You're listening to audio from Faith Church, located on the north side of Indianapolis. If you'd like to check out more information about our church and ministry, you can find us at faithchurchindy.com. Now, here's the teaching. Do you remember a time before data breaches? Some of you do.

You remember a time before social media and ubiquitous cell phones everywhere? You remember a time back when you had to have this box that you pushed a button on, and it took a picture. It was magic somehow. I don't know how it worked. And then you took it somewhere and gave it to someone, and you paid them money, and in a week, you could go back and pick up that image, but it was printed out on a piece of paper.

Do you remember this time? This was my growing up. This was like my teenager years in a small town in Iowa, back when we still rode our bikes everywhere, and we hung out at the ice cream shop, and the biggest event of the summer was church camp. Yes. Thank you.

Okay. This is back when it was, this is back when with your friends, it was really hard to convince them that no, I do actually have a girlfriend. It's just that she lives in another town, and you've never met her. Okay. Some of you remember this.

Right? Now, that, just to be clear here, that was not my experience. Even girls from out of town wouldn't date me when I was a teenager, so I was never at risk of that, but I remember having these conversations with some friends, when my buddy Vince went to church camp. He came home and tried to convince us that he was now dating this girl named Lindsay from Mason City, so you wouldn't have met her. You wouldn't know her or anything like that.

And we're like, that picture looks like you just ripped it out of Teen Vogue. It's like, no. She's really real. Right? So, like, okay.

Prove it. Because you couldn't Google her. Couldn't, you know, look up photos of the church youth group on Instagram or anything that, so Vince got out the phone. We all went to the phone. It was still attached to the wall at the time, and he pulled the phone out and he dialed her, got her on the line, and we're like, okay.

So are you really Lindsay? Are you really from Mason City? Are you really dating Vince? Like, you've seen him, you know what he looks like, you're really dating him, all of that stuff. And even with all of that conversation, she wasn't there in person, so we still technically couldn't prove she wasn't his cousin, just leading us on or trying to bolster his image or something like that.

So we hung up the phone, and we're like, I don't Vince, you didn't convince us. He's like, fine. Whatever. He had to go mow a couple neighbor's lawns to pay for the long distance phone call, and we gave him a hard time about it for you know, until the point he's like, she broke up with me over a letter that she emailed me. I think he made the whole thing up, so don't feel bad for him.

Anyway, we we we were all, we were suspicious. We loved giving each other a hard time, you know, and there was no way we were gonna believe that Vince was actually, we called it going out with this girl, Lindsay, until we actually, you know, met her. Right? In person. There's a difference between believing what someone says about someone else, something you've never met, there's a difference between that and actually meeting that person.

Right? I'll put this in Jesus language because you knew this is where I was going anyway. There's a difference between believing what I or another preacher, or teacher, or friend says about Jesus, and believing in Jesus. There's a difference between believing what I say is true about Jesus and actually meeting Jesus. Right?

On the one hand you're just believing a bunch of facts. Here's a list of things that I guess I now agree with are true. And in the other case you're actually meeting a person. You see the difference, right? That's the dynamic that's at play in this part of the history of the early church that we're looking at this morning.

See, we can believe that Jesus lived and died, we can believe that Jesus died to take away our sins, we can believe that he rose to give us new life, we can believe that Jesus waits to bring all of his followers home. See, we can believe all sorts of facts about Jesus, but believing facts about him is not the same thing as knowing him, as meeting the living Jesus. And it's this latter, meeting the living Jesus, that's what Paul is inviting these 12 men we just, you know, read about, and inviting us into this morning. Paul's not asking us to agree with a bunch of facts about Jesus, he's inviting us to meet him as a real and living person, a presence in our lives, to encounter him ourselves. That's what we see happening here in Acts 19.

So if you haven't turned there already, let's go ahead and jump in. We pick up the story in Acts 19 in verse 1. It's on page 112, if you have one of these scripture journals. We pick up the story with Luke setting the scene for us. It happened that while Apollos was over at Corinth, Paul, meanwhile, passed through the inland country and came down to Ephesus, and there he found some disciples.

If you remember from last week, we met this guy, Apollos. He was a follower of Jesus, though there were parts of the story he hadn't been taught yet. He hadn't quite figured out yet, but that didn't stop him from telling people about Jesus, and while he was in Ephesus, he was preaching about Jesus in the synagogues, and while he was there, some of Paul's former coworkers, this couple Priscilla, Aquila, we've met them over the course of the last couple weeks, they heard Apollos' teaching, kind of pulled him aside and said, okay, you're correct as far as it goes, but there's a little bit more. Apollos had only heard of, we looked at this last week, John's baptism, and didn't know about the baptism of the spirit. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes.

