God Uses Each of Us if We Let Him
Acts 8:26-31
Dr. Thomas Judge Boone, PhD
Delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Mobile AL, Jan. 20, 2008

Thirteen years ago I was an Associate Pastor for education in a well-to-do church in New Jersey. People there mainly worked in Manhattan as bankers, brokers, or lawyers and were accustomed to planned living. If you’ve had the opportunity to work with anyone from that area of the country you might know what I’m talking about. People plan for nearly everything, and anything done last minute was by accident. It wasn’t just that people had plans, but that their affection for the plan was nearly a form of worship in that Type Triple A culture.

One of my committees was the children’s ministry committee and on it were ten mothers, who in their professional lives had been bankers, lawyers, and managers of one sort or another. They weren’t planning for the VBS three months down the road, but for the VBS one year down the road. For fun I decided to shake things up a bit and throw them a curve at one of our meetings. I’d been hearing that people wanted a new event for their kids so I said that we should go for it. They got excited about the idea, too, and started thinking about how to do it, who would do it, and what needed to be done to make it work well next year. You’d have thought I knocked someone’s rare Boehme porcelain bird onto a concrete floor when I said, “I wasn’t talking about next year. I’m talking about us doing this next month.”

As organized and orderly as it was to develop good plans, the challenge for them was to know that God could work in the spontaneous, unplanned moments just as well as, and sometimes better, than in the well-laid plans of humans. When everything goes to plan we have ourselves to pat on the back. When God works despite the plan, we have only God to thank. It’s a spiritual lesson that all children of God must come to know at some point in our lives. But, when God upsets the so-carefully-laid-out apple cart of our lives, it can be a frustrating thing, can’t it?

Things were going along so well ... until you got that diagnosis. Things were fine ... until your children announced their divorce. It was all working like clockwork ... until that electrical fire destroyed your house. You felt so good about your faith ... until you stopped hearing God’s voice. Unexpected moments are opportunities to learn about God in new and challenging ways to stretch our faith.

I think most of us know this truth in our minds, but when it happens it can be a different story altogether. There may be a lot of reasons for this, but one thing I notice about Christians in lots of different places is that faith has become akin to a mathematical formula.

What I mean here is that we’ve been trained by our religious culture to equate being a good Christian with doing certain things. It takes going to church once, maybe twice or even three times, a week. It takes going to Sunday School and mid-week studies if we have them. It takes a worship service that makes us feel like we’ve been to a Presbyterian Church. And what does that mean? When I’ve asked people what it means I usually hear things like this: a good sermon, familiar hymns, good organ music, a creed, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to do it all before the Methodists and Baptists get out!

We live in a formula-driven culture where getting ahead means doing certain things. And it’s in this type of culture that being a good Christian can be reduced easily to reading the Bible during the week, praying at meals or at other times, making sure we’re inviting others to our church, and helping people out when they need it. In other words, if we think that faith means having to do certain things then we’ve fallen for the same illusion about faith and God that so many of my friends in New Jersey had done.

If this is your picture of faith then Acts 8 has something to say to you. Go ahead and plan, but realize that God may shatter your plan to do His will.

In Acts 8 this happens to Philip three times. Philip was one of the original twelve apostles and none of them ventured outside Palestine to share their faith at the start of the early church. Christianity began as a new expression of faith for people in the Jewish tradition. There were certain things that this meant. For example, people still went to synagogue because they were Jews still. People were open to Gentiles joining the church, but only if they had adopted Jewish customs. They worshiped at the temple whenever possible and they had fellowship together in the same way that other faithful Jews did. One of the few tangible differences between Christians and Jews at this early stage was that Christians focused their religious learning on the apostles’ teachings about Jesus Christ, and a lot of this meant reinterpreting our Old Testament in light of Jesus, just like what Philip did with the eunuch. Granted over time these teachings got them into trouble, but they were still practicing their faith as Jews.

So, getting back to Philip, when Saul started persecuting the early church God used that as His opportunity for his followers to fulfill the Great Commission. Wherever Christians scattered as a result of persecution, there spread the good news of Christ. Philip, uprooted from Jerusalem due to persecution, found himself doing new things in new places with new people. God shattered his expectations of how things should be with faith.

