Ligonier Ministries Blog

1. Who Was Stephen?

   There is a temptation to assume that the people who receive the most attention in Scripture must be the most significant. Yet Stephen reminds us that significance in God’s kingdom is not measured by the amount of space devoted to a person, but by the God to whom that person points. Though Stephen’s ministry is recorded in only two chapters of Acts, his role is crucial in the unfolding story of redemption. More importantly, his life directs our attention not to himself but to Christ. Stephen stands at a pivotal moment in the history of the early church. Before Jesus’ ascension, He promised that the Holy Spirit would empower His disciples to be His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). Through Stephen’s ministry and martyrdom, that promise begins to advance beyond Jerusalem. The persecution that followed Stephen’s death scattered believers throughout Judea and Samaria, leading to the further spread of the gospel. This should encourage us. God graciously used a man whose entire ministry is summarized in only two chapters to help advance His kingdom. Outside of Acts 6 and 7, Stephen is mentioned only a few more times in the book of Acts. Yet his influence was profound because God delights to use ordinary believers for extraordinary purposes. Character As the church continued to grow, so did its needs. A complaint arose because the Hellenistic (Greek-speaking Jewish) widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. In response, the Apostles instructed the church to select seven qualified men to oversee this ministry (Acts 6:1–6). The first man named is Stephen, and he is introduced as “a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit.” While this description likely characterized all seven men, Luke places special emphasis on Stephen. These characteristics were especially evident in his life. What defined Stephen’s character? He was a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit. Stephen had been saved by faith, the gift by which sinners are justified and reconciled to God (Rom. 5:1). Paul says there is one faith, and yet the experience of that faith may vary (Eph. 4:5). For example, Paul says there is weak and strong faith (Rom. 4), and Jesus referred to those with little faith (Matt. 14). However, Luke tells us that Stephen was a man full of faith. His faith was steadfast, courageous, and unwavering in the face of opposition. He was also a man full of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean he received a second conversion or a higher spiritual status than other Christians. To be a Christian is to have the Spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9). Rather, Scripture teaches that God often grants special measures of the Spirit’s power for particular tasks and trials (Matt. 10:16–20). Stephen was continually strengthened and equipped by the Spirit for whatever challenges lay before him. In his book The Spirit of Promise, Donald Macleod notes that: > The Holy Spirit is not something God’s children can do without. He is indispensable. Nor is he something they can store up. They need more and more. They need again and again. And the only way they can ensure that they are always full is to be always asking. A man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit was also full of grace and power. Stephen had been saved by grace through faith and set for us an example that grace saves and grace transforms. The grace of God that saves us changes us not simply in status but in character. God’s grace in our lives brings a kind of charm and sweetness to it. At the same time, the Spirit of God empowered him to use his gifts for the building up Christ’s church (1 Cor. 12:7–11). Calling Stephen’s calling extended beyond serving tables (Acts 6:1–6). He faithfully fulfilled that responsibility, but God also called him as a powerful witness to the gospel. It’s striking to think that a man marked by such a godly character was called into a ministry marked by intense opposition. Stephen’s ministry did not lead to comfort or popularity; instead, it led him into conflict. The longest recorded sermon in Acts isn’t found in a worship service but rather a courtroom of sorts. Stephen is on trial for being charged with blasphemy before the religious leaders. Instead of a personal defense, Stephen recounts Israel’s history. His point is clear: They understood many of the facts of their history but failed to grasp its meaning. Every event in Israel’s story pointed forward to the coming of Christ. Stephen addresses their misunderstanding of God’s promise and God’s presence beginning with Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and even David and Solomon. The point was that God’s presence with God’s people isn’t confined to a building made with human hands, and even Solomon acknowledges this (1 Kings 8). All of Israel’s history culminates in Jesus Christ. The temple was never the ultimate hope of God’s people, for Christ is the true cornerstone, and through Him, God is building His church with living stones from every nation and people. Crown Stephen’s life concludes with a fitting fulfillment of his name. All seven men chosen in Acts 6 bear Greek names because they were appointed to minister among Greek-speaking believers. Stephen’s name means “crown” or “garland.” In the ancient world, a crown was awarded to a victorious athlete and honored leaders. How fitting that Stephen would receive a far greater crown, the crown of righteousness promised to all who love Christ’s appearing (2 Tim. 4:6–8). His final moments are remarkable. As he faced death, Luke tells us that he was once again “full of the Holy Spirit.” Gazing into heaven, he saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at God’s right hand. The Savior upon whom he had fixed the eyes of faith throughout his life now stood before him in glory. Like his Lord, he prayed and forgave saying, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60). Like his Lord, he entrusted his spirit into God’s hands. In such violent persecution, Stephen’s death is described with remarkable peace: “He fell asleep.” Stephen’s life reminds us that faithful Christian living is not measured by prominence, longevity, or earthly success. It is measured by steadfast faith in Christ. Therefore, might we find great encouragement and exhortation in the hymn lyrics: > Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face; > and the things of earth will grow strangely dim > in the light of his glory and grace. : Donald Macleod, The Spirit of Promise (Tain, Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus, 1986), 85–86.

