November
15th with the healing service
we'll be doing here at the church.
As we just try to say, hey, what we see
God doing in the Bible, we want to see him
doing here at our church room for more.
And this week is going to participate
in that by looking at one
particular story that was just read for us
in acts chapter eight.
So if you have a Bible,
you can open it to acts chapter eight.
We'll be looking at verses 26 through 40.
Of course
it'll be on the screen behind me.
I do have an outline I'm going to use
to guide our time together.
Three points. Very simple.
I want to show you the man on an island,
the god of the island
and the mission to the island,
the man on an island,
the god of the island
and the mission to the island.
All right.
Let me start with the first one.
The man on an island.
One of the hardest things for people
to accept about Christianity,
about what the Bible teaches, is
that there is only one way
to have a relationship with God,
and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.
It's called the exclusivity of Christ,
meaning
there is an exclusive path to God,
only one path.
That path is available
to anyone and everyone, but
there's only one path
that is an inescapable truth.
When you read the Bible,
it's all over the Bible.
It's all over the book of acts.
Let me just show you one place.
For example, this is the Apostle Peter
preaching in acts chapter four, verse 12.
Here's what he says about Jesus.
He says this
and there is salvation in no one else,
for there is no other name under heaven
given among men by which we must be saved.
You don't have to accept that,
but you can't get around it.
If you're going to take seriously
that the Bible is teaching us about God,
then here it is.
There's only one way
to have a relationship with God,
and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.
One little thing that maybe will help
you understand that,
or at least begin to be open to that,
is that most of spirituality,
most of religion is guessing about God.
That is kind of our cultural view,
is that we can't really be sure.
And maybe you are
guessing this and I'm guessing that,
and that makes a lot of sense.
How could we really know?
Except for this if God speaks,
it would be a little bit like this.
If I asked you to guess what
my favorite color is,
you would all have different guesses,
and some of them would seem like
really good guesses, and no one guess
would be better than another.
Until I said actually,
my favorite color is blue.
And then if you guessed red,
it doesn't matter how sincere you are,
you're wrong because I've told you so.
What the Bible is telling us
is that God has spoken.
The time for guessing is over.
And because of that, God is telling us
there's one way
he'll accept people,
and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.
One of the reasons that's hard for people
is because they ask this question,
what happens to those
who have never heard about Jesus?
I mean, if Jesus is the only way
to have a relationship with God, then then
what does that mean for people
who grow up in Yemen or Saudi Arabia
or Sri Lanka or in, you know, Ohio,
but just not in a family
that takes them to church, not in a family
that is religious.
What does that mean for them?
It's often called the man on an island
question, because the thinking is,
if Jesus is the only way
to have a relationship with God,
then what happens to the man on an island
who's never heard of Jesus?
It's a great question,
and it's not a question I'm going to fully
exhaust here, except for to say this.
This story is about one of those men.
This story is about a man on an island.
The Bible calls him the Ethiopian eunuch.
Here's what the writer
Luke writes about him in verses 27 and 28.
Here's what it says.
And there was an Ethiopian,
a eunuch, a court official of Candace,
queen of the Ethiopians,
who was in charge of all of her treasure.
He had come to Jerusalem to worship
and was returning
seated in his chariot,
and was reading the prophet Isaiah.
Now what I want to show you
is how mathematically improbable
it is that this man
would ever actually become a Christian.
For all intents and purposes,
he is the man on the island.
Let me give you five reasons
this man should never become a Christian.
Five reasons it's incredibly unlikely.
The first is geography.
We're told he's Ethiopia,
and most scholars
believe that he came
from what we would call modern day Sudan,
meaning
he's a long way away from Jerusalem.
It's most likely that he's
going to live and die
his life, his entire life
without ever hearing about Jesus.
He's not Jewish.
He's not going to synagogue.
He's not hearing the Old Testament
be read.
It's unlikely that he would even know.
There was a guy named Jesus
who lived and died and rose from the dead.
He is from Sudan.
Sudan is a long way from Jerusalem.
So the first problem is geography.
The second problem is culture.
It's also extremely unlikely
that he was from a monotheistic culture.
Most likely he's from a place
where there's a god of the river
and a god of the mountains
and a god of the hills, meaning he's
not even thinking about meeting
the one true God,
or that that one true
God would send a messiah.
He isn't growing up in synagogue.
He's not going to church.
He he has no
no awareness of the Jewish faith
or how that would give way
to Christianity.
He's from the wrong place.
He's from the wrong culture.
The third problem for
this man is one of access.
It will be.
Most scholars will say
it will be three centuries before.
Where he's from has a single Christian
church, three centuries from this story.
So it'll be 300 years
before there's a church or
the Bible, or anyone who knows
Jesus living in his town.
There's no one to tell him about Jesus.
The fourth problem
is that he is busy at work.
The text says he is a royal official
for Candace, the
the queen of the Ethiopians.
He handles the money,
which means once he gets back to where
he's from,
he's got a pretty important job.
Right now he's thinking about what he's
seeing in Jerusalem.
But if nothing happens on the road back
home, once he gets home,
he's got a full outlook calendar.