Well, Apollos was a good student, good enough student that when, he decided, hey, I think God's calling me to go over towards southern Greece, this region called Achaea, the baby church here in Ephesus wrote him a letter of recommendation. Priscilla and Aquila, people know who they are over in Corinth, so they personally vouched for this guy and sent him off. So that's where we are in the time frame. Apollos is off to Corinth. Paul is making his way to to Ephesus.

This is like a 3 or 4 month long journey on foot through the inland country, but when he gets there, Luke tells us he found some disciples. The word disciples doesn't really surprise us, right? We would expect to see disciples, but we're about to find out that these disciples are a little different. There's some pieces missing. Now, finding disciples, again, it's not surprising because Priscilla and Aquila are there, they've set up their tent making business, they're going to meetings in the synagogue, they're talking to people about the messiah, about Jesus, you know, hey, we're Jewish, you know, we spend our whole lives waiting for the Messiah to come, he's come.

His name is Jesus, he died and rose again, I know that's not what you thought a Messiah would do, but he died, he rose again, he forgives all of us, Jews, Greeks alike, we're all part of this family of faith. So this little church has, you know, started to form, but when Paul shows up and encounters some disciples, a dozen guys, it turns out they they don't quite seem like normal disciples. There's still some parts missing in their minds. Look at verse 2. So, Paul said to them, he said to them, did you, did you receive, did you receive the holy spirit when you believed?

And they said, no, we've not heard that there is a Holy Spirit yet, or we've not heard even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. Now, what exactly prompted Paul to ask that question? We don't know. I don't think Paul walked into Ephesus, you know, found a copy of the yellow pages, because this was pre Google, remember. So, he looks up the yellow pages, finds church, pops his head into the 1st men's bible study, and he's like, just checking in, y'all good?

Here, we got the spirit, okay. Luke's condensing the story for us. Something they did, something they said, some way they behaved, something maybe they were teaching or saying to other people, maybe they were hacking into the church's database, I don't know. Something made Paul do kind of a double take and go, wait, did you did you receive the spirit, the holy spirit? When you believed, something's missing here.

When you believed, did you receive the spirit? And, I think that's actually one of those questions that's more a statement than a question. You know, like when your spouse asks you, did you really think that was a good idea? It's not a question. Right?

They're not actually curious. It's more of a polite way of saying that was not a good idea. Supposed saying, did you did you receive the spirit, like, when you believed? Now, before we go too much further into what's happening here, I wanna pause for a minute, because if you're wondering what does receiving the spirit mean, like, what kind of a question is that? What is that about?

This idea has come up a number of times in Acts, so I wanna pause and kind of briefly recap it. You know, when Christians talk about God, we talk about how God is one God, eternally existing in 3 equally divine persons. You might have heard someone use the word trinity to describe who God is. It's a mystery that's too deep for any of us to fully grasp, doesn't mean we don't explore it and try to think about it, and try to understand who God is, but this God is 1 and 3 is what scripture teaches, what the church has recognized to be true for, you know, 2000 years. There's one God and he is God the father and God the son, Jesus, and God the holy spirit.

And each person of God plays a unique part in how we follow Jesus, and the holy spirit is the one who, when we become followers of Jesus, the holy spirit comes to live in each of us, giving us new life, empowering us to live more and more like Jesus. Sometimes we call that the indwelling of the spirit. You know, indwelling because the spirit dwells in or lives in each of You could call it the the in livinging of the spirit, if you don't mind saying words that aren't real. It's God living in us. Sometimes too we call that the baptism of the holy spirit, because when the holy spirit comes to live within us when we come to faith in Jesus, we're so thoroughly soaked in him, it's as if we were baptized or immersed is what the word means, thrown into the deep end of the pool.

We're totally soaked in the spirit, we're swimming in the spirit and the spirit is swimming in us. This is what happens when we move from simply knowing facts about Jesus, to actually meeting the real and living Jesus. When we encounter Jesus as a living and active person and respond to him in faith, you know, not just as a historical figure you read about in the history books, like lists of facts, when we really meet him and respond to him in faith that the Holy Spirit comes to live in and live each of us, indwell each of us. But for some reason, some reason these disciples were showing to to Paul's eyes at least that that God wasn't living in them. The holy spirit wasn't dwelling in them.

