Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I now can sing Since I've been redeemed I'm on the everlasting, everlasting rock I faith in Christ my redeemer King I'm on the everlasting, everlasting rock Then row, row, pillows, row I'm on the everlasting rock of ages Roll, roll, billows roll I'm on the everlasting rock.
Ask me why I stand to sing what glad tidings these lips bring I proclaim to you one thing There is a kingdom coming Let this joyous anthem roll Stirring peace within each soul his plan's in place God's in control There is a kingdom coming Every wrong will be made right all that's faith will be made Sight and of shadows only light There is a kingdom coming Here amid these troubled times Evil plots its dark designs but soon all faithless hearts will find There is a kingdom coming Every wrong will be made right all that's faith will be made sile and of shadow's only light There is a kingdom coming so come Lord Jesus Let all who hear sing Come, Lord Jesus May the day be near when every wrong will be made right all that's faith will be made Sight end of shadows only light There is a kingdom coming There is a kingdom coming.
We praise Thee, O God, our Redeemer Creator in grateful devotion Our tribute we bring we lay it before thee we kneel and adore thee we bless thy holy name Thy praises we sing.
We worship the God of our fathers.
When perils o' ertake us Escape Thou wilt make us and with Thy help, O Lord Our battles we win.
With voices united Our praises we offer to thee Greater of the glad anthems we raised Thy strong will guide us Our God is beside us To Thee our great Redeemer Forever be praise.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Welcome to the Voice of Hope. I'm your host, Anthony High.
Today we continue our study in the Book of Acts.
Joining me again is Jeremy Sensnick, a team member here at Heralds of Hope.
In our last episode, we began contrasting the early church leaders with the religious establishment of the day.
In this episode, we go deeper into the systems and giftings that allowed the church to increase, while also examining the political culture of the Sadducees. We'll also explore how primary loyalty, driven by either fear of man or fear of God, determines the path of integrity or the path of control.
Join us as we finish our exploration into these powerful themes in Acts chapters 5 and 6.
[00:05:56] Speaker C: So let's take a look. Do some thinking about the religious leaders, the cultural religious leaders The Sadducees, the scriptures call them.
They were the antithesis, complete opposite of what the Church leaders were.
They were on the defense.
They had a kingdom to protect. They had power to hang on to,
[00:06:20] Speaker B: if memory serves me correctly. They were in alliance with Rome and they were Jewish leaders who kind of maintained control because they were in cahoots with Rome, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, there was also Herodians in there which were maybe even more Roman.
[00:06:39] Speaker C: It was a. It was a big cultural mix, a cast cultural casserole, if you will. And these guys definitely were. They were beneficial. It was kind of a symbiotic relationship between the religious leaders in Rome, or Rome wanted control, control of the nation, control of the region.
And by keeping the religious leaders there, they were able to keep the people quieter, kind of keep them on their side. And the religious leaders also then benefited from the power that they gained from the Roman legions controlling the people, although they still hated them and they wanted to be free of them there. So it was a very, I guess you could say a two faced relationship.
And that produced a lot of conflicted ideals, conflicts of interest, a lot of facades. They had to be one thing to one person, another thing to another person. And so they got used to and acclimated to being duplicitous, being two faced.
And so instead of being pure, these guys, I mean, they were, again, they were the antithesis of the Church. The Church was pure. Think Ananias and Sapphira.
These guys were trained culturally to wear a facade.
They were, they lacked integrity, at least in our eyes as we look at them. But that, remember, we're looking at them through the lenses of scripture, written given by the Holy Spirit.
So again, we're looking at them through loyalty that stems from our fear of God. They were looking at themselves through their own lenses with loyalty to what they thought was God, but actually was determined by their fear of losing control. The fear of the people, the things they feared actually pointed to what their real God was.
And so these guys lacked integrity.
A culture that's more concerned about who is right rather than what is right is a culture that we would call political. It's a political culture.
It doesn't matter so much what the best thing is. It matters about whether you agree with what I'm saying.
And it's a culture that's just, there's no integrity there.
There's truth then absolute truth. God's truth then becomes an enemy. It becomes a liability.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: Gamaliel did kind of a dangerous thing, saying we might be wrong. But nobody actually acknowledged in that, wait, we are wrong.
[00:09:28] Speaker C: What he did was not only giving space the idea that we might be wrong, but they might be right. And I'm not sure which was worse for these guys in that political culture, whether being wrong was worse or their enemies actually being right was almost maybe worse than them being wrong.