2. Most Canadian Evangelicals Are Wrong About Sin: The State of Theology

   The State of Theology survey from Ligonier Ministries Canada reveals what people really believe about the Christian faith. Unfortunately, the survey’s key findings show that theological confusion is prevalent—not only outside the church, but also within. Nearly three quarters of Canadian evangelicals affirm the statement, “Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God.” This means that three out of five evangelicals throughout Canada either don’t understand or don’t believe the Bible’s teaching about original sin and human fallenness. When people fail to see the seriousness of sin, the need for the gospel itself is called into question. To make matters worse, 60% of Canadian evangelicals agree with the statement, “Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.” These sobering statistics point to significant perplexity in the church about sin. Yet Scripture is clear: Since Adam’s fall, every person (except for the incarnate Lord) is born guilty, corrupted in nature, and in need of God’s grace for salvation through Jesus Christ. Download the Free Study Guide The church today needs clarity on sin and salvation. One important way of gaining clarity is by gathering people together around the Word of God. Download the free digital study guide for The State of Theology Canada. Each section includes discussion questions and biblical insight to guide your conversation. More Resources on Sin and Salvation R.C. Sproul founded Ligonier to help Christians know who God is and who they are. Here are several resources from Ligonier addressing the Bible’s teaching on sin. The Bondage of the Will book by Martin Luther “Radical Corruption” article by R.C. Sproul “The Sinfulness of Man” video message with Michael Reeves “TULIP and Reformed Theology” article by R.C. Sproul What Is Reformed Theology? video teaching series with R.C. Sproul

3. Where Did Christianity Come From?

   Where do blueberries come from? I asked myself this question the other day watching my kids enjoy blueberries at the dinner table. The bluish hue that bled across their lips and tongues reminded me of the purple of Roman imperial robes—a color so rare and costly in the ancient world that it marked the heights of status and splendor. “Why didn’t they just use blueberries?” I thought. The answer, of course, is geographical. Blueberries are native to North America. The ancient peoples of the Mediterranean never knew them. Yet, asking questions that often seem trivial at first glance can have a way of pointing us to more profound discoveries. Take, for instance, a seemingly simple question: Where did Christianity come from? The answer leads to deeper understandings rooted in geography, identity, and divine intent. Let’s consider each in turn. 1) Christianity comes from the Middle East. It’s easy to forget, especially in the modern West, that Christianity is not a Western religion. It’s a Middle Eastern one. It was born among Semitic peoples, in lands long shaped by monotheism and the idea of divine sovereignty. These ideas offered a strong contrast to the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans, whose gods bickered, lusted, and stumbled in their dramas. Christianity, on the other hand, emphasizes that God is one and holy. He rules not from Mount Olympus but from the heavens, maintaining justice and order. He can’t be manipulated or controlled, and we owe Him our allegiance as the emperor of the universe. Contrast that with the Greek and Roman gods who were often regional, fickle, and merely super-human rather than divine. As a result, Christianity offered a vastly different understanding of God than the polytheistic world in which it took root. 2) Christianity comes from the name of Christ. Acts 11:26 says that “in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians.” This is because people understood the early Christians to be following Christ. Christ, of course, means “Messiah” in Greek. Christians are people who believe the Messiah has come; He is Jesus of Nazareth. Christians, however, weren’t always called Christians. In the early days, they were frequently called followers of “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9; 19:23; 24:14; 24:22). Sometimes they were called Nazarenes (Acts 24:5). Other general terms appeared as well, such as “disciples” (Acts 6:1), “saints” (Acts 9:13), and “believers” (Acts 2:44). But Christian is the name that stuck, and the religion that they keep is therefore Christianity. 3) Christianity comes from God. When Adam and Eve fell, God promised to send a seed to crush the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). This was the first time in the Bible that God promised a Messiah—someone who would come to save His people from their sins. So, the idea Christianity represents—God redeeming a people for Himself—is as old as the world. But going even further back, Paul tells the Ephesians that God chose them “before the foundation of the world, that [they] should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4). So, while the name Christian may have appeared at Antioch during the first century, nevertheless, Christianity points to the redemptive work of God that He purposed from before the world was created. That is to say, its origin is divine, and the unfolding of God’s plan is as old as eternity.

