Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Acts 1:1-12, NASB
- Series: Sent for the Sake of the Gospel (2026), no. 2
- Date: Sunday, June 7, 2026 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
Listen Online
Watch Online
Text
Prepared for the Journey
I have a feeling that for a lot of you—at least for some of you—I know what will be happening in your house this week because it is the same thing that will be happening in my house: a whole lot of laundry and packing because we are getting ready to send people to Falls Creek a week from tomorrow. I know, with my wife being the preparer that she is, that preparation will start tomorrow, and she will have to make sure that everybody has everything they need. Even though they pack their own suitcases, she will still make sure. And it is okay—she still does it for me.
She doesn’t check my clothes, but I have to tell you, when we took the school trip to D.C. a couple of months ago, you never outgrow it. My mother had to make sure I had what I needed and sent me with a LocknLock full of homemade cookies, and she said, “You do not have to share these with all the children.” It was awesome.
My wife wanted to make sure I had everything I needed for the trip, so she bought what was basically a tackle box. For this, you do not want to use one of mine that has been used. She filled each little compartment with my favorite snacks. I called it a snackle box. She is the best wife ever.
When she is getting ready to go on a trip, I do not pack snacks for her, but I try to make sure her vehicle has gas. If I have time to do that, I certainly make sure the fluids are topped off, that she has money on her Pikepass, and all of that. When we send somebody out, the responsible thing to do, the loving thing to do, is to make sure that they have everything they need for that journey. Some of you in this room are going to be doing that for kids or grandkids in the next week or so.
That is what Jesus has done for us. Last week we started talking about this idea of, as a church, being sent. What is it that He has called us to accomplish? What is our “why”? We spent last week looking at the Great Commission in Matthew 28.
He has given us this job to accomplish, which is to represent Him to the ends of the earth and to make disciples, which we covered last week. That sounds like a hard thing until we break it down to what it really means. According to Matthew 28, as we are going through our daily lives, we are looking for opportunities to point people who do not know Jesus to Jesus so they can trust Him as their Savior, and we are looking for opportunities to help people who do know Jesus obey Jesus. And it is that simple. We are pointing people to Jesus, and we are teaching them to obey Him.
We are teaching what we know about Jesus to somebody else. This sounds like such a daunting task, especially as He tells us that we are going to go to the world throughout all nations. It sounds like a daunting task, but the reality is He calls us as a whole, as a body of Christ, to go to every corner of creation. But He calls each of us to go specifically to the places that He has prepared for us, and He has given us everything we need for the journey.
He has prepared us with everything that we need in order to do this job. He doesn’t just send us out and say, “You’ll figure it out.” He equips us with everything that we need. That is what we are going to look at this morning: how we are sent with what we need.
And we are going to be in Acts chapter 1 this morning. Acts chapter 1 is the moment of Jesus’ ascension. So what we looked at last week in Matthew 28 was the prelude to this. It is where He gathered all of His followers together in Galilee on the side of a mountain and had given them this Great Commission, because most of His followers were in Galilee.
Then He goes back to Jerusalem with this core group, the eleven remaining disciples and some others who were closer followers of Him. They go back to Jerusalem for Him to ascend to heaven. And He gives a little further instruction. He has already told them what the Great Commission is, but He gives them a little bit more detail on how they are going to fulfill it—how they specifically are going to fulfill it in the immediate aftermath of Him ascending to heaven. That is what we’ll look at this morning in Acts chapter 1.
These first twelve verses of Acts are where He gives the instructions: “Here is what you are about to do.” Here is what Luke writes: “The first account I composed, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach”—he is talking about the book of Luke there—“until the day when He was taken up to heaven, after He had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom He had chosen. To these He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God. Gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, which He said, ‘You heard of from Me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’”
So when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, Lord, is it at this time that you are restoring the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, it is not for you to know the times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and even to the remotest part of the earth. And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And as they were gazing intently into the sky while He was going, behold, two men in white clothing stood beside them.
They said, men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven. Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away.
Everything We Need for the Mission
Again, in this passage, He is giving them the next steps. As I am sending you out to fulfill this Great Commission—you and every believer who comes after you—here are the next steps that you are supposed to take, these disciples. And from it, we see what Jesus has provided to them, and these are the same things that He has provided for us. He has provided everything that we need to carry out this intense but absolutely necessary task.