God wasn't giving them new life, enabling them to live like Jesus, so he asks, well, did you did you receive the holy spirit when you believed? And the response, it feels a little confusing because they said no, we haven't even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. Now there's a couple things that make that response a little bit confusing for One is that we don't know if these disciples, we don't even know if Luke's maybe using the word a little ironically, or proleptically, as in like they're about to become disciples, so I'll call them disciples now, but we don't know their religious backgrounds. Are they Jewish? Are they Gentiles?

If they're Jewish, then surely they know of God's spirit. It's all through the Old Testament. Even if they're Gentiles, we find out later they are followers of John the Baptist, and John the Baptist preached constantly about how, hey, this baptism is about turning away from your sins and living in faithful anticipation of the one to come who will baptize you in the Holy Spirit. So, if they really don't know there's a Holy Spirit, then they must have been Gentiles who heard half of a message and for some reason responded, but I don't think that's a very good explanation. I think what's actually going on here is that kinda the way this is put in Greek is difficult to render in in English, because in Greek it's not so much this sense of wondering if the Holy Spirit exists, it's more about not knowing if the Holy Spirit is present yet.

It's kind of like they're saying, did we receive the spirit? No, we're followers of John, so we've been waiting, but we haven't heard yet that the Holy Spirit is present, that the Holy Spirit is being poured out yet, or maybe another way to translate is no, we haven't heard that there is a Holy Spirit yet, and that the Holy Spirit is available to us. And so, Paul said, okay, interesting, let's dig a little deeper. Verse 3, Paul says, well, then what were you baptized into? Which again feels a little bit like a non sequitur, doesn't it?

It's like, hey, did you receive the holy spirit when you became a believer? No, I didn't know the holy spirit was being poured out yet. Oh, well, then what were you baptized into? But, what Paul's trying to get at I think is that if they're not being indwelt by the spirit, if they're not animated by the presence of God in their lives, then the question is, well, what is the driving force in your life? What is it that you are soaking in if it's not the holy spirit?

Because when Paul asked them this question about baptism, what were you baptized into? Or more grammatically correctly, into what were you baptized? He's not asking about whether or not someone said the right words when they were baptized. Let's just make sure the person who baptized you, they did say, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They didn't accidentally say Holy Ghost or something like that, which I did the first time I ever baptized someone.

Thank you, Catholicism that I grew up in. He's not asking, did someone mess up the words, or did somebody say it wrong? He's saying, he's asking them like, well, if you're not immersed in the holy spirit, if you're not baptized in the holy spirit, if you're not living as if the holy spirit is the air you're breathing, or the water you're swimming in, If the spirit isn't living in you and you're not living in him, then what in the world are you soaking in? What are you immersed in? What community are you a part of?

And they say, well, John's, John's baptism. We were baptized into into John's baptism. And this is where the story connects with Apollos, that gifted preacher that we looked at last week, because he was a guy who knew Jesus, knew about Jesus, he'd been taught some about the way of Jesus, he could even teach and speak passionately and accurately about Jesus, but he hadn't yet connected the dots between what he knew about John's baptism, being baptized as a symbol of repentance and faithful anticipation that the coming one is coming, you know, that the Messiah is coming, and he hadn't connected that with what Jesus himself said, I'm pouring out the spirit on you all now. Now that I'm gone, the spirit is coming. Remember the beginning of Acts, stay here, wait a couple more days, because the spirit is about to empower you to do something incredible.

Apollos hadn't put, you know, connected those dots. So, it's it's possible these guys are some of Apollos' disciples. They were from early in his ministry before he had it figured out, before he'd been taught better. Or, they may not be connected at all, and Luke is just telling these two stories back to back so that he can kinda clearly define, like how does John's baptism actually relate to Jesus? Like how does all that work?

Whatever the case, what these guys do know is that they've participated in that baptism of repentance, the symbol of faithful expectation waiting for the one who is to come. So in verse 4, Paul doesn't tell them anything they don't already know. See verse 3, he says, if you're not soaking in the spirit, like, what are you soaking in, what have you been baptized into? And they're like, well, repentance, John's baptism, like, we've done the repentance thing, and he goes, well, but you know John baptized with the baptism of repentance. He dunked people in order to show that they were turning away from their sins, and he told people to believe in the one who was to come after him, and that's part of what that baptism meant.

But I think here's the new fact. That's Jesus. It's like, that's Jesus. John baptized with the baptism of repentance telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him. That is to believe in Jesus.

