This sermon was preached Sunday October 7th, 2012 at the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Cherry Log, GA by Rev. Paul Mims.

Acts 6-7 In 1998, novelist Tom Wolfe published a book entitled A MAN IN FULL. It is about a man who was a college football star, but now was a middle-aged mover and shaker in Atlanta. He was Charles Coker, a conglomerate king with a big ego that had finally come up against reality. It is the story of how a man like this survives in the social, political, and economic realities in Atlanta. With apologies to Wolfe for using his title for this sermon title, I want to show you A MAN IN FULL from the biblical standpoint. The term “in full” means that he is identified as one who has become what others are striving for.

In the darkness a light shines. In the midst of problems a solution is found. In the early church complaints of inequity among the members was voiced. “…the Grecian Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food.” The Apostles said that it would be pleasing to God if a solution was found that would free them to major on prayer and the preaching of the word. So the congregation chose seven men all with Greek names to meet the needs of the Greek widows. Although these seven are not called “deacons” at this time, they are the essence of what it means to serve the congregation as a deacon. They presented Stephen, Philip, Procorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolas to the Apostles. They were of good reputation, spiritually minded, and possessed practical wisdom. The Apostles prayed over them and set them apart in ordination conveying apostolic blessing to them by the laying on of their hands.

The problem in the fellowship was solved and it allowed the church to grow without internal conflict.
It was then that the man in full rose to prominence. His name was Stephen, one of the seven deacons. He is the first man other than an apostle who is said to have performed miracles in the early church. Let’s look at this man who was a layman who showed us that God anoints his people of the congregation just like he anoints his preachers. In our Baptist life, the two ordained servants of the church are pastor and deacons.

I. THE IMPORTANCE OF SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT (6:8) “Now Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power, did great wonders and miraculous signs among the people.”

The scripture says that Stephen had five spiritual qualities that enabled him to have a strong witness for his Lord. The first was faith. He was “full of faith.” (v.5) He believed strongly in the fact that Jesus was the Christ. We are not told when or how he came to know Jesus. He could have been a follower of Jesus even before the crucifixion. If he was indeed a believer at that time it explains how he was so developed in such a short time. It really does take time for one to become strong in the Lord. But a Spirit-fostered experience can happen quickly.

A student asked his teacher if he could take a shorter course than the one that most of the students took. The teacher replied, “Yes, but it depends on what you want to be. When God wants to grow a magnificent Oak tree, he may take a hundred years, but when he wants to grow a squash, he can do it in six months.” We realize, however, that growth is not uniform in the Christian or in nature. There is usually more growth in trees in a few weeks in May, June, and July than in the rest of the year. There are periods in our lives when we grow fast in the faith and other times when growth is hardly noticeable.
Stephen was also “full of wisdom.” (v.3). This means that he could apply practical good sense to a situation. This is a strength to any church. The ability to do the right thing at the right time is the action of wisdom.

He was also “full of the Holy Spirit.” (v.5). In biblical language this means he manifested to a marked degree his allowing the Holy Spirit to work in him and guide him in his decisions. You can sense when the Holy Spirit is allowed to be active in a person’s life and when he is not. The church needs men and women and young people whose lives are placed at the use of God’s Spirit.

Stephen was “full of grace.” (v.8). This has a two-fold meaning. He had experienced the grace of God toward him and he extended grace to others around him. A believer is one who is awed by how God offers grace to a sinner and forgives his sin and accepts him as his own. Evidently, Stephen marveled in the grace shown to him in Christ. This is a wonderful thing to say about a Christian. You can imagine how he extended grace to the members of the congregation as he distributed the daily food to the widows.

Stephen was also “full of power.” (v.8). All of these qualities caused him to have a marked power in his life. A person who is full of faith, full of wisdom, full of the Holy Spirit, full of grace, and full of power is certainly a person “in full.” Actually, these characteristics are not only of a super Christian, but really are desired to the norm for any Christian who is willing to pay the price to be a person “in full.”

II. WHAT A “LIFE IN FULL” CAN DO. (v.10) “…they could not stand up against his wisdom or the Spirit by whom he spoke.”

The record says that Stephen did “great wonders and miraculous signs among the people.” We are not told what these events were, but we do know that God enabled him to do things that authenticated the gospel. His strong explanations of the Messiah brought him into conflict with the Greek speaking Jews from North Africa and Asia who were in Jerusalem. Stephen walked right into their synagogue and debated with them that Jesus was the Christ. This was the same group that Paul had difficulty with later.
“Then they secretly persuaded some men to say, ‘We have heard Stephen speak words of blasphemy against Moses and against God.’ So they stirred up the people and the elders and the teachers of the law. The seized Stephen and brought him before the Sanhedrin.” (vv.11-12). They were offended that he spoke so forcefully and lovingly of Jesus of Nazareth and how he is the completion of Judaism and will now change the whole way in which God is worshipped and served. Even the Sanhedrin sitting and looking at him saw that his face was like an angel so much was he anointed by the Lord.