The fear of others was, was what ruled the day. And so others became the fear of man controlled what they did. Verse 26 says they feared the people. Ultimately, they feared losing power.
And that defensive misplaced loyalty culture is motivated by a survival based fear.
Fear also prevents those from within from speaking up when they do see the truth. Like you mentioned, when Gamaliel spoke up, no one actually said, you know what, Gamaliel, I think you're right, and did not record it anyway.
And eventually we see that they, with Stephen, they completely disregarded in the moment of their, their anger and their panic.
The anger was an outworking, a practical outworking of their fear. And in the moment of their anger, driven by their fear of losing control, they just completely threw out what Gamaliel said and did what they needed to do in their minds for survival, for protecting the power that they had.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: And in that case, it led them to murder.
[00:11:01] Speaker C: Absolutely. So violating their own ethics, violating their own laws, what they did, they, they knew what they did wasn't right.
So we have a lack of integrity on their part. And instead of passionate preaching, they were using then command and control they, they gave the disciples.
Winding back from Stephen, thinking about the disciples and the apostles, they said, okay, we arrested you guys, we want you to stop preaching. They didn't tell them they couldn't believe what they believed anymore. They didn't tell them they couldn't love Jesus. They just said, stop preaching. So it was sort of compromise.
They wanted the disciples to stop impacting, stop reaching out, stop letting the world know that they actually believed what they believed.
My question for us is, would we have to be told to stop telling others about Jesus?
You know, when I got engaged, it wasn't hard to tell people that I got engaged. It was kind of enjoyable.
Or when I started dating. Think back to those memories and you know, there's been a lot of times in my life that God's had to convict me, that I've lost that first love for Him.
Inviting me back to centering on Jesus and stepping into that experience and it is so fascinating. Again, I'm going, I don't want to beat a dead horse here. But going back to that thing of experiencing Him a Living relationship with Jesus is what produced the passionate preaching.
And it's that absence of that experience with Christ. They killed him. That there was a deadness that came into these leaders. And they had to keep piling on wrongs in order to keep their story, their narrative going. That they just eliminated truth as it came up. An inconvenient truth would keep resurfacing. And so they had to use their command control.
And when that didn't work, then they resorted to murder.
They threw out, as we mentioned, even their own laws.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: What I've noticed here is that by the disciples obeying God didn't make their life easy. It actually made it harder. And they received suffering for that. And we're promised that several times throughout Scripture. But I was just thinking about that here. When they did what they were supposed to, they suffered for it.
[00:13:40] Speaker C: Absolutely, absolutely. Paul said, if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we're of all men most miserable. I don't. That doesn't give us license to go around and be miserable whiners. But there is that reality that following Christ, taking that path of integrity usually creates a certain level of discomfort for us. For others.
It's not the easy path. It's not the path of least resistance.
So as we think about these sets of two leaders, I want to just bring out a diagram here again, going back to that fear, that primary fear determines our primary loyalty. What is our loyalty? Today?
Our loyalty is a big issue.
As I've studied this passage, it's just jumped out at me that our loyalty, again, is the lens through which we determine truth. And it's the reason that we have these two sets of religious leaders. They could look at each other and say the same things about each other.
The cultural religious leaders could look at the church leaders and say, those guys are men who lack integrity. They're fighting against God. They're not trustworthy. They're men of low character because they were interpreting or determining truth, interpreting truth through their lenses of their primary, primary loyalty.
Now, I'm sure they thought their primary loyalty was to God.
But in reality, when you look at, again, our actions say more about our beliefs than our voice will. Our actions say more about our belief than what we will be able to verbalize.
And as you look at their actions, it says they feared the people.
Are we aware of. Of what is driving our actions? Those guys made those decisions out of their fear of the people, out of their fear of losing power. Power. And ultimately they made their decisions based out of their desire to survive and Protect themselves.
The church leaders on the other hand, operated more with a triangular view of this. They, they realized that it's not primarily about protecting the culture or the organization of the church.
It's about loyalty, number one, first and foremost to God.
And it's out of that, that loyalty to God that I determine what is truth. That's, you know, nothing else matters. God's truth is the only truth that matters.
And as I understand loyalty, as I understand truth out of that loyalty, it enables me to identify what is character in this person's life, what is character in my life, what is character in Ananias and survivors life or a lack thereof.
And that is then what determines our courses of action. And so it's that they didn't divorce themselves from connection to the church. You have this diagram.