We look at something like fulfilling the Great Commission and say, how am I supposed to make disciples? Maybe you are an introvert, like me, and you say, how am I supposed to go and talk to people? He has given us everything we need. Maybe you are self-conscious about all the things you do not have answers to.
He has given us everything we need. Whatever the reason is—and we all have our reasons for why we might not be able to fulfill the Great Commission—whatever our holdup is, He has given us the things that we need. He may not have given us everything we want.
Sometimes on a long trip, I’m eager for a Coke Zero, and I cannot say my wife has packed me a Route 44 Coke Zero with heavy ice. He may not have given us everything we want, but He has given us everything we need for the journey. That is what we are going to look at today.
A Message Grounded in the Resurrection
But we see in the first four verses where it talks about Him spending time with the disciples. Luke goes back to everything that He began to do and teach in verse 1. And He said that these things continued after the resurrection. We think of the time that Jesus taught as the time leading up to the crucifixion during those three years of ministry.
Jesus continued to teach after the resurrection. Jesus continued to prepare them after the resurrection. He was still in teaching mode until the very last second when He is taken up to heaven. It happened until this day when He was taken up, according to verse 2.
He spent forty days after the resurrection preparing them. That is not an accident of history, or that is not a coincidence. Anytime we see that number forty in Scripture, it usually involves some testing or proving. And it is not by mistake that Luke says He spent these forty days proving Himself to them, proving His resurrection.
It says in verse 3, He also presented Himself alive after His suffering. What He is doing for them in these 40 days is demonstrating the reality of His death and resurrection. What He was doing for them was giving them assurance and certainty of the message that they were supposed to take. Because what message were these disciples supposed to take to the world as they were making disciples?
Is it just, oh, you just need to love Jesus and he’ll show you how to be happy? That is not the message they were supposed to take. Is it, oh, follow Jesus and everything in your life will be wonderful? That wasn’t the message.
The message they were supposed to take was this man came to earth claiming to be God in human flesh, claiming that He would die on the cross for our sins, and then He died on the cross and He rose again. And we saw Him. And we can be right with God because of His sacrifice. That was the message they were being called to take.
What Jesus is doing during these forty days is preparing them so there is no second-guessing this message. Jesus, even today, gives us a message that is grounded in His resurrection. If we are sharing the gospel with people, one of the questions that we are going to come up against is, how do we know? How do we know Jesus is God?
How do we know Jesus saved us? How do we know any of this is true? What is the difference between what you are saying and what any other group of people says? The difference between what we believe and what any other group teaches is that it is rooted in a historical fact.
It is not rooted in—and I should say, a public historical fact. I will tell you this: Muhammad may have very well seen things when he went into that cave, but nobody else claims to have seen what he saw. Joseph Smith’s visions were private visions. They were just something that he saw and experienced, if they were real.
Same thing with Buddha. As he meditated under that tree, he had a private experience. Christianity and the message of the gospel are rooted in something that happened openly and in public. It happened in a way that we can look at what people witnessed, we can see their statements, and we can test their credibility. It can be corroborated by other people.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the best attested fact in all of ancient history. And I get that we weren’t there to see in the way that they saw, but start here: He is spending forty days with them to make sure there is no doubt in their minds about what they saw. These people watched Jesus die. There is an urban legend that has grown up, and it is taught in churches, that all the disciples ran and hid and nobody stayed with Him through the crucifixion. There is nothing in the Gospels that suggests that. All the evidence points to this: they were there to the end, and then they ran and hid.
That is why they ran and hid, because they knew He was dead. And in their minds, they thought that was the end of it. They weren’t looking for a resurrection, even though at least nine times in the Gospels before that, He had predicted His own death and His own burial and His own resurrection. They ran and hid because they were convinced He was dead.
They knew He was buried. They knew where the tomb was. Several people saw where He was buried, watched it, and they are identified in the Gospels by name. Now, you and I cannot go back and cross-examine them because they are dead.
But in the days when these stories began to circulate, those people were known. And those people openly said, yes, I saw where He was buried. And then there were the same people who saw the tomb empty. These same people who might have been accused of stealing the body had no motive for doing it. I could spend the whole service this morning just talking about this fact: they had no motive for stealing the body.