4. How Can I Deal with Fear?

   When was the last time you were afraid? Really afraid? For many of us, that is harder to answer than it should be. We reach back and find childhood: a dark room, the dog next door, the bully waiting at the bus stop. As adults, we may no longer catch ourselves trembling. We are not scared, we tell ourselves, because scared is a child’s word, and we have not been children for a long time. So, we conclude that fear is mostly behind us. It is not. We have simply stopped recognizing it. Fear grew up when we did. It traded the racing heart for something quieter and far harder to see, and it learned to wear respectable clothes. The man who is afraid of poverty does not walk around frightened. He is careful. He is responsible. He keeps a tight grip on what he has and calls it stewardship, and he would be genuinely surprised to hear the word fear attached to any of it. Likewise, the woman who fears being thought poorly of does not feel afraid. She is simply attentive to what people need, agreeable, and quick to smooth things over. In both of these cases, fear has stopped being a feeling and has become a posture they live from. It is closer to who they are than to anything they consciously think. This is why fear is so hard to name on demand. Ask a man what he is afraid of, and he draws a blank, because the thing he fears most no longer registers as fear. It registers as prudence, as personality, and as common sense. It surfaces only in behavior, in the loss he cannot calmly contemplate, the threat that makes him overreact, the thing he protects without ever deciding to. Often, the people around him can see it before he can. His wife could name it. He cannot. The disciples could not either. The storm had swallowed the light, the water was already in the boat, and the Man who had told them to cross the sea was asleep on a cushion in the stern. They woke Him with an accusation dressed as a question: “Do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mark 4:38). They were afraid, but they did not experience it as a failure of faith. They experienced it as an accurate read of the situation. Their fear felt like sober judgment. So, it was a strange thing for Jesus to still the wind and then turn the question back on them: “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” (Mark 4:40). Jesus was not addressing the storm. He was addressing what the storm had exposed. Their fear revealed where their confidence rested: They trusted the wind to destroy them more than they trusted the One who made the wind. That is what fear does before it is anything else. It reveals what we love and what we trust. It marks the place where we have set our security on something that can be taken from us. The storm does not create the idol. It only drags it into the light. This is also why trying to feel braver never works for long. You cannot calm a fear without dealing with the love underneath it, and you cannot reorder your loves by willpower. So, the question is not how to feel less afraid. It is about what you are afraid of and whether it is the right thing to fear. Scripture’s answer to fear might come as a surprise. It does not tell the fearful to stop fearing. It tells them to fear rightly: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7). When God prepares His people for a season of dread, He does not pretend their fears are imaginary. He says they are misdirected: “Do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread” (Isa. 8:12–13). A man who truly fears God has little fear leftover for anything else, because the One he reverences most cannot be threatened by the things that frightened him before. Reverence for God does not sit beside our other fears. It swallows them. Here, the gospel turns terror into rest. The God we are called to fear is not a tyrant we must appease. He is the Father who feeds the birds and counts the hairs on your head. Jesus holds both halves together: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” And then, without pausing: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. . . Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:28, 29–31). The storm that terrifies you is not on the loose. It is in His hand. I have been the man in the stern. There was a season when I was afraid of losing my job, though I would not have called it fear. I called it providing for my family. But underneath the long hours and the tight planning was a conviction that I never said out loud: The job was the provision, and I was the provider. So, when the work was threatened, it did not feel like a setback. It felt like the floor was giving way because I had built it myself and named it security. God carried me through that season. He did not carry me out of the battle. I am still relearning, in each new circumstance, that the floor was never mine to build and that the One who held my family then is holding them now. The fear still comes. It still arrives dressed as clarity. And I still have to preach myself back to the truth about who holds the water. So, when was the last time you were afraid? Do not answer too quickly. Look instead at where you grip too tightly, what loss you cannot bear to imagine, and the place you defend without deciding to. Name it and ask what it reveals about where you have anchored your hope. Then preach the truth of the sparrow back to yourself: Not one falls apart from your Father. And then act. Move toward the thing you dread rather than away from it, not because you have worked up courage, but because the One who governs the storm has told you to fear not, and His Word is steadier than the sea. Faith is not the absence of fear. It is fear that has finally found its rightful object.