It wasn't a linear thing of my loyalty to the organization and through the organization to God, but it was actually a loyalty first to God and then out of that there was an accountability to the brotherhood. That's, that's the healthy, that's the biblical model.
Because when we get that linear loyalty and our loyalty is first of all to the organization through the organization to God, our primary loyalty is then actually not to God, it's to the organization.
And that messes up a lot of things because that starts determining truth. And then we need to align truth, align narratives to fit our loyalty.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: If you tell the truth, you don't have to keep track of the lies you told.
[00:17:51] Speaker C: Oh, it is so much simpler just to live those live lives of integrity.
But simple doesn't mean easy.
Recently I had this really brilliant thought. The reason hard decisions are so hard is because they're not easy.
The reason hard decisions are hard is because they're not easy. And it's not the decision that's difficult, it's the action that that decision requires of me. That's why it's not easy.
Most times the most difficult decisions I've faced weren't difficult because I didn't know how to make the decision. They were difficult because the decision that I instinctively knew, led by the scripture, by the spirit of God, required of me a price tag that I wasn't sure I was willing to pay.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And then that's where you get into that dilemma. If you take the easy route, yeah, it may not cost as much now, but the damage usually comes later.
You know, Ananias and Sapphira face their consequences immediately.
And maybe if we face them that way it'd be different. I don't know.
[00:19:05] Speaker C: Yeah, you know, but it certainly, certainly would.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: We think twice. And we should think twice.
[00:19:12] Speaker C: We really should.
So integrity does matter. Some of the key takeaways for me from this study, integrity matters. And I've, I'm, I've been passionate about that. I haven't diminished that passion. But I've realized through this study that our integrity again is determined through our lenses of loyalty.
Our primary loyalty is determined by our primary fear. And so a question again is, are we God fearing? It's pretty simple. We all like to say yes. But again, our actions, the old adage, actions speak louder than words.
Our deepest beliefs are most clearly exemplified by our responses in the storm. Our storms are not departure from our internal beliefs, they're exposures of our internal beliefs.
So again, the key takeaway for me though from this session back to Peter's statement, we must obey God rather than man. I would suggest out of that that we obey him based on our love for him, our fear of Him. And that determines our loyalty. Our loyalty then determines integrity, truth and action.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: This concludes our two part study of Acts 5, 6.
These chapters really highlight the internal motivations that shape our outward actions.
One key takeaway is the contrast between linear loyalty and the biblical model of loyalty.
When our primary allegiance is to an organization or to self preservation, then truth becomes a liability.
But when our loyalty is first to God and we walk in accountability with others, we're able to maintain integrity even at a great cost.
And that cost is real. Difficult decisions often come with sacrifice.
Yet as seen in the actions of the religious leaders, the cost of compromise is far greater.
Their pursuit of control ultimately led to violence.
In contrast, the apostles modeled faithful obedience, declaring we must obey God rather than men.
Before we close, consider this sobering one in three people around the world lack access to Bible resources.
This means pastors, ministry leaders and seekers are often left without the tools they need to grow and disciple others.
At Heralds of Hope, we believe everyone should have access to Bible teaching and discipleship resources in their own language.
One way we're responding to this is through Hope for Today, a Bible teaching program that's now available in over 40 languages.
Listen to this testimony from a listener in East Africa.
As I listen to the program by hiding myself with my family because of persecution, this radio program is my small Bible school where I learn the message of hope and I get encouragement and motivation from this radio ministry, which is very interesting and restores the lives of the listeners.
If you've been encouraged by this study in Acts we, we'd love to hear from you.
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Until then, may God's Word strengthen your faith and remind you that his work in the world is far from finished.
Thank you for listening to the Voice of Hope.
[00:23:43] Speaker A: God of the Father's Almighty Hand.
Beauty of the story O shining worlds in splendor through the stars Our grateful songs before thy throne arise.
Thy love divine hath led us.
As our chosen way.
Represh Thy people on their lead us from thy to never ending day.
Far away in the depths of my spirit today Rosa Melody Sweeter than sweeter than song in celestial like strains it unceasingly falls O' er my soul I can laugh and confident it calm Peace, peace, wonderful peace Peace coming down from the tantrum of Father above Sweep over my spirit forever I pray in fathomless billows of love what a treasure I have in this wonder buried deep in the heart of my heart of my soul so secure that no power can mine it away While the years of eternity O beauty, peace, wonderful peace Coming down from the Father of the Father above Sweep over my spirit forever I pray in fathomless pillows in fathomless billows of love.
