Pastor Tullian preaching this sermon from the Acts of the Apostles on Sunday, March 1, 2015. As he has mentioned previously in this series, Acts is the story of God choosing the foolish things in the world to shame the wise and the weak things in the world to shame the strong. The overarching theme of the book is the mercy of God flowing out into the world through messy people, showing us that broken people make the best messengers of grace because they know how badly they need it. We take great comfort in knowing that God uses broken and messy people because broken and messy people are all that there are. And in Acts, Chapters 6 and 7 we see that God also uses little people to accomplish His big mission.

We are introduced to Stephen who was one of the seven men whom the twelve Apostles selected to mediate a dispute in the Church. But as Stephen was preaching to the masses, outsiders brought false charges against him to silence him and he was arrested. During his trial Stephen preached an amazing sermon to the council and his accusers. This one sermon showed them that the entire Old Testament was about a good and gracious God saving bad, guilty people. It is captivating because it is a brief and bold overview of salvation history from a seemingly unknown, ordinary nobody who appears out of nowhere.

As quickly as we are introduced to Stephen he is gone. Killed by the same people he was preaching to. As he was being stoned he prays for his killers. When we read this story we want to see ourselves more like Stephen then the ones who were throwing the stones. While Stephen gives us an amazing example of what grace looks like under pressure, and what believing the gospel looks like in the face of opposition, we need to see ourselves first and foremost in the stone throwing mob. We need to do this because we are constantly throwing stones at the idea that we are bad, helpless, and needy. We desperately want to believe that we are better, stronger, more deserving, and more lovable than we really are. But the truth is, the only hope we have for ourselves is to give up hope in ourselves. This sounds like bad news but it is the best news.

The gospel is for those who are defeated and not for those who think they are dominant. The gospel is for people who understand how desperate and broken they are. The bad news is that we are much weaker and worse off then we think we are, and the good news is that Jesus is much stronger and better than we can ever hope for or imagine, and he came to set us free. Jesus came to do and secure for us what we could never do and secure for ourselves.

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