In his article on Culture Watch, Bill Muehlenberg says, “One of the recurring themes found in the Gospels and Acts is the story of people rejecting Jesus and the disciples – for all sorts of reasons. We find it happening all the time as we read these five books. We are told that Jesus and his followers caused division, caused offense, caused controversy and caused public disturbances.

Many people not only rejected Jesus and his message, and that of his disciples, but they in fact became enraged and wildly opposed to the message of the gospel. Many utterly rejected the Christian message because they rejected its basic claims.

The idea that we are sinners in need of a savior does not go down very well with most people. Indeed, it cuts right across human pride to even suggest such a thing. Thus it should not be surprising that many people will refuse to accept Jesus.

Indeed, Jesus had already made it clear that people would reject him. He mentioned this many times, and his discussion with Nicodemus as found in John 3 is a classic example of this. Note what he said about this in verses 18-21:

“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”

Here is the final word on all this. People prefer sin and darkness to righteousness and light. That is the bottom line for so many who refuse to embrace the Christian message. Sure, we are often poor reflections of our Lord, but in many cases, even if we were terrific reflections of Christ, people would still reject the gospel.

Indeed, the most Christ-like person in the world, Jesus himself, was rejected by many. Obviously he was not misrepresenting Christ. And as a man without sin, he could not be accused of being hypocritical, unloving, ungracious, and so on.

People reject being told they are sinners in need of salvation. They find this offensive, intolerant, judgmental and narrow. Always have, and always will. Thus no matter how much we improve things on our end (and we should always be working on this very thing), there will still be plenty of people who will choose to reject the Christian message.

No matter how nicely and attractively we package the message; there will always be some people who will be uninterested, un-open, and/or resistant to it. Jesus obviously was the most attractive carrier of his own message, and yet people rejected him.”

These people said to Stephen, “We have our own religion and are comfortable with it and we don’t like the sound of yours.”

III. THE “LIFE IN FULL” LEADS TO EVEN A FULLER LIFE. (7:56) “Look, he said, I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”

The charges against Stephen stated, “For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs Moses handed down to us.” (6:13). “Then the High priest asked him, Are these charges true?” Then Stephen begins the longest discourse in the book of Acts as he stands before the seventy elders of the Temple. He recounts the history of Israel from the time of Abraham. He proceeds through Joseph, Moses, Joshua up to the time of Solomon who built the Temple. It is here that God uses Stephen to show that a new day had come in the worship of God. No longer would God be considered to be present just in the Temple for now he would live in the hearts of believers. The time will come when the Temple and it rituals will no longer be and they are not needed even now for the Lamb of God has been slain once for all. He boldly told the religious leaders that their hearts were wrong in relation to God because they have resisted the Holy Spirit, persecuted the prophets, and even killed the Messiah, and disobeyed the law that they seemed to cherish. He called them stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart. That was the last blow. They would not take it anymore. When he claimed to see heaven open so he could see Jesus standing there at the right hand of God, they covered their ears and started yelling at the top of their voices.

Enraged, they seized him and dragged him out of the city and started to stone him. The method for stoning was to make the victim sit on the ground and pile stones up around him so that only his head was showing. They would then aim their stones at his head and continue hitting him until his skull was broken open and he was dead. But to show how much like Jesus he had become, he prayed as Jesus did on the cross, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he said this, he died and went to an even fuller life than he had known on earth.

But what about us? Are we living life to the full? As Christians do we have the fullness of faith, grace, wisdom, power, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit? Surely, we all want to live life to the full and realize that we have a distance to go in all of these areas.

The Japanese artist, Hokusai, said, “From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the forms of things. By the time I was fifty I had published an infinity of designs, but nothing I produced before seventy is worth considering. He died at eighty nine, declaring that if he could have only another five years he would have become a great artist.”

To be sure, our life in Christ is full. But it gets fuller with every passing year as our spiritual capacity grows. We, like the Japanese artist, will look back across our lives and realize what progression in grace is really like.

Praise Be To His Name!