Stephen, Full of Faith & Power

Somewhere in the congregation of the original church in Jerusalem – among the thousands who had come to faith in the months since Pentecost – there was a man whose name we might never have known, except that God had plans for him that nobody saw coming. His name was Stephen. And when we first meet him in Acts 6, he is not teaching in the temple courts. He is not leading a prayer meeting. He is not preaching to crowds at the Beautiful Gate. He is delivering food to the widows of the church.

That is how Stephen’s ministry began. Not as the chairman of anything. Not on a platform with a microphone. But in the ordinary, behind-the-scenes work of meeting a practical need that nobody else had stepped up to meet. And yet what begins with a food distribution problem ends with one of the most powerful and heartbreaking scenes in all of Scripture – a man dying on his knees as he calls out to Jesus.

Please find Acts 6:1-15 & 7:54-60.