 And this morning it is my delight to share the word with you. So open your Bibles if you would to Acts chapter six. This is our series called Wind and Fire. And today the focus in Acts chapter six is growing pains as well as growing gains. Growing pains and growing gains. We're gonna be looking at the early church and it's very formative years. Some of the growing pains, also some of the growing gains and we're gonna see what it is that God is doing in the midst of those pains as well as opportunities. But right now Holy Spirit, we invite you to come and to illuminate and open up our hearts to be able to receive your word. Lord, we want the soil of our hearts to be good soil that receives the implanted word of God with meekness and humility. Lord, challenge us, speak to us and impact us in a way that transforms our lives and even our church, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Acts chapter six beginning in verse number one. It says, now in these days, when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the 12 summoned the full number of the disciples and said, it's not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the spirit and of wisdom whom we will appoint to this duty, but we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. And what they said, please the whole gathering and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit and Philip and Prochorus and Nikonar and Timon and Parmenas and Nicholas, a proselyte of Antioch and these they set before the apostles and when they prayed, they laid their hands on them and the word of God continued to increase and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith. So here we see as we've noticed over the last, you know, several weeks as we've looked at the first five chapters of the book of Acts, we see that what Jesus began with an outpouring of the Holy Spirit and a commission to take the gospel into the whole world, literally begins to explode as a catalytic movement. It begins with 120 in an upper room and on the first day, 3,000 are saved. A few weeks later or a few months later, another 5,000 are saved. So the church in Jerusalem, which is really its epicenter is just exploding. It's exploding with growth. It's exploding with signs and wonders and miracles and Acts chapter five, you see that people are bringing their sick out into the street so that as the apostles walk by, even their shadow being cast and touched upon the sick are actually healing them and people are taking handkerchiefs that have been prayed over and they're placing them on sick people and even the handkerchiefs are healing people. There's just this awe and this incredible wonder that is going on as God is powerfully touching the church. I mean, people are getting saved. People are getting healed. Demons are getting cast out of people. In Acts chapter five, somebody lies on their offering envelope and when they're called to account, they fall over dead in the middle of a church service. How many know that would be an exciting 9 a.m. service? There's this awe and a wonder that is taking place where literally the church as it's gathering together like we are this weekend and like Christians are all over the world on this Lord's Day are looking at each other and going, what is going on? I mean, God is in our midst. This is powerful. This is glorious. This is everything that we ever dreamed of. I mean, what else could go on? Well, I'm gonna tell you what else could go on. Problems arose. Problems arose in the middle of the explosion of growth, the miraculous, the presence of God and the power of God being demonstrated. Problems arose and the reason problems arose is because anything that is growing is also adjusting. Anything in life that grows also has to make adjustments and those adjustments become obvious when the way you did something before no longer will hold or contain what God is doing today. You see, oftentimes people will say, church shoppers, especially in a Western consumer driven culture, it's like, we're kind of shopping for a church and I get what they mean. They're looking for, does it believe what we believe? Does the worship impact us? What about children's programs? I get all that. But oftentimes you'll talk to people, especially if you're on this side of the pulpit and I've had these conversations with people where they will say, well, we're looking for the perfect church for our family. And my answer is always, if you find the perfect church, do not go to it because you will ruin it. If it was perfect before you got there, it will be imperfect as soon as you arrive. And here's the reality. There is no such thing as a perfect church. It does not exist. Oftentimes we can even idealize the church in the book of Acts and say, oh, I wish that our church was like the book of Acts. Well, if you look at the book of Acts, what you'll quickly find out is they had a lot of problems. They had good things that were happening, but they also had challenges that they were facing. Listen, in the kingdom of God, there is no perfect church. There are just perfecting churches. Jesus says in Hebrews chapter 12 in the King James, which I love, it says that he is the author and the perfecter of our faith. See, Jesus doesn't have a perfect church. He is a perfect savior who is perfecting his church, which means wherever we're at, he's taking us from glory to glory. How many are grateful that God's standard for your life is not perfection? Anybody happy? Like 40% of the