Scripture: Acts 6:8-15

Rev. John W. Fowler

When we think of the word witness we think of a jury trial where they call in witnesses to give truthful testimony or evidence to advance an argument. Or when we think of religious witnesses we tend to think of Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses who are very passionately going from door to door to share their views about God. But all Christians are witnesses. The word martyr means witness. It has come to take on the meaning of a witness who actually dies for the Christian faith. But I want you think of the kind of witness that you are, and also the witness that you would like to be. For what we have here is Stephen who was the first Christian to actually die for his faith in Jesus Christ. And he is one who did not live a long time. He was not Christian for a long time, but God used him in a very significant way and is still using him today as an influence for Jesus Christ. One of the great needs today is for God’s people to have a witness who is a good witness, who is a consistent witness for Jesus Christ and one who is living in such a way that people will want to know the Savior that we serve.

I want to share with you from Acts, chapter 6. I want to pick up this story from verse 8. Sometimes we look at the early Church and think that everything was just fine, but they had conflicts and squabbles as well. We look at how they dealt with it. In Acts, chapter 6, the crowd is getting bigger and they are having an argument about the food distribution. The Hellenists are complaining against the Hebraic Jews and so, what happens is that the Hellenists Jews get the job of waiting on the tables. (Sometimes that’s the way to deal with people who are complaining — give them a job and maybe they will shut up and go away—-no, not go away—but stay and work it out.) But Stephen is more than someone who is waiting on tables, as important as that is. He is a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit. Let me begin with verse 8:

His name is Dwight Howard. He is an eighteen-year young old man on a mission. He is a very gifted basketball player, in fact, he is listed as the top high school recruit in the nation. Any college would love to have him but he is so good he has decided to be drafted by the NBA, which is coming up soon. He is listed as the number two pick. But what is drawing a lot of attention now is not just that he is six foot ten and he led his Atlanta high school to the state championship: he has a quite outspoken Christian faith. He believes that, as he was praying, he saw the NBA logo, which, if you know anything about the NBA, it’s an old picture of Jerry West, the great basketball player — guard for the Lakers — and he is envisioning a cross on that NBA logo one day. He says that when he goes into the NBA he wants to preach the Word of God. Not so much like I am preaching today, but preaching by the way he plays, that he will play unselfishly; he’ll play for the team. He sees the NBA as an opportunity to share his Christian faith.

What kind of witness do you have? What kind of influence do you inspire on those around you? Are you impacting others for Jesus Christ? Think of those who have impacted you. What was it about them? What was it about their faith that really inspired you? I want you to think for a few moments this morning about Stephen’s witness, and I see four aspects of his witness that are a good way to examine our witness, as not only as we look at the witness we have, but the witness we aspire to have.

First of all, there was a calling of the witness. Stephen was very clear about his calling. They did have a dispute among the early Christians. Those who were leading and teaching and preaching said it was not right that they needed to go back to the minister of the word in prayer, and so they chose seven men, full of faith and full of the Holy Spirit — of which Stephen was the first — to be over the food distribution. I consider that a very important job in the church or anywhere — those who are over the food distribution. And we find that, really, I point this out to you, Stephen wasn’t what you would call a preacher or the ordained; he was more of a lay person. But he wasn’t one of those who said, “I’m just a lay person.” He was first and foremost a Christian and he knew his calling, primarily as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

One of the great needs I want to share on this Fathers’ Day is for fathers to realize that when God has blessed you with children or grandchildren, it is a calling. It is a calling. There is something very special about God giving you that responsibility and that joy. Max Lucado shares about that in the book, The Heart of God, in a little story called “The Little Reunion.” Max Lucado, gifted author and preacher of a large congregation, was mostly a dad in this story. He was going to camp. They lived in Texas. They were going to Missouri. He had two girls, and even though they had been to camp before, they had never been that far, and so Dad was eager to see his girls.

He flew in to Missouri a day early; wanted to be on time; saw the sights, but then about three o’clock he went on over to the camp, about two hours before they could see their children. There was a rope there that you couldn’t go past. There were a few other dads there. They made a little small talk about where they were from and about their children, but about an hour later you could tell that, as he said, “The horses had been called to the gate.” They were lining up along the rope and they were serious about wanting to see their children. About five ‘til five, here came some young counselors. Apparently they had seen this before and they had a pre-arranged signal to be at the end of the rope and lift it up and drop it at the signal.

When they dropped it, he said that they all started walking fast, and then he saw out of the corner of his eye that one daddy was running, and he said, “Well, I’m not going to be outdone,” so he began running.

And then the word, “Daddy,” when he saw his daughter, just thrilled him as she ran and jumped in his arms. And he said, “It was at that time that I realized that this is what our Father is like. He runs to his children and nothing thrills Him more than that His children will come running back, saying ‘Daddy.’”

