Tag: Acts

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Giving and Receiving Hospitality – Sermon Notes, Acts 28:1-10

It can be difficult to accept help – it can be embarrassing, demoralizing and overly vulnerable. But we are also commanded to give help and assistance to those in need – this means that if we are not careful, we can fall into a pattern of paternalism, making a separation between those who Have and those who Need. But this dichotomy is not biblical – biblical hospitality is a two way street. You cannot truly give unless you can receive.

We see that in this story in the book of Acts. People serve each other throughout the story – even at the beginning, the people of Malta rescue Paul and his companions, while Paul works to build a fire.

When he is bit by a snake, Paul’s reputation swings wildly from being a murderer to being seen as a god. This miracle does not result in an immediate conversion of the people there – they do not turn to Jesus but interpret what happened within their own pagan framework.

But even so, Paul heals the father of Publius, the chief official, and then heals many others on the island – in turn, they are given hospitality by Publius for three months, and are greatly honored by the people there, “in many ways”, finally sent off with all the supplies they need

We don’t see Paul preaching the gospel here, but rather we see him “doing life together” with the pagans around him, accepting their help and providing his own.

We can learn a lot from this passage about receiving hospitality in God’s economy. First, God’s people aren’t immune from need. If we pretend we do not have any needs, we will miss opportunities to receive help. And we will be surprised by those who step in to help. Christians are not the only people who work the will of God, just like we see on Malta. As we also see on Malta, receiving hospitality creates community. Paul and his shipwrecked companions created a community for three months with the people of Malta, a combination of cosmopolitan Jews, superstitious islanders, maybe a few sailors in the mix. And in that community, like this motley crew in the Mediterranean, we can experience home and life.

As a people, our hospitality muscles have atrophied – between the pandemic and the general drift of culture, as Paul says later in Acts 28, our “heart has become calloused.” This is true on an individual level but also on a national level.

If we as individuals and as a nation could reflect more on how we have received help and wisdom and gifts of other people and peoples, perhaps there would be less calloused behavior, and more celebration.

We, as a church, are called to be openhearted, to both give and receive hospitality with joy and gratitude. We are to be expansive in both directions as we expand our family circle and God brings all of us to His banquet table.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, September 21, 2025

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Resurrection Life – Why are You Looking at Heaven? – Acts 1:4-11

It is not for you to know

We get a sense of impatience among the disciples in this passage, and like much impatience it may have stemmed from fear. The disciples had been looking forward to Jesus as Messiah overthrowing Rome’s rule over Israel – Jesus’ death derailed that plan briefly but now things seem like they should be back on track, but over the 40 days from His resurrections He hasn’t made any kind of move in that direction. So naturally, they are getting impatient. What’s the plan?

Here, they ask about this directly, and Jesus’ answer is critical to understand: “It is not for you to know.” We all want answers and a clear understanding of our place in God’s overall plan. But Jesus’instruction is to wait. We hate that!

But there is a promise coming – the Holy Spirit will come, and the disciples will be witnesses. That is ultimately the story of Acts, which is an active, mission oriented book, but that starts with the leader of this new movement disappearing and telling his followers to sit tight.

And so they stand there looking at the sky feeling confused and maybe frustrated. Then along come two angels, much like the scene at the tomb that Luke also described. They promise that, even if the details are hidden, Jesus would return. Their task was first to wait and then to be His witnesses.

We are called to the same – we are not just biding our time until heaven. God has set a plan in front of us and a purpose on this earth. We aren’t meant to simply stand and gaze at heaven, huddled together with like minded people and waiting for the second coming. We are called to be witnesses. There is work to be done!

The church is supposed to be the collective witness of the Good News to the world. We are not here to calculate the times and seasons, to seek and predict the next big change. We are called into the streets and homes and lives of those around us, the nitty-gritty of life. Gaining and losing, loving and mourning, succeeding and failing – we are to be witnesses amongst all of it.

But when we do find ourselves standing around looking at the sky, when we do feel lost or impatient, we have instruction here too: wait. Rather than jumping to whatever seems right in our own mind, Jesus instructs us to wait.

Waiting on God’s spirit can be challenging but it is a fundamental part of building a relationship with God. God’s timing is perfect, even when it differs from our own expectations or desires.