room is happy. I don't know how portage is this morning. It's Memorial Day weekend. Let me just say, I for one am glad that God's standard for his presence in my life is not perfection. It's grace. And here's what I want you to know about grace. Oftentimes when we talk about grace, we talk about it in terms of like a Holy Ghost eraser. It's like I made a mistake and now he's gonna apply the Holy Ghost eraser and erase my mistake so that it's like it was never there. I'm grateful that grace does that. He forgives our sins, but grace is much more than that. Grace also means God's empowerment. This is what we see as Jesus is perfecting his church. He's giving us grace where we are and he's taking us to a new level of glory, a new level of maturity, a new level of being able to cooperate and partner with what he's doing in the earth. And that's what it means to perfect something. Practice makes perfect. Have you ever heard that term? It's true unless it's golf. Because I've played golf for 40 years and I just get worse and worse and worse. Practice, practice, practice. But in the church, when we put into practice kingdom values and virtues, it is the process by which the Holy Spirit through grace is perfecting the church. What we need to recognize and what we can see right here is that even in the early church, growth and expansion, growth and expansion as was taking place, it reveals weaknesses, problems, and points of pain. It reveals weaknesses, problems, and points of pain. The more something grows, it begins to reveal where the fault lines are, where there needs to be correction or where there needs to be change or where we need God's grace to come in and meet us. And when we see the early church, we see the pain. It says it right here in verse number one that in these days, when the disciples were increasing in numbers, so they were growing, but as they are growing, they begin to feel the pain and the pain was felt along the fault lines of the Hellenists and the Hebrews. Now, if you don't know those two terms, let me explain them to you. So Hellenists were Greek-speaking Jews. So because many of the Jews had been dispersed throughout the rest of the Roman Empire and the Roman Empire, a large portion of it was Greek-speaking, what happened is these Jewish communities began to live in places like Athens and Thessalonica and Corinth and they maintained their loyalty to the God of the Bible and the law of Moses, but they adjusted to the culture that they were living in and they began to speak the common language. So Hebrew was not their primary language and Palestinian Judaism, like those who lived in Israel, was not their primary culture. They were Greek in their culture. They were Greek in their language primarily and even in their way of thinking. And many of those Greek-speaking Jews had now come to believe that Jesus or Yeshua was the Messiah. In fact, one of the distinctions was that you had the Hebrew Jews who now were believers in Yeshua as their Messiah, who when they read in the synagogues, the scripture, they read out of the Masoretic text, which was the Hebrew text. They read the law of Moses in Hebrew, but then you had the Greek-speaking Jews when they gathered in their synagogues, they read from the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So you had language barriers and you also had ethnic barriers. You had ethnic barriers because culturally they were distinct and they were different from one another. And so now both of these groups are loyal to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They've come to completion in their faith and believing that Jesus or Yeshua is the Messiah of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And they've come into the church under the leadership of the apostles and many of them have relocated to Jerusalem. They're living in Jerusalem. And now one of the things that they did was they took care of the widows. They took care of the widows in their community because one of the most vulnerable group of people in the first century were widows because they could not have jobs. Their husbands in their form of livelihood had ended. They had nobody to take care of them. And now they're being ostracized by the Jews who did not believe in Jesus and the rulers and the leaders. So who's gonna take care of them? Well, it's the church. Unless you think, yes, we should take care more of the widows in our community, that's great. Read the rest of it. It also says the way that they supported the widows where people were selling their homes and giving the proceeds of their homes to the church to take care of the widows. So let's have a fire sale on Zillow and sell everybody's homes. How about that? I mean, but the reason why they were doing that is because of this sense of awe and wonder. It's like, the kingdom of God is here. Let's lean into this thing and it was powerful. So you've got these two groups, the Hebrew and the Hellenists. And the Hellenists or the Greek speaking Jews were complaining to the apostles and saying preferential treatment is being given to the Hebrew widows. So think about this in the early church as the church is exploding with miracles, signs and wonders and even persecution and all of these different types of things. There was also dividing lines. And I think a modern example or a modern expression of what was taking place was, it might be like in the church, people who had grown up in church and had an understanding of the Bible versus those who