They had no motive for stealing the body and then lying about it. It is not like they got fame and fortune in their lifetimes. They were considered pariahs. They were chased from their homes. Many of them were martyred. They endured all of those things rather than recant what they had seen. They all said, “We saw Him die. We saw His body in the tomb. We saw the tomb empty. We saw Him alive again.” There are so many avenues and so many objections that people have used to try to attack this story over the years, and none of them hold up. Looking at the evidence we have from ancient history, the best explanation—the only explanation that works—is that Jesus Christ died, and then three days later was alive again.
And I realize that there is a limited amount of time this morning to go over how we can know that for sure. But if you want to know more about that, I will talk to you more about that than you’ve ever wanted to be talked to about anything in your life. Just come ask me. Okay?
Jesus wanted them to be certain. Because they were going to go and they were going to be challenged on the message that they were teaching. Wait, you are saying this guy was God and He can forgive sins? What makes you think that?
Because He rose from the dead. You and I, He has intended for us to not be shy about our message, but to be certain about our convictions because the evidence is right there in front of us. We cannot ignore the gospel writers as eyewitnesses, but the historical evidence is not limited to just these four eyewitness accounts. I’m not saying you have to do a deep dive like it is your obsession, like it has been with me, to pick apart every detail of the resurrection story and understand the objections. I’m not saying you have to have a PhD in the resurrection. I am saying we ought to be familiar enough with the story to know what it is we defend and what is the basis for our faith, because the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that if Christ is not raised, our faith is vain.
But if we look at the evidence and we understand what it means that Jesus really did die and rise again from the dead, that gives us conviction and boldness to go out and speak, because our message is not grounded in our opinion. It is not grounded in whether people like us or not, or whether they want to hear it. It is grounded in a historical fact: that 2,000 years ago Jesus walked out of the tomb. Why were these men so bold throughout the book of Acts and throughout the New Testament?
It was because they were convinced of the resurrection. We need to ensure that we are familiar with the gospel message and where it is rooted and why we know it is true so that we can speak with that conviction that they had. So Jesus has given us this message that is grounded in the resurrection.
The Holy Spirit Empowers the Mission
Second of all, we look at verses 4 and 5 and then a little bit in verse 8, and we see that Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit to empower the mission. Now, this becomes important for those of us who are a little bit shy or get a little bit tongue-tied at times. I’m not doing that on purpose. And we get a little bit nervous about what would I even say.
How would I handle this objection? How would I handle this hostility? How would I do this? Verse 4 teaches they weren’t supposed to go out and do that on their own.
We get worried about being able to share the gospel because we think we’ve got to go out and figure out on our own how to convince people. I spent years and years looking for that one magical argument that would just convince everybody under every circumstance, and it is not out there. Different people hear different things, and the Holy Spirit connects with them through different things. I heard a story from a pastor one time about him preaching on Psalm 23 on a Sunday night. There was this man that he had been praying for for years, and he had been preaching hard evangelistic messages, and there was nothing. Then he preaches on Psalm 23 on a Sunday night, and the man comes forward just broken in conviction and gets saved. And he thinks, “How did that even happen? That doesn’t even have to do with—that is not an evangelistic message.” It doesn’t matter. The Holy Spirit works where we do not.
He has given us the Holy Spirit in order to empower the message of the gospel as we take it out. We go and talk to people, you do not have to worry about how do I convince them? How do I, what exact words do I need to speak? We need to be willing to speak and we need to know what we are speaking about, but the Holy Spirit is the one who empowers that message, and so we need to follow His lead.
I think their impulse was to go out and try to do this on their own, and He said, no, you are going to wait in verse 4. You’re going to wait until you receive the promise of the Father, because you are going to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. What that meant was they were going to be indwelled by the Holy Spirit of God, who was going to empower them to take the message of the gospel to the nations. And that same Holy Spirit who was coming to baptize them and indwell them is the same one who baptized us at the moment of conversion, the same one who lives inside of us.
That has come up several times in the last few weeks, just in various messages I have preached: the reality that the third person of the Trinity lives inside of us. Why in the world do I think I have to figure all the things out when God is right in there? And if I’m just listening to Him and speaking as He tells me to speak, and to whom He tells me to speak, and where He tells me to speak, He is going to take care of that, and He is a whole lot better at this than I am. There have been numerous times that one of you has come to me after the service and said, “Great message.”