See, these guys knew John's baptism. And they knew it, if they knew it accurately, then they knew that the Messiah was coming. They knew that the Messiah would baptize them in the Holy Spirit. See, they believed in the Messiah as an idea. They hadn't met him yet.

They believed in the Messiah, they just didn't know who the Messiah was. They didn't know that he'd come, they didn't know he'd poured out his spirit on his followers. They knew some facts. They hadn't actually met him. They hadn't encountered Jesus as a real and living person.

They just knew that there would be this person we call the Messiah someday. So, when Paul tells them, John told people to believe in the one who was to come. I think they're nodding their heads. Yes, we know that, we get that, we believe that, we're waiting for him to come, but when Paul adds, you know, that's Jesus, that's new information. But to their credit, these guys are faithful followers of John, and so they immediately believe in the one that Paul says John was pointing to.

Immediately believe in Jesus. Verse 5 Luke tells us on hearing this they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And we're supposed to fill in some of the gaps. I don't know if you've noticed, the further we go into Acts, the less detail Luke gives us whenever somebody comes to faith in Jesus. He knows we can fill in the gaps of the things he's leaving out, but they're baptized, so we're supposed to assume, you know, there's some expression of faith here, some expression of belief in Jesus as the Messiah, before Paul's willing to baptize them.

This is a gospel conversation that's probably a lot longer than the one sentence back and forths we get here. If this is word for word how it went down, that was a very efficient gospel presentation. That really, man, that's fast. Likely this is more the gist of the conversation than a word for word recounting of it. And so, I know as Paul's talking with these guys, he's given an explanation of who Jesus is and what faith in him means, and how the holy spirit comes, and what the indwelling of the spirit means, and all of that, before they believe and then are baptized.

Paul's not gonna baptize someone who doesn't have a relationship with Jesus that they can put into words that make sense. So there's a succession of events here then that Luke narrates for us rather quickly. They believe, they're baptized, Paul lays hands on them, they receive the spirit, and then the spirit's presence in them now as proof of how John's baptism connects to Jesus, the spirit's presence is proven by their sudden ability to preach and teach, and even in languages they hadn't previously studied. That's kind of a common sign in the book of Acts. But what the story shows us as we've moved through these few verses is, yeah, you can believe all sorts of facts about Jesus, but believing facts about Jesus is not the same as meeting the living and risen Jesus.

Right, facts can't forgive you, the way meeting Jesus can. Facts can't take away the weight of your sin, the way meeting Jesus does. Facts can't give you a a direction and and a purpose for life. A bigger story of everything in which your life makes sense, like meeting Jesus does. So, you know, as we pause for a couple minutes to think about what this story has to teach, you know, a church in Indianapolis 2000 years later, I wanna invite us all to just focus in on kind of this core question.

Not the question of so technically what did these guys believe, or think, or where were they, or whatever, but the core question of do you know Jesus? Do I know Jesus? Is he a real and living presence in my life, or do I just know about Jesus? Maybe at the risk of pushing the metaphor just a little bit too far, is Jesus just someone's out of town girlfriend? That kinda ripped a page out of a bible, and they're like, yeah, this is this is the person I'm talking about.

But you've never actually met him? See, if you grow up in church, like know a lot of us have, it's easy to accidentally get to the point where you know a lot about Jesus, and confuse knowing about him with actually knowing him. Right, you can go to Sunday school every Sunday, you can hear the stories of the Bible, you can hear people talk about their relationship with Jesus, you can hear a 1,000 sermons in the course of 20 years of fairly faithful attendance. I mean, maybe you could even explain the doctrine of the atonement or the nuances of the incarnation, or you could elucidate the eternal processions of the trinity. But that means nothing if you've not met the Messiah.

A few years ago, I was part of one of faith's, mission trips to Spain. You know, we have a group of older high schoolers, or young adults who, get to go every year, work in a conversational, kind of evangelistic English camp. It's for Spanish speaking students, kinda around the Barcelona area to come work on English, have a ton of fun, and wrestle with some really deep questions. Our missionaries that put it on just do a fantastic job. And this year that I was there, there was this young Romanian girl, who she was part of the camp that week.

