My witnesses

My witnesses

“But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)

Immediately before the Lord Jesus returned to heaven, He focussed the hearts of His disciples on being witnesses to Him. He promised that this witness would extend to the end of the earth. Until Acts chapter 8, the young church was centred in Jerusalem and was blessed enormously by God. But gradually, issues began to arise. The first problem was covetousness, when Ananias and Sapphira pretended to give the full value of a property they sold to the service of God. Immediately before that happened, Barnabas provides an example of faithful sacrificial giving. Later, grumbling emerged over the distribution of funds to widows. God brings forward seven faithful men to address the problem. They included Stephen and Philip.

Stephen was a great witness to the Lord Jesus. It cost him his life and led to a great persecution (Acts 8:1). It seemed things were coming apart at the seams. But where were the disciples scattered? To the very places Jesus said they would be His witnesses: Judea and Samaria. Everywhere these ordinary saints of God went they preached the word of God (Acts 8:4).

Seven men were chosen, in the apostles’ words, to “serve tables” (Acts 6:2). They included Stephen, the first martyr of the church, and Philip, the only man called an evangelist in the New Testament. I have often thought of how quickly the apostles overlooked the importance of serving tables. The Lord Jesus rose from a table to kneel and wash the feet of His disciples, to teach them to follow Him in lowly, loving and costly service. It was tables that Stephen and Philip were chosen to serve. I must never forget the example the Lord Jesus gave.

The Lord Jesus used the martyrdom of Stephen to fulfil His precise promise that His disciples would be His witnesses in Judea and Samaria. Philip was the man at the centre of the work of God in Samaria. God empowered him to preach Christ and perform miracles. As a result, the whole city rang with the joy of salvation. Amid this vast work, Philip was called by an angel of the Lord to go to Gaza, a desert place. To what purpose? So that in the impeccable timing of God, one influential man would be led to Christ by Philip and take the gospel into Ethiopia. Christ was beginning to take His witnesses to the end of the earth.

Let us pray always to be close to the Saviour. And let us also pray today that, through the witness of the ordinary lives of God’s people and those gifted by Him in evangelism, the Lord Jesus will open hearts and fill them with the joy of salvation that filled Samaria and the heart of the Ethiopian eunuch.