What a great need today that we realize our calling, and especially the calling of fathers — how important that is.

Stephen knew his calling and then we look at the character of the witness. Most of what we remember about Stephen is the kind of godly character that this man had. It is said that he was a man full of God’s grace and power, full of faith, full of the Holy Spirit, so we know that he exuded the Christian faith, the fruit of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience . . . I mean it was evident in Stephen’s life. And he spoke with great wisdom, a gift of the Spirit. Great power, and the only thing they could think of to dissuade him was to come up with some false accusations of blasphemy to bring him down. But Stephen was a man of godly character.

These past two weeks I have been at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, the Charlotte branch. This is a seminary with the mother campus in South Hamilton near Boston, the campus that Billy Graham was instrumental in founding in the late sixties. The Charlotte campus, started about ten years ago, was a satellite of that and there is a beautiful new campus. It is very near Carowinds, in fact, the way I could remember how to get there in the mornings was to go to the roller coaster and turn left, because it’s right there at the border of North and South Carolina. As you go in there is this rotunda, a big, beautiful, open room, and I just assumed that it was named after Billy Graham, but a couple of days ago I was reading the plaque and noticed that it was named for his parents, not for him, in their memory by their children. There are pictures of Mr. Frank Graham, who was a dairy farmer, and his wife, Morrow Graham. It talks about that these were godly, Bible-believing, praying parents who loved Christ and believed in evangelism. In fact, it was on Mr. Frank’s dairy farm, seventy years ago in 1934, that they were praying, not only for an awakening in that community, but that God would raise up someone to take the Gospel to the ends of the Earth, probably little dreaming that that would be one of his own children.

How were they remembered? They were remembered as farmers, but Christians of godly character. One of the great needs for our witness is to be people of godly character.

There is a calling of the witness and the character of the witness, but then in chapter 7 you find the convictions of the witness. In chapter 7 Stephen has this speech to the Sanhedrin. He realizes that he is speaking to his fellow Jews, so he begins with the history of the Jewish people. He speaks about Abraham, or Abram, as his name was, who received that promise that you are going to be the father of a great nation; you are an old man and your wife is an old lady, but you are still going to be the father of a great nation. And it was a promise that he finally followed in faith and Isaac was born . . . (tape change)

. . . He begins to tell them (Acts 7:51): You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! 52Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him--

And needless to say, they didn’t like that and it made them mad; it made them furious. But he had to share his convictions.

What are the convictions that you have that you want to be sure that you are passing along to your children and your grandchildren, to the next generation?

In that same book, The Heart of the Father, John Trent shares that he was doing a family-life conference and a lady came up and said, “I want to tell you about my son and my grandchildren.”

I guess when people want to tell you about their grandchildren, you think the pictures are coming just right after that, but she didn’t show any pictures.

She said, “My son has a five-year old daughter and a two-year old daughter, and the two-year old is really terrible, in those terrible twos.”

He says that if a grandmother tells you they are really terrible, they really are terrible. But she says that her son has made it a practice that he takes the five-year old out for a date every now and then, mostly just to let her know that she is special.

The grandmother said, “He took the two-year old out for the first date a few weeks ago — went out to a little fast food place — and they had breakfast. He began by saying, ‘Now, Sara, I want you to know that you are very special to your mom and dad. We prayed for you and believe that you are an answer to prayer. We are very proud of you and we love you very much.’ Something to that effect, and then he started eating. But then this little hand reached over and put a hand on his hand and said, ‘Longer, Daddy. Longer.’ So, he quit eating and he started talking about a few other things — the reasons she was special, and then started eating, and the hand came back and she said, ‘Longer, Daddy. Longer.’ This went on for about four times.”

She really had the need to hear from her father that she was special. He didn’t get to eat much that day, but he knew that he had gotten his message across, for several days later, as the grandmother relates, he heard his daughter just spontaneously go up to Mama and say, “You know, Mama, I am very special, because Daddy told me that.”

One of the greatest convictions that we can pass along to people is how precious they are in God’s sight, that God loves them unconditionally, with an everlasting love, every person on the face of the Earth, but especially that person that we are in the presence with.

And then, there is the conclusion of the witness, the conclusion of the witness as we face death. I struggle with the right ‘C’ here. It could be the continuance of the witness as well, because we’re looking at how the witness faces death and the kind of memory that they leave behind.

I told you that they didn’t like Stephen’s sermon at all. They understood it very well and that’s why they didn’t like it, because they were ready to kill him. It says:

But what does Stephen do?

They couldn’t stand that.

That young man named Saul was giving approval to his death. He was a Pharisee, a student of Gamaliel, one of the great persecutors of the Christian faith. But I believe that Stephen’s influence on him was to have eternal consequences, to have eternal significance. When you see someone face their accusers the way Stephen did, when you see the kind of witness that he had, when you see someone dying and forgiving those that have killed them — it makes an impression. What is going on in this man’s life?