I love how you said X, Y, or Z. I do not remember saying that. It wasn’t in my notes. All I can figure is it was the Holy Spirit.
And He is better at this than we are. I think sometimes He translates for us. I think sometimes He filters the message for us. I know that is what happened in Acts chapter 2 as they began to preach the gospel and people heard it in their own languages. It was the work of the Holy Spirit. I think sometimes the Holy Spirit will connect with somebody’s heart, and it is only barely related to what we are even saying, but the Holy Spirit uses it. And so this is something we dare not try to do His work without: the leadership of the Holy Spirit. But that ought to reassure us, and it ought to light a fire under us, that He has given us the Holy Spirit to empower the mission.
Enough Direction for Faithful Obedience
I like this in verses 6 through 8. He has given us enough direction for faithful obedience. We talked last week in Matthew 28 about how they were, some of them were a little bit paralyzed because they didn’t know how to react. They didn’t know what the next step was.
And sometimes we are not going to know what the next few steps are, as much as some of us would like to. Now, some of you are okay with the adventure of it all, but some of us would like to have the next thirty years all mapped out step by step. God doesn’t usually work that way with us.
But when we come to verse 6, this is funny to me. They still do not get it. I would probably be in the same boat as them, though. All this time, everybody’s thought Jesus was coming as an earthly Messiah.
He is going to throw out the Romans. He is going to restore the kingdom of David in this golden age. And He goes through all of this with the cross, and He goes through the resurrection, and He has been teaching them for 40 days. And they ask Him, okay, now you are going to restore the kingdom?
Like, they still do not get what is happening here. Jesus told them there were some things that they weren’t meant to understand. He tells them, when we get to verse 7, “It is not for you to know.” I’ll be honest with you: I do not love that answer. Just in my flesh, I do not love that answer. But I realize it is true. There are some things that we do not need to know. There are some things that we were not made to know. The beauty of it is that none of this affected their ability to go and proclaim what they did know about the kingdom. None of this affected their ability to go out and proclaim what they did know about the King. They didn’t know the timeline. They didn’t know what all of His plans were. But they knew He had been crucified, they knew why He had been crucified, they knew He had risen again, and they knew they had seen Him. And they knew that there was a message that needed to be proclaimed of forgiveness because of His sacrifice. And that is what they were sent to do.
There were things they were never going to understand, but Jesus had given them enough instruction for them to be able to move forward in faithful obedience anyway. And that is what He does for us. He gives us enough direction for faithful obedience. Lord, if I step out and I do what you’ve called me to do and I make disciples here, what is that going to look like in five years?
“It is not for you to know, maybe. But God, what’s going to happen to me next week? That may not be for me to know. Well, God, what if they are hostile when I go and talk to them?
Let Him take care of that. What if they ask me a question I cannot answer? What if they raise an objection I cannot answer? What we do not know does not affect our ability to move forward with what we do know.
There was so much they still did not understand about the kingdom, but He still told them to go. And you and I will never have all the answers to every question. We’ll never know every detail of God’s plan, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot obey Him in what we do know. He has given us enough information for us to take the next step in obedience. And sometimes, instead of looking ahead and saying, “What is the next step? What is the next part of Your plan?” we need to ask ourselves, “What is the last thing You told me to do? Have I left it undone?” We should not let what we do not know about the future get in the way of obedience in the present.
A Mission Field That Begins Where We Are
Then we come to verse 8, and we see that Jesus gives us a mission field that begins where we are. There is this progression that begins at Jerusalem. He said, “You shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.” It begins with where we are, and it ends with where God eventually leads us.
And there are these circles that get talked about in missions, the Jerusalem, the Judea and Samaria, the uttermost parts of the world. We understand what the uttermost parts of the world are, that is wherever God sends. Jerusalem is wherever we are now. Judea and Samaria I have heard explained as, well, I have heard explained in different ways.
They could be spreading out from where you are. I have heard the distinction between Judea and Samaria explained as your people and the other. Maybe to put it another way, the people you are comfortable going to, the people you are not comfortable going to. Because none of these people were really happy about the idea that the Samaritans were going to be included in the gospel, at least initially.