He's going to be busy.
And the fifth thing is that
even if somehow he stumbles
across the message of Jesus.
How would he understand it?
That's what he says.
Look at verses 30 and 31.
It says so Philip ran to him
and heard him reading Isaiah
the prophet and asked,
do you understand what you are reading?
Listen to what he says.
And he said, how can I
unless someone guides me?
In other words, he's saying,
have you read the book of Isaiah?
Pretty confusing. I have no shot.
All I'm saying is, I want you to see,
when you read this story,
that there is almost no chance
this guy will become a Christian.
He's from a far off place,
a different culture.
He has no understanding.
He's a busy guy at work.
He has no context for the idea of one God
or a messiah.
It is mathematically improbable.
He is the man on an island.
And the reason I say that
is because I want you to understand
that this story
is going to give us a window into
how God feels about those kinds of people,
but also this forget the man on an island
as a philosophical question.
The truth is, each one of us,
if you're here and you're a Christian,
probably have has someone in your life
that you think of as a man on an island,
a family member,
a friend, a neighbor,
a colleague that you just cannot
imagine would ever become a Christian,
would ever be open to the message of
Jesus, would ever be willing
to consider whether or not
they would put their faith in Jesus.
It feels mathematically improbable
that the person you're
thinking of would ever come.
Well,
this is a story about that kind of person.
So what happens?
Well,
the first point is the man on an island.
Here's the second point.
The god of the island.
Of course, you know,
because the story was just read to us that
this man is going to become a Christian.
The story will end with him
being baptized,
just like we're baptizing across
all of our services this weekend.
He will respond in faith to Jesus.
But what I don't want you to miss is why?
And here's what I want you to see.
There's a guy named Philip in this story
who tells this guy about Jesus,
but it is not Philip
who's driving the action of this story.
It's God.
Let me show you that time and time again
in the story.
If you don't mind, just get a machine gun
it it'll be on the screen behind me.
Look at verse 26.
It's God who sends Philip.
Here's what it says.
Now an angel of the Lord said
to Philip, rise and go toward
the south, to the road
that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.
This is a desert place.
In other words, God says to Philip,
I want you to go to this place,
that nothing is happening.
You have no reason to go
except for I know there's a guy there
that I'm going to reach.
Verse 29 and the spirit said
to Philip, go over and join this chariot.
And God might not have had a lot
of confidence in Philip's intelligence.
So he sends Philip to this place.
And just so he's not confused,
he goes, that guy,
that guy, that chariot, go talk to him.
Verse 35, when Philip does talk,
then Philip open his mouth.
And beginning with this scripture,
he told them the good news about Jesus,
meaning he tells them
the story of what God has done in Jesus.
And in verses 39 and 40, it's
God who takes Philip away.
Here's all I'm saying to you.
This is not just the story of a man
on an island,
a man mathematically unlikely
to become a Christian.
This is the story of a God
who pursues the man on an island.
This is a
story of God whose passionate
about reaching far off
people, unlikely people, resistant people.
This is a story of a God who is passionate
about reaching them
and is leveraging his power to do it.
And that shouldn't surprise us,
because actually, that happens
time and time again
in the Bible, in the book of Genesis,
it is God who goes looking for a pagan
moon worshiper named Abram
and not only reveals himself to Abraham,
but tells Abraham, I'm now going to
use you to take the message of who I am
to the nations in the book of Exodus.
It's it's
God who pursues a fugitive from justice
named Moses and reveals himself to Moses
and says to Moses, I'm going
to send you to my people in Egypt
so that they would know who I am.
It's God who goes looking for
an ethnocentric, racist bigot
named Jonah and tells him,
I want you to go to your enemies and
preach to them the message of salvation
in Nineveh before it is too late.
It's the God of the Bible
who writes Psalm 67 about his desire
to gather people from all over the world,
that they might worship him
at his holy mountain.
It's the it's the God of the Bible
who sends his Son
Jesus to come looking for
the loss is the God of the Bible,
who tells us to go into all the nations
with the message of Jesus.
It's the God of the Bible and Revelation
five who says that in heaven
there will be someone from every tribe
and every tongue in every nation.
Here's my point.
Although it is fair to ask
if Jesus is the only way
to have a relationship with God,
what happens to those
who have never heard?
What happens to those mathematically
unlikely?
What that question misses is the passion
and power of God to reach those people.
God has always been on a mission
to reach far off people
and to bring them into his story.
Your hope for your friend, for your family
member, for your neighbor is not
how likely it is
that they would come to faith.
It is that God is more passionate about
reaching them than you could ever be.
And I say this in part
because some of us here this weekend
will feel like a man on an island.
We'll feel like
if anyone was going to know God, it is.
It is unlikely to be us.
If anyone was going to begin
a relationship with God, to be forgiven
by God, to be included by God
and His kingdom through Jesus,
it is unlikely to be us.
But this story
and the whole story of the Bible is
the story of the God who comes looking for
the mathematically unlikely people.
He comes looking for you.
That's who he is.
In a sermon series
we're calling room for more.