were in their church who got saved as adults. That's one way to kind of look at it. Another is even racial lines or ethnic lines. It might be like the black church versus those who've grown up in the white church and those who are black or brown might come into the church and say, hey, we're not getting treated the same as other people. The very issues, think about this, the very issues that the body of Christ wrestles with even in our own day are not new to us. These are human nature. These are issues that even under the shadow of God's miraculous wings. And even at a time when there was a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the church was still confronting these issues. So what we see is that the church was dealing with issues of favoritism and neglect, dealing with issues of cultural, ethnic and even linguistic issues. The church was experiencing persecution from the outside. They were experiencing warfare from beyond them, spiritual warfare, and they were experiencing tensions now from within. And what was the response? People complained. People complained. How many know that complaining is kind of a human universal response when we feel pain? Now, I've heard that there are people, probably nobody in our church who has complied. I've heard that there are people though that when they have experienced pain in their lives have from time to time found themselves to complain about things to others and to God. Has anybody known anybody in this room that when they've gone through some painful situations, they have complained? Anybody know anybody like that? Anybody? Okay. Isn't it interesting that even though 2,000 years have passed, human beings are still the same. Our first response when we endure pain or we feel unjustly treated or we feel like as things are expanding, even in churches, we feel like things are expanding, growing, changing, transforming, that our first response, and I'll say pastors do it too, is out of our flesh we want to complain. You go on the Old Testament and you can see at times when God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt miraculously, part of the Red Sea miraculously, fed them with manna and water from Iraq miraculously. What did they do? They complained. They murmured and complained. Why do we do that? Have you ever thought about that? Do we really think that that is the solution to the problem? You might be tempted to read Acts chapter six and say, well, it worked out pretty good for them. They complained and then they got the problem solved. But the reality is that the response of the apostles and the response of the leaders being led by the Holy Spirit and the spirit of wisdom is what brought the solution. It wasn't the complaining. It was that they responded to persecution. They responded to spiritual pressure and they responded to internal tension in the appropriate way. What is the appropriate way? Well, it's when you see problems and when you experience pain, it's to know that in those moments, there is also opportunity. That there is opportunity to grow. There's opportunity to learn. There's opportunity to put into practice, sermon on the Mount lifestyles. There's opportunity for us to pray. There's opportunity for us to see God move. And what we need to know is this, that problems and pain in our lives, whether it's on an individual level or whether it's even in our church environments, whether it's at radian or any other church, that problems and pain are not evidence that God has abandoned the church or that he's not present or that something has terribly gone wrong. It might, but it does not indicate that. What it means is that it can oftentimes be a catalyst that God is using and actually working through to bring further growth and future expansion for the church and for the gospel beyond itself. And that's just reality. Almost at every single point in my life where I have seen a giant leap forward in growth has been during a very difficult season of my life. Now, I wish it was not that way. C.S. Lewis said that God speaks most loudly to the world through the megaphone of pain. Now, we don't like that. It would, wouldn't it be joyful if that the happiest moments of our life and the most joyful moments of our life were the things that taught us the most? But typically happiness, joy and the thrill and those really good moments are actually on the other side of the pain. It's where we experience the gain that God gives to us as the reward of going through the process of pain with humility and trusting him. That's on an individual level and I want you to know it's also true of the church. Look at this. It says in verse number two through six, the 12 summoned the full number of disciples and said, it's not right. This is the apostles that we should give up preaching the word in order to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men with good reputations full of the Holy Spirit whom we will appoint to this duty but we will devote ourselves to the ministry of the word and what they said pleased them and so what they did was they brought seven men and they said, these are leaders intermixed. These are trustworthy, full of the Holy Spirit people who have a servant heart. Many people look at this and say, well, these are deacons. Even though the word deacon is not there, really what they were is people who just stepped forward and said, hey, we'll take some of the pressure. We'll take some of the problems and we'll solve the problems. We're spiritually