“Seekers Need Guides”
Acts 8:26-40
1 Peter 3:15
Throughout
my life, there have always been people who have guided me on my journey. These people are not only my family, they are
the people both whose names and faces I remember, and whose names and faces I
have long since forgotten, but all of whom have impacted my life in powerful
and dramatic ways. These guides have
been instrumental and invaluable in my moral and ethical development. They have led me through the valleys of the
shadow of death. They have directed me
along the right path and at times they have steered me back onto the path when
I have gone astray. Without these
guides, I do not know where I would be today.
All
of us need guides in our lives. They
help us discover more about ourselves, more about strengths, and more about our
gifts. These guides play
a significant role in all of our lives, helping us to discover new ideas, to
gain a new vision of the world, to learn more, and to be more. Most importantly, these guides in our life
help us to discover and to claim our identity for ourselves, the identity of
who we are and of who we might become.
Just as we need guides in our journey of life, we also need
guides in our journey of faith.
Regardless of where we are in the journey of faith, we are all
seekers. We may be new seekers just
searching for some kind of spiritual awareness or divine presence, or we may be
mature seekers on a continue search greater faithfulness and obedience, but we
are all seekers, seekers of the greater truth about God and God’s will and
purpose. And we seekers need guides to
help us along the way, we need those people who have already traveled the road
we are on, those people who have already experienced the challenges of
discipleship, those people who have already wrestled with the stirring and
movement of the Spirit in their lives, those people who have already gained a
deeper knowledge of God’s word than ourselves.
One
of the things the Presbyterian Church values a great deal is biblical education.
Some of the earliest missionaries were preachers and teachers, who established
schools for children of all ages across this great country, including one of
the first universities for higher education in
But, as all of us know, Scripture
isn’t always easy to read and understand.
There are a great many things in Scripture, which are confusing,
problematic, and even down right questionable.
And yet, it is Scripture that helps us understand who God is and what
God is doing in the world. The ability
to read and understand Scripture is enormously important for us, for it is
through Scripture that we learn new things about God, new ideas about how we
understand God, new ways of seeing the world through the eyes of faith, and new
ways of being God’s people in the world.
For
the Christian life, there is no substitute for Biblical literacy, knowledge,
and understanding, but the value of Biblical education comes, not just from our
ability to read Scripture and understand it, but from the people who have
guided us along the way, who have taken the time to share with us the good news
of Jesus Christ in order to help us discern and discover our own identity and
place in God’s kingdom. In our text
today, we read a story of one such encounter of Biblical education, and more
importantly, about the impact that just one guide can have on a seeker of God.
Our story of Philip and the Ethiopian
is a story about a seeker and a guide, about one who sought an understanding of
Scripture, and one who through Scripture guided a seeker to the truth of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ.
On many levels, the
Ethiopian is not a normal, run of the mill, average person, like us. He had no identity and no status other than
an accountant for the Ethiopian Queen.
He was also a foreigner, from an exotic land, which meant that he was an
outsider to the Jews, but even worse than that he was a eunuch, a man who had
been physically maimed and marked by society.
Because of this, he was unable to worship within a faith in which he
believed, but in spite of all of this, this man still went to worship God in
In
many ways, it is hard for us to identify with the Ethiopian eunuch. We certainly have it much easier than he
did. We don’t have to travel nearly as
far as he did to come to worship. We
certainly don’t have the status and wealth that he did to distract us from our
worship and faith, and we certainly are welcome within our faith, no matter
what our physical condition might be.
But, we face other challenges. We
live in a society increasingly becoming more and more secular. We live in the midst of a cultural war, in
the midst of a battle between what is fact and what is fiction. Yet, we send ourselves, and our children, out
into this battle without the weapons of knowledge and insight and the truth of
God’s word. And we do it to our own
detriment and theirs.
I am more and more convinced that the cultural war is a war
of identity, a war between those who say we belong to the world and the one who
says we belong to God. Only by knowing
the truth about who God is will we be able to know the truth about our own
identity, and be able to claim it as our own, just as the Ethiopian eunuch
did. Seekers need guides. Seekers need guides to help them know the
truth of Scripture so that they can claim their identity. Without knowledge comes vulnerability and
uncertainty. But with knowledge comes
security and assurance.
Certainly all of us would agree that Bible learning is
never a completed task. We can always
learn more, and we need to learn more.
Just because we have gotten older, and graduated from high school or
college, doesn’t mean that our Biblical learning is now over. While it is now up to us to make that
decision for ourselves rather than for someone else to make it for us, it is
still our calling as God’s people. Since
we cannot follow a physical Jesus, we must follow God’s written Word in order
to understand what it means to be disciple of Jesus Christ.
This
is why it is imperative for us to continue our Biblical education no matter how
young or old we are, because without Biblical education how can we truly know
who God is, what God has done for us, and how God thinks and feels about
us? But most importantly, how can we teach
the Gospel to others, if we don’t know the Gospel ourselves? And with that we turn to Philip.
It
is much easier for us to identify with Philip, a man who was called by God to
follow Jesus, as all of us are. Like us,
Philip was faithful as well as spiritual, and he gives us a good example of
what it means to be willing to be led by the Spirit. Also, like us, he was a person, who came from
a regular trade, a common person who worked with his hands to make a
living. But even though he was a
fisherman to begin with, he was called to do something much greater. Through the experience of the living Christ
and through the presence of the Spirit, he was now more than a fisherman, he was now a Gospel teacher, a teacher of the
Lord.
It
is this new vocation that Philip was living out when he met the Ethiopian that
day on the road to
My
friends, we can read and read and read the Bible, but unless someone takes time
to help us through it, to explain what it is we are studying, to help us
understand, we will always be stuck in the same place. Not just in Sunday school, but in our own
homes, with our own spouses and children, and with everyone we meet in our
daily lives, both at work and at play.
Without guides to open up the scriptures to others, without guides to be
the means by which the Holy Spirit works in people’s lives, the church will not
grow, and maybe that is why it is in such decline today. Maybe we have forgotten our calling to be a
teacher of the Gospel, to be a proclaimer of the good
news about Jesus, to maybe be the one person in someone’s life who makes a
difference in their life, who can gave them something that will effect their
life forever, who can give them what they need to claim their identity as a
child of God, and give them the knowledge they need to know the truth of God’s
son, Jesus Christ.
Brothers
and sisters, never underestimate the significant role
you have in the spiritual guidance of others, for it is the Spirit of God that
will be at work in you, and when the Spirit of God is at work, nothing is
impossible. Amen.