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Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20 is the one sermon in the book of Acts preached to the church. He calls them to meet him on the beach at Miletus, and the credentials he gives them are the ones Roman culture looked down on. In part one of this message from Church on Fire, our series through the book of Acts, Pastor Darren walks through how Paul lived among them: as a slave of Christ, with great humility, with tears, through hardship, and preaching repentance and faith in Jesus publicly and from house to house. Pastor Darren closes by asking "who are you becoming today?" For more information, visit garden.church.

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

Paul preaches the same message in two cities forty five miles apart. Thessalonica riots. Berea starts a Bible study. Same message, same messenger. The only thing that changes is how the word gets received. We look at why people can miss the truth when it's sitting right in front of them, and why the obstacle is usually not the evidence but the story we've already built our lives around. In Thessalonica the offense was a king who took his throne through a cross instead of a sword, and the claim that if Jesus reigns, Caesar doesn't. Jesus isn't asking for our vote. He's asking for our allegiance. In Berea, people received the word eagerly and put the scriptures on the witness stand every day, and the examining produced faith instead of doubt. We also talk about what hunger and discipline look like now: asking God for an appetite, starving the ones that crowd it out, and making time in the word a custom rather than an intention.

In Acts 16, a fortune telling girl follows Paul through Philippi shouting things that are technically true, and he silences her with the name of Jesus. We look at the kind of spirituality she represented, the Delphi brand that kings and business owners paid good money for, and how accurate words can still be arranged into a lie. Most of us listened to a dozen voices before we ever walked into church, so the question is whose voice gets the final say. From there we go back to Acts 1 and the bigger story. Luke tells us what Jesus began to do, and Acts is that same ministry continuing through the local church: preaching the kingdom, healing the sick, casting out demons. We talk about deliverance as daily rather than as a special event, about the difference between what needs a doctor or a counselor and what needs the authority of Jesus, and about how the only power the enemy has over a child of God is our agreement with his lies.

In Acts 16, Paul is doing exactly what Jesus called him to do, and the Holy Spirit keeps closing doors. He heads for Asia and gets blocked, tries Bithynia and gets blocked again, until finally a dream sends him to Macedonia. The question underneath the whole passage: can we trust the God of the no as much as the God of the yes? Closed doors are one of the main ways God guides his church, and Acts 16 shows what that has looked like for Paul, for Lydia, and what it might look like for us. Once Paul crosses into Macedonia, he ends up at a river outside Philippi and meets Lydia, a wealthy businesswoman whose heart the Lord opens as she listens. She gets baptized with her household and redirects her home, her resources, and her time toward what God is doing. A little further along, Paul meets Timothy, a young leader he takes under his wing and raises up for the mission. Running through all of it is a pointed question for the church in Southern California: are we consuming Jesus, or are we following him? Something wakes up in us when we stop treating faith like content and start reorganizing our lives around the one who is still actively leading his mission today.