mature. We're leaders. We'll take some of that on ourselves so that you guys can give yourselves to what God's called you to do. And when they did this, the apostles affirmed them, laid their hands on them and now what we're gonna see is that the church began to expand and grow even further than they ever had before. See, what they did was they turned growth pains into growth gains. How many have ever heard that term? No pain, no gain. Most often you hear about it when you sign up for your gym membership. No pain, no gain. And so you say that, you pump yourself up, you go to the gym in January, you're paying your $12 a month to your purple gym and you go to your purple gym and you show up and you get one workout and the next morning when you get up and the alarm is going off, you can't touch it. And you just gotta do one of these things because your arm is so sore. And then you try and get out of the bed and you're just like, oh, my abs, because you tried to do everything in one day. And you thought, oh, I'm gonna go to the gym. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could find a tablet that you take it and it does for you in taking one serving, what three years of daily going to the gym and eating right on your diet would accomplish. I wish somebody would just invent that because if they would invent that, I would buy it. Anybody else would you buy that? But it doesn't happen that way. Pain is a process that when we commit to it, ultimately, will bring about gain. It will bring strength, it will bring expansion, it will bring about growth, but it's a process that we have to commit to. And when we commit to the process of growth, when the church goes through seasons and when the church or a local church goes through seasons of pain, we can either see them as the problem or we can see them as opportunity. If we'll see them as opportunity, then we'll be able to turn growth pains into growth gains. How do we do that? Well, they give us the template right here, three things that they did that I think we need to do really well. Number one is they defended unity. They defended unity at all costs. Think about these scriptures. First Corinthians chapter one, verse 10, Paul writes to the Corinthian church. I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you. Think about this scripture. First Corinthians chapter 11, this is an interesting one, verse 18 through 19. It says, for in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you and I believe it in part, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. Paul actually says that God takes even advantage of division in the church. When there are things that come up and factions begin to form, Paul says, when that happens, God's plan isn't for the church to be divided, but when it happens, God even takes advantage of those opportunities to reveal who's in and who's out, who's genuine among you, who's really a part, who's sheep in the fold and who's not. And so Paul is even saying that there's opportunity there. Ephesians four is the keystone of unity, though. Paul writes in verse number one, I therefore a prisoner for the Lord. He's talking about the church. I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. See what we see in Acts chapter six is that it wasn't the complaint that caused change to come. It was spiritually mature leadership that knew how to put their minds together, seek the mind of the Lord and in the spirit of wisdom come up with a solution. And so complaining is a response of the flesh. Complaint on a personal level and on a corporate level and even at work and just being a citizen. When we complain, we think our complaint actually does something, but all it does is it embitters our soul. When oftentimes when we come into places of disagreement and listen in churches as well as in families and in neighborhoods and in workplaces, there are going to be disagreements. Unity does not mean that we all agree all the time. Unity just means that we value each other as family and we value each other and the unique image of God that is imprinted on each other as family more than we value the issues that we're fighting over. And that's so key because the enemy loves math just as much as God does. See, church math, God's math, the way that God uses math is he uses addition and multiplication to produce disciples. Acts chapter six is the first time in the book of Acts that Christians were not referred to as followers or believers, but as disciples. Twice it says that the number of disciples were increasing. How does God do that? He uses addition and multiplication to produce disciples. And then he uses division to reveal the faults in our midst and subtraction to prune them away so that more fruit can be born. That's God's math, that's church math, but the devil uses math as well. And here's the devil's math. He uses addition and multiplication in order to plant disease and dissension in a body. And he'll use division among brothers and subtraction in order to prune truth so that there's a void that will host deception. So we wanna be involved in God's math, amen? We wanna use God's math. We don't wanna be a part of divisions or dissensions. We don't wanna be a part of subtraction. We don't wanna add the wrong things and take the right things out. We wanna add and multiply disciples. Disciples who make disciples, who make disciples, who make disciples. That's God's multiplication and increase. And we'll use division when we need it and we'll use