Let us be a people who can wait on God’s timing, and be His witnesses.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, May 12, 2024

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Resurrection Life – Listening to the Spirit – Acts 10:44-48

What does it mean to be led by the Spirit? Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would come and instruct the disciples after He ascended into heaven. The Holy Spirit is the real time presence of God working and and through us to do His work in the world. This passage gives us an example of this.

Christianity began as a sect of Judaism. At the time, Jewish religion, ethnicity, culture and language were all very tightly tied together, so the early movement of gentiles into the sect of The Way, it created tension. Many of the Jewish Christians considered these converts to still be outsiders.

This tension is addressed head-on in Acts 9 and 10. In Acts 9:8, Saul, who had been persecuting the church, is blinded after ‘seeing’ Jesus. Meanwhile, the Christian man Ananias has a vision telling him to go to Saul. In 9:18 after ministering from Ananias, scales fall from Saul’s eyes and he is baptized. Then in 9:40 we get the story of Peter raising a little girl from the dead. He says “Tabitha, get up.” She opens her eyes, and seeing Peter she sits up. Then in Acts 10 wet get Peter’s vision that leads him to understand that the gentiles are loved by God and that “God does not show favoritism” even to His chosen people. This is a key pivot point for the Church that ultimately transformed it from a sect of Judaism into the global body of believers it is today.

We have those same transformational moments in our own lives, where the paradigm we have operated by is disrupted and overturned by the Holy Spirit. Consider Peter, looking at this collection of unclean animals, age being told to eat, against a thousand years of culture and religion. Consider him entering the house of gentile, uncircumcised Cornelius, and sharing a meal.

What would be similarly kind blowing today? What could the Holy Spirit do today that would be a similar paradigm shift? On the one hand we must be alert to people claiming the leading of the Spirit, and use the boundaries of scripture, tradition and the discernment of the community. At the same time, we must be open to be challenged in church – church is not only able feeling safe.

So we must find ways to listen to the Spirit and listen to those around us but who may be moved by the Spirit. This takes trust and patience, but the more that we grow in that practice is spiritual formation and discernment, the more we can accomplish for God. The Spirit is moving and speaking all the time, if we are open to listen.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, May 5, 2024

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Resurrection Life – Philip and the Eunuch – Acts 8:26-40

This is a story of God pulling Philip out of his standard routine. Philip has been preaching in Samaria and has just had his ministry blessed by Peter and John. But now God calls him away to a completely different place, the road from Jerusalem out to Gaza, where he meets an Ethiopian official.

The official had been castrated as many were in order to keep their full attention. He also must have been either a convert to Judaism or someone curious about it because he was reading Isaiah, specifically chapter 53, the “suffering servant” passage that is one of the clearest prophecies of Christ.

The passage may have had special resonance for him, especially the line “In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants?” As someone bodily humiliated, someone who would have no descendants, he wants to know more about who is being discussed here.

Given this perfect setup, Philip spikes the ball and walks the Ethiopian through the story of Christ, and he immediately jumps to wanting to be baptized in a pool they just happen to be passing.

For some additional context, this comes shortly after some trouble in Jerusalem where the Greek-speaking widows were being overlooked by the Aramaic-speaking church leadership who then put in place Greek-speaking deacons, of whom Philip was one. The apostles were “oo busy teaching and preaching to” wait tables” so they put in place these deacons to work out the logistics. But then the next two chapters are all about two of these deacons teaching and preaching! Stephen becomes the first martyr and Philip gets teleports all over.

This is a story of the Holy Spirit pushing on our human boundaries. God wants us to move beyond our central comfort zone, to leave our holy huddle and get out on the road to Gaza.

We are called to live a Spirit-Led Life. The Holy Spirit continues to work powerfully today, but at do need to work the muscles that He wants us to use.

But beware, the spirit filled life can take you off track, disrupting your plans and putting you in an entirely different place and directions.

This may happen through timely and crucial interactions. Philip never saw the Ethiopian again, but tradition holds he went on to found the Ethiopian church, among the oldest in the world.

This happens because God has been working ahead of time, moving eunuchs to investigate the Jewish religion and page through Isaiah.

The Holy Spirit will prompt you to push to the margins and boundaries, which means we must practice listening and trying.