He gives us a mission field that begins where we are. This is just a brief section of this text, verse 8, but it is also one of the most quoted because it is one of the most crucial parts. There is this idea that you and I have been given a mission field, and we do not know where it ends, but we know where it starts. God has given you the task of making disciples. He has given me the task of making disciples. And we do not know where that task will lead, but we know where it starts.
Where does it start? Right here where we are. It starts right here where God has planted us. And God has not put us where we are and with the people we are around by accident.
Wherever you live, whatever your neighborhood is, maybe there is that neighbor that they do not know Jesus and they act like it. And they rub you the wrong way and maybe you rub them the wrong way. God didn’t put you in proximity to them by accident. Or that co-worker who’s a little rough around the edges because they need Jesus.
God didn’t put you, you are not in their orbit by accident. Wherever we are, God has put us there. Doesn’t mean we stay there forever, but God has put us where we are at each moment because that is where our mission field is. It starts from where we are and works its way out to the end of the world.
We have a responsibility to say yes to the Lord wherever He leads. And sometimes the hardest part of that is when He leads right where we are. It is a lot easier to say, yeah, I’ll go help out in Alaska with what they are doing and share the gospel. Sometimes it is easier to say yes to that than it is to say I’ll walk across the street.
Both of those are important, by the way. The proximity is not the issue. The yes is the issue.
Hope and Urgency Until Christ Returns
And then we look at the ending of this, verses 9 through 12, and we see that Jesus gives us a hope as we wait for His return. Sometimes as you are serving Him, sometimes as you are making disciples, it might get a little lonely because sometimes you might be the only one who, you feel like you are the only one who sees the need. You’re the only one that is on fire about it. Other people are not.
Why can’t I get other people as excited about this as I am? You might feel discouraged because you are trying your best, and you are just not seeing the fruit you think you ought to see in terms of people trusting Christ as a result of what you are sharing with them. First of all, both of those are the Holy Spirit’s job. We were never promised that we would see all the fruit.
Sometimes we plant, sometimes we water, sometimes we harvest. The Apostle Paul talks about that. But in those moments of frustration, in those moments of discouragement, in those moments of loneliness, we have the hope of Jesus’ return. We have the hope that what we are doing is not meaningless. We have the hope that comes from knowing there is a day when Jesus is going to return. Whatever the result has been here on earth, what we are looking for is to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And whether we see the fruit we think we are supposed to see on earth, that is the goal, is hearing well done. Also, I believe when that comes, we’ll understand what He was doing.
We’ll see the fruit of those labors. We’ll see the person that we talked to felt like we beat our heads against a wall. Have you ever just witnessed to somebody and you felt like you were talking to a rock? We will see how God used that and maybe it took three or four other people, maybe 10 or 12 other people after that to talk to that person about Christ.
Maybe they got saved and we never knew it. We have the hope that one day we will see the fruit that the Holy Spirit has produced when we are all united with the Lord. We have the promise of His return. But notice this, as it talks about His return, and it should comfort us, the knowledge of His return, there is also a sense of urgency that it creates in us.
Because it talks about these men who appeared to them, and I assume they are angels, two men in white clothing, stood beside them. Basically, they say, why are you standing there staring at the sky? And that is sometimes what we want to do, don’t we? We just stand there and stare with our mouths open.
What He is telling them, He is coming back, right? There is a finite amount of time. For us, it feels like it goes on forever. But there is a day when there will be no more opportunity for us to share Christ. The promise of His return and the hope of His return should create in us a sense of urgency to go out and share while we have the opportunity. Folks, there are other things we may wish we had. You might wish you could speak better. I wish that all the time. You might wish you knew more. I wish that all the time. You might wish you had this ability or that ability. There are things we would love to have that might be helpful—not necessarily bad things—but He has given us everything we need in order to go and fulfill the Great Commission.
And as I’m talking, I have no doubt that for some of you, there is a name that is coming across your mind. Or there is a face that pops into your mind. That is probably who the Holy Spirit is leading you to talk to. And we can say, “Oh, I cannot for X, Y, or Z reason.”
The enemy will tell you, “But you need this first.” I’m telling you, God’s Word shows us He has given us everything we need. Doesn’t mean they are going to drop to their knees and trust Christ as their Savior today. You let the Holy Spirit work that out, but He has given you everything you need to be able to have the conversation.
And then trust Him with what He does.