subtraction when pruning needs to take place. But at the end of the day, the increase of God's government is always increase. So they protected unity. And listen, unity is so important. When you go back in Genesis chapter 11, here's what God said about sinful broken people at the Tower of Babel. As they were building a city for their own name without God. And when their sin was overwhelming them they said, when God wanted them to scatter, they said, let's all gather and we're gonna build a city and a tower up into the heavens. We're gonna be our own God, make a name for ourselves. God came down and God was speaking to his divine counsel and he says, because they have one heart and they speak one language, nothing will be impossible for them. That's sinful men. Think about that. When there's unity, even with broken people, there is momentum. But when you have momentum as the body of Christ and what Paul says is the bond of unity and the spirit of unity. When there's unity in the Holy Spirit, when there's unity and there's proper leadership and there's proper responsibility and there's proper truth. When all of those things are in place and everybody is together, Psalm 133 says how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity. You read on, it says, for it's there that God commands the blessing. I wanna be a people that are living in the commanded blessing of God. I want the oil to flow over every single one of us because we're dwelling in unity. And listen, unity is supernatural in our generation. Natural is division. Unity is supernaturally originated and supernaturally maintained. So we see right here that they defended unity and number two, they protected their priorities. What were the priorities? Verse number two, here's what the apostle says. It's not right that we should give up preaching the word to serve tables. And then verse four, here's what the apostle said. We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. And then they also engaged other people to take some of those responsibilities. When they were confronted with problems, one of the reasons why these problems arose, I believe it's not spoken of here, is that any time that there is momentum and growth and increase taking place in a church, Satan will try to bombard from any direction that he can. If he can't persecute you into submission, then he will try to bring dissension from within you. Or he will try to bring deception and false teaching and implant it into a church to stop the kingdom movement from expanding. One of the other things that the enemy does, and I think he's trying to do it in this portion of scripture that we're reading, is he will try and distract the church from the main things. He'll try and distract the church. And he was trying to distract the apostles from doing the things that they needed to do. What did they need to do? They needed to be teaching the word. They needed to be praying and leading prayer. They needed to be making disciples of the rest of the church and equipping the rest of the church. But now there's this need that comes up and a complaint. And what the enemy's trying to do is, like in the book of Nehemiah, it's get them off the wall to come over here and try and resolve issues that are not urgent and not eternal. Because if they're doing this, they're not doing that. And listen, this is true both of those who are in full-time pastoral ministry like myself. And it's also true of those who are in the church who have vocations outside of the church but are ministers of Jesus in the church just as much as I am. The enemy will try and distract you. He'll try and get you busy doing all the wrong things. He'll try and keep you from church. He'll try and keep you out of fellowship. He'll try to distract you with other things that are not eternally significant. And it happens to pastors too. You see, I think being a pastor 50 years ago was a lot different than it is today. There was no social media world. There was, you know, the platforms that you had were much smaller and so you were able to really zero in. I mean, a pastor would spend 30, 40 hours a week preparing a message, visiting the sick that are in the hospitals, making disciples, leading small groups, prayer groups. But today to be a pastor, you have to be a psychologist. You've got to be a marketing specialist. You've got to be a public speaker. You've got to be an expert in all things culture. You've got to be a social justice person. You've got to be a politician. You've got to be a creative artist. And all of these things that are expected of you. And listen, it's not just pastors today. If you're going to be a parent, you've got to be a social media expert. You've got to be able to watch your kids on TikTok and Snapchat. And you might not even know what those things are. I promise your kids do. But if you're going to raise kids in today's world, then you've got to be good at what you do at your job. And then you've got to be a baseball coach. You've got to be a marriage expert. You've got to be all these things. Can I just tell you, none of those things are wrong. Not for pastors, not for anybody else. But what is dangerous is that we allow the enemy to distract us from the things that are most significant. And I know this for me. If I do everything right throughout the week and I don't have the word of the Lord for our church on Sunday mornings, then I have failed that week. Because my number one priority is vision for what God is speaking to