GARDEN CHURCH Podcast

What was the primary message of Jesus? Pastor Darren shares the moment a college professor asked him that question and he got it wrong, and how finding the answer (the kingdom of God) changed how he read the whole Bible. In this message, we look at how Luke frames the book of Acts as the continuation of what Jesus started: the same message, the same ministry, by the same Spirit, now carried by the church. We walk through what the kingdom of God actually means and what the ministry of Jesus looked like in the Gospel of Luke, which is proclaiming the kingdom, healing the sick, and casting out demons.

For more information, visit garden.church

In Ephesus, the wealthiest and most pagan city of Paul's world, a move of God began with about twelve people being filled with the Holy Spirit. Before the lecture hall, the miracles, or the riot, the Spirit came first. This week we look at the fourth condition for revival in Acts 19: a church full of the presence of God. We trace the promise of the Spirit from Genesis through the prophets to Jesus, who said he would send another advocate like himself, and we talk about what "baptized in the Holy Spirit" actually means: soaked, overwhelmed, changed all the way through.

We also get honest about why so many of us live without that power. We've tried to will ourselves into patience and self-control, we've been discipled by secularism and consumer Christianity more than by scripture, and we're too busy and too hurried to wait on God. Paul's command to the Ephesians still stands: keep on being filled with the Spirit. It starts with humility, and with an old prayer the church has prayed for two thousand years. Come, Holy Spirit.

For more information, visit garden.church.

Paul walked into Ephesus, the wealthiest and most idol-filled city in the Roman Empire, and found twelve disciples who had never heard of the Holy Spirit. Three months in the synagogue later, he moved the church to a rented lecture hall and taught the word of God daily for two years, during the hours everyone else spent napping through the heat. In Acts 19, revival wasn't organized around a prayer room. It was organized around a Bible study.

This week in Church on Fire we're asking what it means to be a church anchored by Scripture. We look at how Luke uses "the word" as a main character in Acts, something alive and unstoppable rather than information sitting on a page, and we go to Matthew 4 to see the two ways Scripture gets read: the way Satan quotes it, clipped and out of context, and the way Jesus submits to it. Then we get practical. Study the word, submit to the word, live the word. With your money, your relationships, your sexuality, your integrity, your phone, what would it look like to actually do what it says?

In Acts 19, Paul spends three months preaching in the synagogue in Ephesus. Some listeners recognize the truth of what he's saying and still refuse to believe, because believing would cost them their position. So Paul moves out, rents a lecture hall, and spends the next two years teaching the disciples day after day until the whole region has heard the message.

In this message, Pastor Bill looks at what it actually means to be a disciple. Not someone who agrees with Jesus, but an apprentice who watches the master and learns to live the way He lived. The question isn't whether you believe the right things. It's whether the way you handle your money, your relationships, your work, and your ordinary Tuesday looks anything like the way Jesus would handle them if he were you. And if it doesn't, what is discipling you instead?

Everybody is talking about revival right now. But history shows the same pattern every time God moves, whether in Wales in 1904, on Azusa Street in 1906, or in Ephesus in Acts 19: the presence of God, the fear of the Lord, sin confessed, and idols dropped. You can't manufacture revival. You meet the conditions and God sends the fire.

In this first week of a six-part look at Acts 19, we step into first-century Ephesus, a city where to belong was to worship Artemis. She was the goddess of security, health, wealth, and blessing, and the temple was the bank of Asia. When the Ephesian believers finally dragged their hidden scrolls of sorcery into the light and burned them, the word of God outpowered every other power in the city. These weren't new converts. They were established Christians who had kept old spells in the drawer just in case Jesus didn't come through. That's most of us. We don't throw out the old operating system; we install Jesus on top of it. Every hidden idol is a confession that we haven't trusted God with that part of our lives, and secrecy is the oxygen that keeps it alive.

Pastor Darren names the idols of Southern California, including wellness, image, sexuality, entertainment, and money. The question isn't what to cut back on or put boundaries around. It's what God is asking you to burn. Name it, burn it, and fear the Lord.

Part of our series Church on Fire: A Journey Through Acts. 

What do you learn after you know everything? In Acts 18, Luke introduces Apollos, a learned man from Alexandria who taught about Jesus accurately and with real fervor, though he knew only the baptism of John. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him home and explained the way of God more adequately. Two tentmakers with no formal training between them, and he listened.

We looked at what that kind of humility costs, and at the danger on the other side, where a real encounter with God quietly becomes the standard we measure everyone else by. There was no public takedown here, no heresy hunt. People don't change their minds because someone hands them a better idea. They change because someone loved them into the possibility of a different way of living.

Acts 18 tells us what happened during Paul's eighteen months in Corinth. First Corinthians tells us what was happening inside him while it did. In this message we look at both.

Corinth was built on strength, beauty, eloquence, and success. Hide your weakness, show off your best, win at all costs. Paul arrives as the most credentialed missionary of his day and instead of booking the biggest venue, he finds a leather shop and goes to work. He later writes that he came in weakness, with fear and trembling, resolved to know nothing but Christ crucified. That wasn't a strategy that failed. A performed gospel produces performed converts, and a faith built on performance collapses the moment a better show comes to town.

We also sit with what Jesus says to Paul in the middle of the night: do not be afraid, keep speaking, I am with you, I have many people in this city. Courage isn't a temperament. It comes from seeing who is with you.

Paul lands in Athens alone, walking a city drowning in idols, and what rises in him is a settled burning, the same grief God has over a place that has everything except him. In Acts 17 that burden turns into conversation. He doesn't open with Genesis. He finds an altar the Athenians built out of an old fear, quotes their own poets back to them, and tells the Epicureans and the Stoics where each of them is right before he shows them where they're wrong.

We spend time on what that asks of us. Everyone has an Athens: an office, a campus, a group chat, a street. And every Athens has an altar, whether that's the pursuit of self, the pursuit of wealth, the phone we can't put down, or the wounds we've quietly built our lives around. We also look at the line between contextualizing the gospel and compromising it, because a Jesus who affirms everything and asks nothing of us is a Jesus who never called anyone to repent.

Acts 17:16-34