So, it’s no wonder that in the next chapter, Saul, on the road to Damascus, sees this light and hears a voice, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?”

And he says, “Well, who are you, Lord?”

“I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.”

He was blinded for three days, and then he received his sight and went on to be the great missionary, the Apostle Paul, I believe primarily because of Stephen’s witness for Jesus Christ.

What do we learn from those who are willing to die for their faith? Sometimes we are intimidated by them. We remember that of the twelve disciples, Judas of course took his life. John lived to old age, but those other ten died for their faith. We think of those Christians who died in the Coliseum under Nero’s persecution. We think of modern day martyrs like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others.

James Howell, in his book on Servants, Misfits and Martyrs, says it this way:

He shares the example of the great writer, Henri Nouwen. Henri Nouwen, who, in his late fifties, suffered an accident where a van slid on the pavement and actually hit him. He was hospitalized for many weeks and almost died. It was out of the near-death experience, as happens oftentimes, he really began to reflect on the question of whether he was really ready to die. And he wrote a little book called Our Greatest Gift, which were reflections on his near-death experience, and said that oftentimes what we need to do in preparing to die, is not so much busy ourselves trying to deny that it is ever going to come, but really to nurture our relationship with God and our relationships with other people, and as he says, “be more like the trapeze artist.” What does this have to do with anything? Well, he began to know some trapeze artists, the Rodleighs, and once he asked the chief of the flying Rodleighs how he managed to fly through the air and still catch on to the other guy on the swing.

Here was the answer of the trapeze person: “The secret is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me and pull me safely over the apron behind the catchbar. The worse thing the flyer can do is to try to catch the catcher. I’m not supposed to catch Joe; it is Joe’s task to catch me. If I grab Joe’s wrists, I might break them or he might break mine and that would be the end for both of us. A flyer must fly; a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms, that this catcher will be there for him.”

For Henry Nouwen this was a vivid picture that, in my life of faith, I’m flying, and I’m counting on the Lord Jesus, when death comes, to catch me and to bring me home, and I can trust Him in that. I don’t need to fear death any more.

The way we face our death will be remembered and God will use it, that influence. On this Fathers’ Day we remember those who have influenced us and we think of the influence we would like to have. This day I am grateful for the father that God blessed me with. When I think back on his life, I think that I learned a great deal from him. I learned a lot about a work ethic.

He had his own furniture business and he allowed me (sometimes I didn’t always want to) to work for him from the time I was little, and the time I got big enough to carry his furniture around, he used to be fond of saying, “Always grip the furniture on the outside when you go through the doors because you can always grow more skin but you can’t grow more desk.”

And so I always felt that kind of let you know where you stood. But I learned a lot just by watching the way he handled himself and his own attitude and the pride he took in his work. He enjoyed it. In fact, he was working part time up until age seventy-five, seventy-six, as long as his health would allow him.

I learned a lot about family from my father. I learned that his children were important to him. Sunday afternoons, oftentimes, we went swimming. I remember those days fondly. I remember going to a Braves game with him, just me and him, and remembering that he was not a sports fan, but his youngest son was quite a sports fan, and so, I remember that; he would take time for that.

I also remember the kind of grandparent he was and I used to see the way he would deal with my children and think, you know, boy, you are seeing the mellower side of Dad than I saw. And I look forward to the day when I can get the M&Ms out like he used to do, with my grandchildren. I especially remember his commitment to my mother. My last memories of him are of him in the hospital, holding my mother’s hand, and of those two saying goodbye after over fifty years together. You don’t forget those things.

But I especially remember today that this was a man of quiet Christian faith. He was not outspoken about his faith, but this was a man who made sure that his children went to Church, made sure I didn’t go home and watch football; that I stayed, because, I could have gone home; I was close enough; I could sneak out.

But I remember sometimes, I just wanted to stop and say ‘hey’ before I went to bed, and I would see my father kneeling beside the bed, praying. I remember one time at annual conference, his roommate, who was a Methodist preacher, told me: “You know, I roomed with your dad in college, and before he’d go to bed at night, I want you to know, he would get down on his knees and he would pray.” I’ll always remember that.

What kind of influence will you leave behind? Stephen was a man full of faith, full of the Holy Spirit, who had a great influence in his day and in the days to come.

Let us pray:

Our Lord, we thank You today for those who have a good witness for You; Lord, for those who have inspired us; for the cloud of witnesses; for those saints who are running their course right now. We pray, O God, that you will empower us by the Holy Spirit, that you will help us — not to have a perfect witness — but, Lord, to have a good witness, a consistent life that it is obvious that Christ is alive and lives in us. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.