Acts 6:1–7

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists murmured against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the body of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brethren, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” And what they said pleased the whole multitude, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands upon them. And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem and a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith.

The Growth of the Early Church

One of Luke’s purposes in writing the book of Acts is to tell the story of the remarkable growth of the church in the years after Jesus left the earth and sent his Spirit to empower his people (Acts 1:8). You can see this if you notice how frequently he highlights the growth of the church. For example,

Acts 2:41, “So those who received the word were baptized and there were added that day about 3,000 souls.” (In Jerusalem.)

Acts 2:47, “And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.” (In Jerusalem.)

Acts 4:4, “Many of those who heard the word believed; and the number of the men came to about 5,000.” (In Jerusalem.)

Acts 5:14, “More than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and women.”

The Early Church Had Problems

It was like a net thrown into the sea of the world, Jesus said, and it was drawing into its power good fish and bad (Matthew 13:47–50).

A true movement of the Spirit in this fallen world will always collect all kinds into the church. This is the explanation of that strange text in Hebrews 6 where it talks about people who have participated in the Holy Spirit and tasted of the powers of the age to come and yet commit apostasy and fall away from the faith and are destroyed. They had been gripped in an external way by the power of God, but they were not born again. They were touched by the Spirit but not transformed. They were excited about supernatural power, and even experienced it, but their flesh had not been crucified (Galatians 5:24), and they had no true brokenness for sin or passion for holiness (Matthew 5:3–6)

Correcting the Problem

It is necessary to understand and provide proper organization within the church. Somebody once said Christians become very unchristian when they get organized. There’s been a long running kind of debate about whether the church is to be organized or not and it’s kind of reached a focus in our current age.

Some would contend that the church should have absolutely no formal organization. It should not own a building, it should not have a piece of property, it should not have anybody who is responsible for any particular functions. Everyone just kind of moves around freely within the body of Christ connected corporately to themselves and to Christ who is the head.

Some say that any system is not of God, which is a little difficult to support. God is so organized that the sun keeps coming up all the time, or the fact that the earth keeps revolving, if you’re a scientist. That everything goes on all the time like it ought to. God is extremely well organized.

So organized is God that your body actually operates year after year without you doing much to make it happen.

Every dimension of God’s world is organized. And so to say that anything that is a system is not of God is to misconstrue the very nature of God, which is the absolute epitome of being organized.

On the other hand there are some people who say that the church is totally an organization, that it must be run like a business, that it must develop complex organizational charts with all kinds of boards and committees and sub committees.

To create an organization and then tell the Holy Spirit to bless it is just as foolish as attempting to tell the Holy Spirit what to do. The New Testament church is an organism. And I believe that the life of the body is its connection to Christ and its organic unity to itself. But there are certain things that must occur organizationally.

Both above extremes are wrong. To say that the church is only an organism and cannot be organized is wrong. To say that the church is strictly an organization and shouldn’t be a functioning flowing kind of living thing is wrong. Following either extreme can get the church into great trouble.

To be organized simply means that something functions in an ordered sequence, and the apostle Paul writing to the Corinthians said this: “Let all things be done decently and in order.” There’s got to be an organization within the organism. It’s a good thing your body functions in that way. It’s a good thing that the organism is organized.

Here in Acts 6 we see that the early church needs to get a little bit better organized. They are a functioning organism. They have had a colossal effect upon the Jewish community in Jerusalem. They have astounded people with the miracles and the wonders and the signs that have been going on. Multitudes have been coming to Jesus Christ. However, the Spirit of God knows that it needs to get organized and the crisis comes in Chapter six and we find the beginnings of the organization of the church.

Biblical church organization always accommodates ministries that the Spirit has already begun.

Now this early church, we can see this pattern in the early church because they have begun to get organized.
Organization is never an end in itself.

Now the early organization was pretty simple. The apostles taught, the apostles ruled and everybody else carried out what they said. But the church began to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and they began to face some real problems organizationally.

What was the reason for organization?

If you’ve got an organization, all that means is that you have certain people doing certain things. And what were the requirements for the people?

Who were the people chosen?

Why did they need to get organized?

“And in those days when the number of disciples was multiplied.” Stop there. Now there’s your first problem. You’ve got too many people for the apostles to handle all the work. You say how many? Well we don’t really know, but many would venture a conservative guess at 30,000 at least, between 20 and 30 thousand. Now that’s a large congregation.

But you can imagine trying to handle a congregation that large, not only when you were handling their spiritual needs, but disseminating all their physical needs and caring for the poor and the widows and everybody else.

And here they are a couple of months old with 20,000–30,000 people and they haven’t adjusted to the growth at all and now they’re faced slam bang against a fantastic problem. And just handling the care of the believers is a great problem, making sure that the poor people get the food they need, and making sure somebody’s collecting all that, it and somebody was responsible to be the teacher at that meeting.

And you can imagine that the apostles, all twelve of them, were running around trying to take care of all those people?

But they were on the verge of such an evangelistic explosion, in fact Chapter six introduces Stephen to us. Stephen appears in the next chapter and following on Stephen’s heels is Paul and Paul began evangelization of the Gentiles. So we’re right on the threshold of that whole movement.

When you get on the threshold of something big Satan begins to work. As soon as you begin to do something for God Satan moves in to mess up.

Now Satan approaches the church from one of three ways, or all three ways.

He will use persecution.
Satan uses the attack against the church of persecuting the saints. You know whether it’s the emotional persecution of being ostracized from your society, or whether you’re looked down on as some kind of a religious So Satan uses that. He tried that in the early church and it didn’t work as we saw already in our past study as the Apostles were arrested and beaten. He persecuted the early church and the message flew faster and gave God the opportunity to do more miracles to more abundantly prove that Jesus was Messiah, and every time he persecuted the church God overruled it and the church grew faster.

