"God's Will for Your Life"

A sermon on Acts 8:26-40

96. "God's Will for Your Life"

I have been invited to preach again. As when I have done this previously, these are my pulpit notes, a kind of minimalist, stripped down text with all of the important phrasing and transitions worked out. What happens from the pulpit will bear a loose resemblance to what is here. It would take 16 minutes to read out loud, but the sermon will likely be 20-25 minutes in length. Preaching is always a live event. If, like before, I can secure the audio, I will post that later.

Many of us wrestle with the question of meaning and purpose. What is my life for? What is my purpose? Being part of the Christian community is supposed to help with this, right?

It doesn’t help that we live in a culture that is all about planning your future. From a young age we are supposed to be directing ourselves towards a career. Your life is supposed to have a plan. Go to this school, enrol for this program, get a degree, get a trade, go out in the workforce and establish yourself, get that first big promotion by age 30. Make partner by 40.

And then there is marriage and kids. Maybe hold off until after college or university. Get married after that. Again, get established in the workforce and then start having kids. How many? And for women there is a whole separate set of pressures. Career or kids? Can you do both? Will you be sacrificing personal goals to have kids? Or is being a good mother you aspiration as a woman? Which path is appropriate for a Christian woman?

And then there are all those bucket list plans. Run your first marathon. Climb a mountain. Spend a year in Europe.

Where does God fit into all of this?

What is God’s plan for your life?

We kind of look at this way. Maybe God will give you a career. Maybe it is a role in the church. We often think of God’s designs for our lives much like we do our five-year and ten-year career plan, our personal life goals and our bucket list.

Give me the goal, God. Sketch out the plan for me. Once I know what you want, I can break it down and start planning. I have the spreadsheet all ready to go. My action items and deliverables list are just waiting for you to give me the plan, Lord.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. We chuckle a bit, but this is kind of how we think about “God’s plan for our lives.”

It works that way in the church as well. Often, we want God to give us some big new direction that we can then break down and plan it all out, from timelines, to fundraising, to programming, to staffing and volunteers. We expect that God will give us the big items and then we will work out how to make it happen.

In practice, it often just looks like a run of the mill project planning process borrowed from the corporate world, glossed over with Christian language. We set the goals and plan it all out but do in God’s name.

We could be doing a lot worse, but I think we all kind of know deep down that this is not really how “God’s will for our lives” works. But this planning and process mentality is everywhere in our culture. We deal with it every day at work. It’s only natural that we would carry this way of thinking into the church and our relationship with God and kind of expect that this is just the way it works with God too, right?

The passage we have in front of opens up to us a very different way of understanding how God works and how we are supposed to understand our role in God’s work.

There is no doubt that he calls people to big works and lifelong goals. God called Paul to bring the gospel to the gentiles. That is about as big as it gets. But on a day-to-day basis, while he was led by big goals or a big idea, Paul’s day-to-day resembled this passage much more than it did any modern corporate planning process.

The story here in Acts 8, familiar to many of us from Sunday school, has a number of layers and threads and we will try to tease them out along the way.

The passage opens up boldly, and immediately we know something is about to happen. An angel of the Lord speaks to Philip. Elsewhere in the passage, it mentions the Spirit speaking to Philip. One of the tasks of the angels is to be messengers of God. Whether it is an angel or the Spirit directly, it doesn’t really matter. God is speaking to you whether it is the Spirit or one of his angels speaking to you.

For many of us, this makes us a little uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t. Jesus himself tells us that children have angels who always see the face of God. In our modern world we sometimes don’t know what to do with this. We Protestants like our faith practical and down to earth.

But think about it. We know that the devil is real, and he has fallen angels in his service that seek to do us harm. Why is it so hard to think that there are not angels tasked with protecting us and speaking to us on God’s behalf.

When we pray for protection and aid from God, is it not possible that this comes in the form of angels? So why wouldn’t we then ask God to set angels over us and our loved ones to protect them from the enemy?

So, as the story opens, the angel brings a message from God. Go south on the road, the desert road, the one that goes down from Jerusalem.

God’s will for Philip’s life has become clear! Go for a walk. And God even gives directions. Drop everything, Philip and go out for a walk.

Two things here. The first, is that we need to be close enough to God in prayer and in the Word, that we learn how to listen to the voice of God. The best way to train ourselves to hear that voice is to immerse ourselves in the scriptures. And even if its something random – like “go for a walk” – we will recognize it as God’s voice because of our time in prayer and in the Word.

The second thing is that we need to be ready to drop everything and go with God. If you really want to be doing the will of God, I guarantee there will be a prompting at some point that will force you to give up something important that you want to do or think that you need to do. At the same time we have to trust that God is a God of order and not chaos. God is not going to make your life totally random and unpredictable.