radiant church and also providing the food for the sheep on Sunday mornings. This is my primary calling. But what's your primary calling? You might say, well, I'm glad I got a pastor who preaches the word. Do you know that your primary calling above all things is ministering to the heart of the Lord? It's being a person of the word and being a person of prayer before you do anything else. The enemy will do everything in his power to distract you from that. On top of everything else that you do. Because if he can distract you, then he can divide you. Then he can deceive you. He can diffuse the momentum in your life and keep you from prospering. What did they do third? They delegated ministry responsibilities. So they defended unity. They protected their priorities. And lastly, this is so beautiful. They delegated ministry responsibilities. They appointed servant ministers. So it gives us a list of these seven men. Stephen, Philip, many of these names you might recognize. And they gave them the responsibilities. Take care of tables. You might say, well, what does it mean taking care of tables? It means just practical stuff. It would mean like making coffee, parking cars, taking care of ministry to kids, greeting people when they walk in, leading a small group, helping at the gospel mission during the week. It's all the different things that are ushering on Sunday mornings. All of these types of things. It was people who stepped forward and said, look, I'm a disciple of Jesus. I'm full of the Holy Spirit. I can help. And it was the apostles who said, good, we're gonna delegate that responsibility because it was never God's intention that just three or four people or that 12 people do everything. It was that every member of the body of Christ is anointed by the Holy Spirit and called to do our share. This is how Jesus built the church. And think about what God did with these people. Talk about expansion and increase. Stephen signed up and said, I'll take care of tables. And you know what happens to him next? He's preaching one of the most powerful sermons one chapter later. And he becomes the most significant and the first martyr of the church. Stephen is stoned. Saul of Tarsus is standing right there at the synagogue of Cilicia. He sees it and it sets off a domino effect of the gospel going to the Gentiles. And it started with one guy raising his hands and saying, hey, I can serve. And then God took him and turned him into a mighty preacher. Philip became an evangelist who runs up alongside a carriage with an Ethiopian eunuch in it. And he shares the gospel and baptizes him in the water and then the Holy Spirit literally picks him up and transports him 24 miles away. Just because he raised his hand and said, I'm available. One guy you may not know of is Procuraus. He said, well, who's that? Early church tells us he eventually becomes the bishop of Nicomedia. He's a disciple of John, the evangelist, who was an early church father and then becomes a bishop some 57 years later. And there's one more name that I think is worthy of drawing attention to. It's Nicholas. Nicholas the proselyte. Which means he was not born Jewish. He converted to Judaism and now has become a Christian. But what church history records is that he actually becomes divisive later on. And he becomes the leader of a cultish sect called the Nicolaotans that you read about in Revelation chapter two that Jesus speaks to John in the book of Revelation and says, I hate those who follow and practice the doctrines of the Nicolaotans. This man started off right in the church but he allowed his heart to become divided and divisive and he eventually becomes someone that Jesus corrects and calls people to reject. So what does that mean for us? Well, it means that we need to have our eyes firmly fixed on Jesus, not allow ourselves to get distracted, protect our unity, defend our priorities and also take responsibility. Ephesians chapter four, Paul says that Jesus gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to equip the saints. Everybody point at yourself right now, just wherever you're at, even online, just point at yourself. If you're pointing at yourself, you are a saint. If you're a Christian, a disciple of Jesus, you are a saint. And it says that God has given apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to equip you to do the work of the ministry. Our job as apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers is not to do the ministry, it's to be coaches that are blowing the whistle, calling the plays, opening up the playbook and sending players onto the field and say, you play tackle, you're wide receiver, you're quarterback, everybody get on the field and run the formation. You're a safety, you're defensive line. Your nose tackle, everybody get on the line and the coaches are on the sidelines calling the plays but it takes every saint coming down out of the stands from being a spectator to suiting up and becoming a player on the field. And it says when we do that, it's to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ. What is building up mean? Growth, increase in multiplication. Ephesians 4.16 says when the whole body joined and held together by whatever joint supplies, it's working properly, it makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Look at verse number seven, this is where we'll land. It says, and because they did these things, the word of God continued to increase and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith. Look