God is calling people from the ends of the earth and we all have roles to play in that great work.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, April 28, 2024

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Names of God: The Unknown God – Acts 17:18-28

Paul here is speaking to two very discrete groups of Athenian scholars. On the one hand, the Stoics, dutiful pantheists who literally give their name to being stoic. On the other, there are the Epicureans, essentially hedonistic deists, to simplify things. And all throughout, of course, you have the standard polytheists of paganism. They are all interested in what Paul has to say but accuse him of being a “spermologos, ” sperm meaning seed and logos meaning word or idea – the picture being of a bird picking and choosing between seeds.

And so Paul gets in front of the Aereopagus, both a governing body and a philosophical debate society. He dives into a “first principles” version of the gospel, one that touches on many names of God.

God “made the world and everything in it” – He is Creator. This is in direct opposition to the Stoics who saw God and nature as the same.

God “is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything” – a strike against paganism and polytheism that saw the need for service and sacrifice. He is the All-Sufficient One.

“From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth, and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” – God is the King of Kings, and this cuts directly against the Epicurean idea of a distant, uninvolved God.

Then Paul starts quoting the Greeks’ own philosophers. “For in him we live and move and have our being,” – He is the sustainer. “We are his offspring,” He is Father.

When we meditate on the attributes and names of God, it draws us closer to Him. Let us go forward and think on this in our daily life.

— Sermon Notes, Alison Robison, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, January 21, 2024

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Get Up and Go – Acts 8:26-40

The story here is a story of two people in the the margins of empire, outsiders like immigrants and minorities today. One of these is Philip, one of the seven deacons set up to manage the food ministry for widows and orphans. When his fellow deacon and marginalized person, Stephen, moves from managing the ministry to teaching, he was killed, which scattered the church, including Philip.

Philip went up to Samaria, where he had incredible success in ministry. But God sent an angel who instructed him to get up, leave all the success that he had been having, and head out on a road into the wilderness.

That’s where we meet our second character, the Ethiopian eunuch. Like describes him in remarkable detail compared to most biblical characters, which must be for a reason. This person is about as different as it is possible to be from Philip. He’s from outside the empire, he’s dark-skinned, he’s a sexual/gender minority – but he is also a very powerful person in an important nation, wealthy enough to be driven in a chariot and read his own personal scroll of scripture. Despite all this, he is coming from worship in a place that he cannot even fully engage in because he is both a gentile and a eunuch.

Phillip’s last job was running a soup kitchen – again, these people are about as different as it is possible to be. But God tells him to go and “glue himself” to the chariot, where he finds a wide opening for the gospel. “What is this scripture about?”

And Philip takes that opportunity, and the eunuch in turn takes the opportunity to be baptized immediately – after which God transports Philip elsewhere, his job accomplished.

God is still calling us to participate in these sorts of activities, but there are reasons we resist. We like to be competent and do things in areas we understand. But Philip glued himself to the chariot of a foreign eunuch-treasurer just like Jesus glued himself to the flesh of humanity. Philip got up and went, heading into the wilderness, just as Jesus came to earth.

Where and to whom is God sending you?

— Sermon Notes, Tim Hseih, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, June 4, 2023

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Living in the Resurrection – Be Relevant – Acts 17:16-28

In this passage we see Paul actively waiting – exploring the city of Athens and engaging with the culture. He started, as was his custom, at the synagogue, beginning at the religious center that was closest to his starting point, where religion is a matter of ethnicity and nationality. From there, he goes to the marketplace, a center of both material commerce and intellectual commerce.

We see in this Paul’s versatility – he can move between these two worlds and go back and forth between these cultural contexts in order to meet people where they are at and speak in their language.

From there, he is taken to the Areopagus, aka the Hill of Ares, aka Mars Hill if you ever wondered where that came from. The name was both a place and a ruling council that met there.

Note that Paul starts his Sermon by finding common ground, rather than by highlighting their divisions abs differences. Some might react against his use of something pagan in order to talk about God, but Paul does not shy away from it.

We have a tendency to be anthropocentric in how we look at the world and the Greek gods were examples of that. Paul worked to get them to look beyond their own humanity, including that humanity reflected in these invented deities. Paul specifically uses their own poetry to point out that God does not come from us, but we come from God.

How does this impact us? We also are called to engage the marketplace. We are not supposed to build our own fortress to hide away in and create our own culture, but we are to be out in the mix of the society that we live in. And we don’t always need to do it in the same way Paul did, by standing up in a public place and talking. God goes before us in the person of the Holy Spirit and all we have to do is be open to that He is doing. We don’t have to have it all put together, we just have to engage.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, May 14, 2023