5. How Did Christianity Turn the World Upside Down?

   The claim that Christianity was turning the world upside down was originally made by Christianity’s enemies, not its friends. In Acts 17:6–7, we hear that a mob of Hellenistic Jews set the city of Thessalonica in an uproar, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also . . . acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” It is certainly true that the early Christians confessed Kyrios Christos (“Christ is Lord”) over against the claims of the Roman Empire that Kyrios Caesar (“Caesar is Lord”), but they did not set out to launch a political revolution. Far from trying to overthrow Caesar, the Apostles taught the early Christians to pray “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim. 2:2). In every case of turmoil recorded in the book of Acts in the towns where Paul was planting churches, it was caused by his opponents and not by the Christians. Christianity was not a revolutionary movement in that sense. Moreover, it was not Christianity that was turning the world upside down, but rather God, through the power of the Holy Spirit. We call the second book that Luke wrote The Acts of the Apostles, but it would be more accurate to call it The Acts of the Risen Jesus Through the Holy Spirit (see Acts 1:1–2). It is, after all, focused more on the work of the Spirit bringing the gospel to the nations than on the Apostles themselves, some of whom are barely mentioned on its pages. Moreover, there have been plenty of other times in church history when preachers have faithfully proclaimed the same truths the Apostles did without seeing anything like the same results. As a result, people sometimes try to re-create the form of the early church, as if doing so will automatically grant them the same outcomes. But God is sovereign not only over the dramatic growth of the church but also during those times when it seems to be stagnating or even shrinking. It is God who turns the world upside down through the gospel, whenever and wherever He pleases. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that God did something rather remarkable in the growth of the early church as described in the book of Acts. In the space of half a century, Christianity grew from being a marginal Jewish sect into a religion with devotees around the entirety of the then-known world. How was that possible? The answer lies in the fundamental difference between Christianity and every other religion. Most religions offer a kind of wisdom or spiritual enlightenment that enables a person to live well, however that may be defined. They provide spiritual coaching that promises to help good people achieve a better life, either now or in eternity. Christianity, however, offers a message of hope that is rooted and grounded in what God has already done in Jesus Christ, not on what we must do for ourselves. In his message to the Thessalonians, which stirred up such turmoil, Paul explained that “it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead,” and said, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ” (Acts 17:3). For Paul, the death of Christ was not simply a demonstration of love in its purest form (although it includes that). Rather, it was the necessary atonement offered by God so that sinful human beings could be made right with Him, not through their personal reformation but through the righteousness of another that is imputed to them. This offering was itself vindicated by Christ’s resurrection from the dead, whereby God acknowledged the full payment for the sins of all of God’s people. It is this consistent message of salvation through faith alone, in Christ alone, that Paul and the other Apostles preached wherever they went (see Eph 2:8–10; 1 John 1:9; 2:2; 1 Peter 1:3–5). Even though the Apostles knew that this message of a crucified Messiah would be offensive to both Jewish and Greek audiences, they continued to preach Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23–25), confident that the Spirit of God would use that preaching to bring men and women to faith in Him from every tribe, nation, and language group. The good news for us is that the Spirit of the risen Christ is still sovereignly at work through His church, turning the world upside down one sinner at a time. In some places that work may be dramatic, recalling His work of the first century. In others, Christians may find themselves in a “day of small things” (Zech. 4:10). The Spirit is still at work in those times and places too (Zech. 4:6), and we are to be faithful to our callings even when the harvest seems meager. God will bring in His whole harvest in due season, on the day when He will shake the heavens and the earth and truly turn everything upside down (Hag. 2:6), creating a new world for His saints to inhabit with Him forever.