I think she and her family were actually living as refugees in Barcelona, and somehow she had gotten connected to one of the churches that knew about the camp, and she came along, and, got to be part of the camp for the week. She came into the camp kind of knowing some things about Jesus. She'd been in and out of some church contacts, heard some of the stories, knew a few of the facts, but she'd never met him. Of course that's a big part of what we're trying to do at an evangelistic camp, is not tell people a bunch of things about Jesus, but introduce them to him, and on Thursday night, she actually met Jesus for the first time. And it's not like there was a wind or anything, but we knew the holy spirit had just immediately rushed in, and was dwelling in her, living in her, giving her this new life because she she prayed with a counselor and then looked up and looked right at the counselor and said, I feel like my whole life I have been blind, and now suddenly I can see.

I don't know that she ever sang Amazing Grace in Romanian, but those were the words that just came to mind. That was the spirit in her saying you have life now. You can see. So I want us to ask ourselves the same question or a version of the question that Paul is asking these 12 guys. He's seeing their life or their teaching or their actions or their something and saying, you know, you kinda say you're part of this, but do you have the holy spirit?

Is God living in you, giving you new life and helping you to grow more and more like Jesus? It's a question that is good to pause every once in a while and ask ourselves. Do I know about Jesus or do I do I know him? Am I living in the spirit, or do I just know what living in the spirit could theoretically look like? So, a couple of a couple of questions, if you wanna jot these down, we'll email them out too in the sermon discussion questions, but a couple of questions you can use when you're chatting with your community group, or with a friend that you came with, or with someone in your family.

One of the the kinda key questions is do I have a sense of of God's presence in my life? Now that sense even as we prayed earlier today that sometimes it's it's very, it's difficult to feel the presence of God in our lives, but do I, if I look back over the course of my life, would I say, you know, I have, I know God has been present with me. I have this sense of a deep and abiding rest or peace, because I know I'm at peace with God, because of what Jesus has done. I do have a sense of God's presence in my life. Another good evaluative question, if I look back on my life, kind of over the last season, the last 3 months or the last year, not just over the last weekend.

The weekend might have been rough. Go back a little further. If I look back over the last year, can I see how I've grown to be more like Jesus? If I look back over the last year, can I see ways in which God is becoming more and more the center of what I worship, the center of what I love? You know, if I look back over the last year, can I see ways in which I've moved deeper into the community of people for whom God is at the center?

Do I see myself more and more with others who who are like wanting to be like Jesus? You know, if I look back over the last year, say, can I see ways in which my relationship with Jesus and my love for God has changed just the daily rhythm or habits of my life? My life's just shaped a little bit differently now, because some things are more important than they used to be. Or maybe if I look back over the last year, you know, can I see ways in which I I I realize I'm beginning to move closer to people who are far from God, Wanting to introduce them to Jesus? When you're able to look back over a period of time or maybe ask someone who knows you well and ask them to reflect on how you've changed in the last say 5 years, how you've grown to be more like Jesus, it's looking back on things like that, it's looking inside and knowing there's this deep and abiding presence of God that helps us know, yeah, I have met Jesus.

I've met him, the Holy Spirit is indwelling in me and empowering me and I wanna grow more in that. I know the spirit is with me, not because I've suddenly got the power to speak in languages I've never studied. It'd be awesome, you know, on a Spanish final or something like that. But that's not the miraculous manifestation of the spirit, the mundane manifestations of the spirit, if you'll pardon the alliteration, the daily manifestations of the spirit are, is that slow growth over time as be as living like Jesus becomes just a little more second nature. It's a little more habitual to respond in love or joy or peace, or patience, or with kindness, or goodness, or faithfulness, or self control.

Through the spirit growing in Him is the real miracle. So, I want us to end there, just this simple question, right. Do I know facts about Jesus? Or do I know Jesus? Have I met Him?

Do I want to meet Him? And if I have met Him, am I continuing to grow in Him? I think we should pray. Father, this morning I know each of us myself included, we are challenged because it is sometimes so difficult to tell the difference between knowing you and just knowing things about you. Even as we look back on our lives and see how you have been present and how we have grown in you, we can become discouraged because we don't feel your presence as closely or as immediately or as passionately as maybe we did at some point in the past, or as much as as other people describe, or we look back at our lives and and we're like, man I am I am growing, but it is not, it does not look like good healthy straight line up and to the right growth, it's just a mess.

Jesus, we we want to know you, and not and not just know about you. Father, we want to to know you and not just know things about you, holy spirit we want to know you deep within us, not just know things about you. So we pray today, for those of us who have never actually come to know you, have met Jesus that today would be a day in which we just realize I I wanna meet Jesus for the first time. And for those of us who know you and have been following you for months, years, decades, Help us to know you more and more deeply. We pray in Jesus name, amen.