The first group of people that woke Philip up to the spontaneous nature of God were the Samaritans. We know enough about them for me not to go into detail other than to say that they were outside the norm. They had no worldly influence, so these weren’t the first group of people anyone would have thought to take the message of Christ to. They couldn’t help with the growth of the early Church because it was supposed to be a Jewish thing. But, God apparently had different plans. As Luke presents it in Acts, the first group of people outside Jerusalem to hear the good news of Christ and to receive it wholeheartedly were the Samaritans. And it was Philip first, followed by Peter and John, whom God called to the task.

Can you relate at all with how Philip must’ve felt? Go where, God? To them, Lord? You’ve got to be kidding! But imagine how he must’ve felt after he’d obeyed God, went out of his plans, and heard their response. Luke puts it this way in verse 6. “The crowds with one accord listened eagerly to what Philip was saying, bearing and seeing the signs he did. There was great joy in that city.” And I imagine that there was a sense of awe in Philip, Peter, and John, too. When we obey God by following him beyond our plans great things will happen not only in those to whom God sends us us, but in us as well.

The second surprise for Philip comes after Peter and John take over his ministry in Samaria. Philip was doing a great thing among the Samaritans, but then all of a sudden in verse 26 God tells Philip to leave and go south, toward Egypt into Gaza. The only response we see from Philip is in verse 27, “so he got up and went.” I love that verse because I really think that’s how simple it was for Philip by this time in his faith journey. God had shown Philip through the Samaritans that when we respond to God’s call, regardless of where it takes us or among whom it puts us, God’s going to work miracles.

God wants us to learn the same lesson. The more we see about how God works in surprising ways at unplanned times the more we’re able to trust Him rather than our plans. We begin to see that God uses us despite our plans, or that He uses others in our lives when we thought we were the ones who were going to do all the teaching.

When it comes to this second surprising spontaneous encounter, God has in mind for Philip to take His good news to an Ethiopian eunuch. It’s not an episode in the Bible that we hear much about after the fact. All we know from Acts is that Philip’s words to the eunuch are precisely what he needed to hear and it happened at just the right time. How incredible it must’ve been for Philip to see God working in him in the life of this stranger. He was working so much so that without thought in verse 36 the eunuch said, “Look, here’s water! What’s to prevent me from being baptized?” No preparation, no classes, nothing but a genuine, heartfelt response to Jesus Christ and a little bit of water along the side of the road.

You know, we don’t hear about what that did for Philip, but reading between the lines, here’s what I can discern. Philip responded in obedience to the work of the Spirit in someone’s life. His goal was to obey God, which meant sharing the good news and then following it up with an authentic blessing for what the Spirit was doing in the eunuch’s life. And then, without a word, Philip leaves to do even more of God’s work. He didn’t take credit for the eunuch’s conversion, he didn’t hang around to make sure the eunuch got it all theologically correct. Philip trusted God to do His good work after he had done what he was supposed to do. Evidently God did some great things in that eunuch because the Ethiopian church was one of the strongest Christian communities in the known world for hundreds of years. But, it all began with an unplanned act of spiritual obedience on the part of Philip.

In the Old Testament there’s a verse I’ve chosen to highlight this morning. “People whom I had not known served me.” Now what David meant in these words is that despite his lowly state God elevated him to a place of honor as a king. Despite everyone’s plans for his life as a shepherd boy, God had other plans for David. God planned for David to come into contact with many people even from other nations, who would not disdain him as a measly shepherd boy, but serve him as a king. I’m using these words slightly differently, but with the same principle in mind.

Let God use you outside of your plans and, like David, you’ll discover that a life with God is a life of one blessing after another. Allow the Holy Spirit to shatter your frames and your boundaries, and you’ll learn how trustworthy the Spirit is. Open yourselves to the awesome work He wants to do through you in unexpected ways, and you’ll discover that your faith reaches new heights. Open yourselves to being God’s mouthpiece at a critical point in someone’s life, even a stranger, and you’ll learn how awesome this faith really is beyond our well laid out plans, as Presbyterians so love to do. This is the faith to which we’ve been called. This is the mission into which the Spirit wants to lead us. I’m not suggesting that we dump our plans, but that we never be controlled by them. Let us never be so stuck in the mud in our faith that we think God can work only in our comfort zones or according to our plans, because apparently we serve a God who will shatter our plans to bring others and ourselves into a deeper relationship with Him. Meditate on these words as a church whom God continues to call to be a living witness of Jesus Christ. Hallelujah. Amen.