I don't want you to miss that.
It isn't just that God
wants us to make room for more, it's
that he's the one who's doing the looking.
He's the one who's doing the pursuing.
He's the one who's winning.
People
like the Ethiopian eunuch to himself.
Every person who'll be baptized
this weekend has a different story.
And in that story, there will be different
people that they will appreciate
and celebrate and say, this person
was a big part of me coming to know God.
But behind
every single story is really not a person.
It's a God who is passionate
about reaching people.
It's a God who is passionate
about reaching you.
So the question then is
where do we fit in?
And that's my third point.
Not just not just the man on an island
and the god of the island,
but the mission to the island.
Philip is a really interesting
character in the Bible.
He does a lot of different things.
In acts chapter seven,
the apostles are too busy
praying and preaching and preparing
to preach, to meet all the needs
of the people who are struggling.
So they pick seven guys to
basically wait on people, to serve people
so that they can keep doing ministry.
Philip is one of those guys.
He is, in the original language,
a table waiter, not a glorified position.
He will also, at the beginning of chapter
eight, preach to a crowd.
Here at the end of chapter eight,
he shares Jesus with one guy.
Later on in the book of acts,
he'll host the Apostle Paul in his home,
and we're told that he has four
unmarried daughters that he has discipled,
who are prophesying about God themselves.
In other words, Philip is a little bit
like the junk drawer of the book of acts.
He does a little bit his master
Jack of all trades, master of none.
Philip is not the hero of this story.
His first job is just to serve people.
They didn't pick him because he was
the most eloquent or the most talented.
Philip simply is looking to join God
in what he's doing and why.
Well, because here's what Philip knows.
Here's what every Christian
who joins God in his mission knows.
Here's what every church
that joins God in his mission knows.
We were all once the man on an island.
It is
mathematically improbable that any of us
would place our faith in Jesus,
that any of us
would turn away from our sin.
You say, well, not me. Pastor Zach,
I grew up in the church. Yeah.
Do you know anyone else who grew up
in the church and has walked away?
Why? Isn't that your story?
Well,
the answer is because God pursued you.
This is what the Apostle Paul says
in Ephesians chapter two.
Listen to how he describes
the story of every Christian.
Here's what he says.
And you are dead in the trespasses
and sins,
and which you once walked,
following the course of this world,
following the prince of the power of
the air, the spirit that is now at work,
and the sons of disobedience, among
whom we all once lived in the passions
of our flesh, carrying out
the desires of the flesh and of the mind,
and were by nature children of wrath
like the rest of mankind.
Let me translate that for you.
You and I, we were the men
or the women on the island.
We were dead
set against God, rebellious against God,
seeking in every way we could
to do our own thing, to ignore God.
It was mathematically improbable that
we would ever know him except for this.
Here's how Paul continues. Verse four.
But God, being rich in mercy because of
the great love with which he loved us,
even when we were dead in our trespasses,
made us alive together with Christ.
By grace you have been saved
and raised us up with him,
and seated us with him
in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
so that in the coming ages
he might show the immeasurable riches
of his grace in kindness
towards us in Christ Jesus.
For by grace you have been saved through
faith, and this is not your own doing.
It is the gift of God,
not as a result of work, so that no 1st
May boast and why?
Here's what he tells us in verse ten, for
we are his workmanship, created in Christ
Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand, that we should walk.
And them.
You see, what Philip understood
is that if God could reach him,
God could reach anyone.
Friends, listen to me.
I don't know who your man on an island is.
I don't know who the family member
or friend
or neighbor or colleague
that you want so badly to come to faith in
Jesus, to be forgiven, to know how it is
to have a relationship with God.
And you think it'll never happen.
Where do you find the optimism to believe?
Where do you find the encouragement
to invite them to church
to tell them about Jesus?
It is simply this If God can save you,
if God can save me,
if God can save the Ethiopian eunuch,
then there is no one outside of his reach.
There is no island so far away, no person
so far away that he can't reach them.
And I'll just end with this.
If you hear this weekend
and you do not have a relationship
with Jesus and you're you're thinking,
I just don't know if I could believe
that God could forgive me.
Every person who's baptized this weekend
is saying to you, if he can forgive me,
if he can come
looking for me, then he can find you.
Church.
If we are going to be a church
that makes room for more,
the first step is to be reacquainted
with the miracle of our own salvation
and to find in that story
and in this one, a reason to believe
God isn't done writing
those kinds of stories.
Let me pray for you, father God,
thank you so much for this story.
Thank you so much for the message
it gives to all of us,
that there is no one beyond your reach.
No dad, no mom, no uncle, no aunt, no
cousin, brother, sister, friend.
That is too far for you to reach.
No one sitting here right now
under the sound of my voice,
who is too far gone
that they cannot be forgiven in Jesus?
My prayer is that through your Holy Spirit
you might be pursuing them right
this moment, just like you were pursuing
this Ethiopian eunuch.
That you would use me
like you used Philip.
I'm not the hero of the story.
Philip wasn't the hero of the story.
You are the God who saves.
In Jesus name we pray. Amen.