at this progression with me. In Acts 5.14 it says the church was growing because God was adding disciples. In Acts 6.1 that we just read, it says the number of disciples was increasing and now in Acts 6.7 it says the number of disciples was multiplying. We go from addition to increase to multiplication when we protect unity, when we keep our priorities and when we all take responsibility and say I have a part to play in what Jesus is doing in our day. This is what God's plan is for the church. This is how we take growing pains and turn them into growing gains. I wanna invite you to stand with me if you would this morning. The first and the most important response to what Jesus is doing and make no mistake about it, Jesus has not stopped his mission on the earth from when he started in Acts 2 to our present day. He's still moving by his spirit. You and I are part of this, this story. But the first response that all of us are called to is to become disciples of Jesus which means become obedient to the faith. Jesus is not looking for fans. There are a lot of people in this world that are fans of Jesus. I admire Jesus. I love Jesus, respect Jesus. Jesus makes me feel good, but they don't obey Jesus. Jesus isn't looking for fans and he's really not just looking for followers. He's looking for disciples. He's looking for those who say I'm going all in. I'll be obedient. Jesus said if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. Jesus, I'm gonna go all in and part of what it means to be obedient to the faith is to say I was created not to be a lone ranger by myself but I was created to be a part of what God is doing in the church. Part of what I do is serve, but that's not the only part. So on a personal level, you're called personally to know Jesus and not be distracted from that and then to defend the unity at all costs. Fight for unity, protect it. When you hear division, you hear dissensions to reject it and then to take personal responsibility, say Jesus, my first call is to love you. It's to serve you. And if you have never made the decision to become a disciple of Jesus, to turn from your way of doing things, to turn literally from the world and say I'm no longer gonna be a disciple of the world. I'm not gonna believe what the world says. I'm not gonna speak the language of the world. I'm not gonna go the way of the cultural world. I wanna learn the culture of the kingdom. I wanna speak the language of Jesus, the language of love. I want the word of God to be my God, Jesus. I'm following you. And in the process of being saved from my sin and from certain death, if you've never made Jesus the Lord of your life, today is the day for you to be one that he adds to the church, adds to the kingdom of God. Would you buy your heads with me all over the room? See, one of the reasons why people were being saved is because they recognized that their sin was shipwrecking them, that they were broken and could not fix themselves and that someday all of us will stand before God, our Creator and be judged and given account for our lives. And the only way we will be vindicated when we stand before him on that day. The only way that we will not be held responsible for our sins is when we've appropriated and we've received the grace, the gift of salvation, forgiveness of our sins through Jesus's death on the cross and we've repented and said, Jesus, come into my life, save me, forgive me. Today, if you're listening to me and you've never done that, this is your day. This is your moment to receive Jesus all over the room. If you say, pastor Lee, I know I'm not right with God, but today I want to be saved. I want to become a disciple of Jesus. Pray for me. I want to pray for you. I want you to indicate it. I want you to just lift your hand, say today I want to be made right with God. I want my sins to be forgiven. Pray for me today and raise your hand and we're gonna pray for you. We're all gonna pray together. I see one hand back there looking over the room wherever you're at. If that's you, you raise your hand. Thank you. There's two. Who else today say that's me? Pray for me. I want my life right with God. I want to be forgiven. I want to be a part of what God's doing in the earth. If you've not raised your hand, raise it right now and we're about to pray. Okay, you can put your hands down. Last thing before we pray is this. In your heart, you're here today and you're saying Jesus, I want to be a part of what you're doing in the earth. I want to be a part of what you are doing in the world. I want to get out of the stands and get onto the playing field. I'm saying Jesus, in this next season, I'm saying I'm gonna move from being a follower of Jesus to being a disciple of Jesus, fully engaged. If that's you, I want you to just raise your hand all over the room. The Lord's convicting you, moving in your life. Thank you, lots of hands. Father, today we turn to you and we ask for grace and mercy. For those of you who raised your hand to receive Christ, I want you to just pray this out loud and everyone join us in praying this. Say, Heavenly Father, I come in Jesus' name and I ask you to save me from my sins. Forgive me and fill me with your Holy Spirit. From this day forward, I belong to you and I yield to you because I believe you died for me. Fill me with eternal life and set me on a path of following you, Jesus. Thank you for loving me and saving me. In Jesus' name, amen. Come on, can we celebrate that this morning? Amen.