Satan will use sin in the body.
If he can get some individuals within the body to begin to sin then he can pollute the body. And he tried that with Ananias and Sapphira and God moved in and just killed Ananias and Sapphira dead on the spot right in front of the whole church. yet. The purer the church the faster the gospel.

Satan will us dissention in the body.
If he can get the church so busy fighting within it itself that its message is lost in hypocrisy and its energy is dissipated in internal struggle. Murmur, murmur, which is being translated as somebody was griping. Now this is a problem. Somebody’s griping. What are they griping about? The murmuring of the Grecians, which were the Greek Jews.

There were Grecian Jews or the Hellenist Jews. They were Jews who lived outside. They lived in Asia Minor, North Africa and all those areas. They had moved out, some of them three, four generations from living in Palestine, but they had maintained Jewish heritage and always came back to Jerusalem for Passover and Pentecost and everything. Many of them were saved at Peter’s preaching, right? So the church is made up of Jews from Israel and Jews from outside the land. Now it was only natural that there would be an immediate kind of break there because the Jews from outside spoke Greek; the Jews from Israel spoke Hebrew and Aramaic.

So they spoke two different languages; therefore, they would tend to group into the language groups where they could communicate. Not only that, the native Jews looked down somewhat on the Grecian Jews in a little bit of a snobbishness because they felt they had probably been polluted by alien culture and they weren’t true Jews, loyal to the land.

And so, there was this little friction here. So the Grecian Jews have a complaint. The murmuring, “There arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration.” Oh petty, somebody’s mother-in-law didn’t get her goodies. That’s what it all boiled down to. I mean why would they ever let something like that cause trouble. Listen it’s always those little things that mess up everything. It’s always somebody’s little thing that’s blown into a huge thing and so what was happening was the Grecian Jews thought that in the dispensing and the money to the widows the Grecian Jew widows were coming out on the short end of the stick.

So this was a common custom for the Jews to care for the poor, the needy and the widows. This is specifically defined by the apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 5, as a responsibility of the church. I believe the church’s responsibility is to meet the needs of the widows of believers.

Just like when the children of Israel in the wilderness wanted to gripe they griped to Moses and Aaron, so the people griped to the apostles. But that’s good. If you have a complaint you want to go to the people that can do something about it. You don’t want to talk to everybody else about it.

Before the church can do anything, especially effective evangelism, the dissention has got to get out.

Satan’s trying to mess the church up by sin in the life of the believer. What do we do? We sin. Satan’s trying to create dissention. What do we do? We get into little hassles, little bickerings and little dissentions. We do like this and we don’t like that and so forth and so on. This group is against this group and so and this person is against that person. You know what he’s going to do and we let him do it anyway. I can say honestly that. It never ends. You just claim victory and the next morning you wake up and it’s battle all over again.

So, the complainers with a valid complaint went to the apostles.

Now the first thing they say is look okay guys we recognize the problem, but we can’t handle it. They knew what their calling was; their calling was to the word and the preaching of the Word and they didn’t want to leave that. “We will not leave that to serve tables.”

Now this can lead to a real big crisis.

If the ones who are to preach and prepare those for the work of the ministry, leave the handling of the truth of the Word, disaster is ahead. The results of the void of truth is, congregations languish in spiritual infancy year after year, after year, after year. They never get anything. and that was the teaching of the Word of God and they were starting to have to turn that over or just leave it undone because of time and other necessity.

Verse 3, “Wherefore brethren because we have this need, look among you,” that means select, “seven men.”.
Correcting the problem, select men to correct it, they give guidelines for it.

Here are five requirements for leaders in the church.

Number one, men. They are to be men.

Now nothing against women. Women are wonderful. God’s basic instruction that man is in authority and woman is in submission the leadership of the church belongs to men.

Number two.

That they be from among you. Isn’t it a great thing that God expects the church to find its own leadership from within its own ranks.

Number three.

They must be of honest report. A good reputation, men whose integrity and reputation is blameless.

Number four.

They must be spiritual men, full of the Holy Spirit, filled with the Spirit. Men whose lives are not their own, but lost in the will of the Spirit.

Number five.

They were to be wise, full of wisdom. That means the are able to use the knowledge they have in a practical way. They are to be able to flesh out truth in life.

Why were there seven?

Because the Mishna said in Jewish towns anybody conducting business would have to have seven men and so there were seven very likely in order that they might conduct the business within the Jewish town. And so the requirements were laid out. This is the kind of leadership the church needs.

The two were beginning to split and here they are back together united again. God has accomplished His purpose. The devil’s been defeated. The whole multitude was pleased. Is that good? They’re back together. No more split. They got together. Praise God. Whenever Satan tries to divide and God has His way things get back together tighter than they’ve even been before.

Who were they? Stephen, All seven names are Greek. They said if the Grecian Jews feel like they’ve been slighted oh God forbid, let’s choose deacons and the whole church chose all seven of them from the Grecian Jews.

The church got organized and you know what happened when the church gets spiritually organized as the Spirit directs it, the results are fantastic.

Verse 7, “The Word of God increased.” Why? Number one the apostles had more time. Number two, the church was in love with itself again and it was effective. And as a result of the Word of God increasing look what happened. “The number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly.” More people got saved. They just got saved faster and faster. And not only that, look at this shock, “A great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.”

Now those aren’t the chief priests. Those are the ordinary priests looking for their Messiah. They found Him in Jesus Christ and they had a revival among the priests.