But, if you want to draw close to him and be used by him, if you want your life to have meaning and purpose, then when the call comes, you need to answer with a “yes.” If you want God to use you in making his plan a reality, can God trust you to be there when he needs you? Like the song, are you just one call away? Can God pick up the phone, call you, and know that you will answer? We talk a lot about us trusting in God, but can God trust us?

This really is so vital. Are we learning how to listen to God? And can God trust us to answer the call when he does speak to us?

We would much rather God give us a project that we can do on our own time and in our own way so that it doesn’t interrupt our tidy, well planned and organized lives. But it doesn’t really work that way. If you read the scriptures, more often than not, the work of God has the character of “go take a walk” than it looks like a five-year corporate planning process, both individually as well as communally.

As Philip is walking along the way, he encounters an Ethiopian. He is a eunuch, and in this case, it almost certainly means that he was castrated. This is important because this would prevent him from full worship in the temple. This is why he came to Jerusalem…to worship. And yet, he couldn’t fully do the one thing he came all that way to do. He is an important man. He is sitting in his chariot reading the book of Isaiah. And like most people in those days, he was reading out loud.

Philip gets his next prompting from the Spirit. Go to that chariot and stand near it. This is the will of God for Philip’s life. Go stand by that chariot over there. Philip doesn’t just walk, he runs over and hears the man reading and asks him, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The Ethiopian responds, “How can I, unless someone explains it to me?” He invites Philip to join him in the chariot.

At this point we understand what all the prompting was about. God was bringing Philip here, in this moment, to speak to this man, to explain the meaning of a passage from the prophecies of Isaiah.

To understand fully the importance of what is going on here, we need to know that Ethiopia was a land well outside the Roman world and had an almost mythical kind of reputation during this period. Ethiopia was considered the “ends of the earth.” In terms of the framing of the broader story in Acts, the disciples were commissioned to bear witness to what they had heard and seen in Jesus, to the people of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

This man is kind of in between being a Jew and being a Gentile. He can’t fully convert because of his condition as a eunuch. He can’t be circumcised, and so it was forbidden for eunuchs to come fully into the temple. So here is a man who wants to worship God, but can’t, a man who is kind of half in and half out.

He is reading from Isaiah 53:7-8 from the Greek scriptures, the Septuagint. Even though the surrounding text talks about the substitutionary atonement that Jesus would make for us in his sacrifice, this section focuses in on the unjust suffering which Jesus endured on our behalf. His question becomes the stepping stone for Philip to explain the good news of Jesus using the prophecy of Isaiah as the jumping off point.

What is interesting is that this story is told with a very similar structure to that of Jesus meeting the disciples on the road to Emmaus, a story told in Luke’s gospel, also the author of Acts. And just as that encounter was used by the resurrected Jesus to open the scriptures fully to the disciples, so too this encounter was used to open the scriptures to the man who would symbolically carry the good news to what was considered the ends of the earth. All these different layers to the text convey to us that something important is happening here

As they travelled along the eunuch sees a body of water and asks to be baptized. So, they stop, and he is baptized. This man’s story begins with him earnestly trying to worship God, traveling a great distance, from what was considered the ends of the earth, to come and worship. But he can’t because he is a eunuch. Now, on his way home, because of Christ, he has now been baptized and thus fully included in the people of God. He now bears the mark of the new covenant in Christ when he could not receive the mark of the old covenant.

Now we have arrived at the point where everything comes together. Think of how much God was doing to make this happen and how much was potentially going to come out of this encounter. Here was a man of influence who was previously prevented from worshiping God now brought into a saving and covenantal relationship with God in Christ.

But God was able to do this amazing work because Philip listened to an angel speaking to him a word from the Lord. At this prompting, he went and took a walk and the rest is, as they say, history.

And like the conclusion to the story of Jesus meeting the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the Spirit took Philip away and brought him to Azotus. The Ethiopian man went on his way rejoicing.

This is how God does it. For individuals and for churches. This is how he gets things done. Will they be as dramatic as this? Maybe, but probably not. But it all works the same.

The call for us as a people, as a community and as individuals, is to be immersed in the Word and in prayer, learning to listen to the voice of God so that when we get our prompting, when the Spirit or one God’s angels speaks to us, we are ready to go and do what God would have us do.

Remember, God is at work all the time all around us. He is waiting for us to make ourselves ready and draw near to him. If you want your life to have meaning, if you want to be used by God, as persons and as a church community, this is how it happens. Time and time again, this is how God does it.