The Portrait of a Godly Woman - Ben Stuart

Well, in 1861, Julia Ward Howe and her husband visited Washington, D.C., and as they arrived, they saw Union soldiers marching about, singing a marching song. The first verse of which said, John Brown's body is a moldering in the grave. John Brown's body is a moldering in the grave, and on they would go. The third verse was, Jeff Davis will hang from a tree, inspiring stuff like that. And so there was a minister standing next to Julia, and he understood that she was a poet. And so he asked her, do you think you could write better lyrics to this marching song? And Julia said, yeah, yeah, I think I can. And so in one night, she sat down and woke up and wrote these lyrics. The first verse of which was, mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. The third verse was, in the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me. He died to make men holy. Let us die to make men free while God is marching on.

And many of us know that song as the battle hymn of the Republic, written by Julia Howe. What's a little less well-known about Julia Howe is that after that and after the war, she became concerned. When the Civil War finally ended, she saw again that storm clouds of war were brewing in Europe. And she realized, we've lost so many sons and so many husbands, this has to stop. And so she attempted to gather a universal coalition of moms to fight for world peace together. And she tried to get a mom's coalition. She called for a Mother's Day of Peace. And though she was inspiring, it never really got off the ground. But she had a contemporary, a friend of hers, named Ann Jarvis. And Ann had a little bit humbler pursuits. She lived here in the Virginia area. And she said, you know what? Many of her children, she had over a dozen, had died from disease. And so she started Mother's Work Days, where she would get the mothers of Virginia and West Virginia together and teach them basic hygiene to help their kids. And then after the Civil War ended,

she saw that this region we live in had been rent apart, north and south. And she said, you know, with these little Mother's Work Groups, I'm gonna start Mother's Friendship Day, where we'll get mothers together and say, let's help each other. Let's nurse each other's wounded sons. Let's try to heal the wounds of a nation after the Civil War, right? And she gave her life to that. And when she died, her little daughter, Anna, who never married, never had kids, so wanted to honor her mother, she said, you know what? I wanna start a Mother's Day, not for world peace, but a day where we could stop and honor our moms with white carnations and a thoughtful note of gratitude. And so she petitioned for that. The president, Woodrow Wilson, said yes, and Mother's Day was born on the day, to celebrate on the day of her mother's death, Anna Jarvis. That's how Mother's Day started, right? Incidentally, later, she was mortified to find out that florists and card companies were monetizing Mother's Day, because they saw the potential.

And so at the end of her life, ironically, she petitioned to recall Mother's Day to end it, but she failed. And so here we are. So happy Mother's Day, on behalf of Julia and Ann, but maybe not Anna, hell, yeah. Now, why do I mention that? Because it's America's 250th birthday. These are some of the moms of the nation, right? That were trying to heal the wounds of a nation back in the Civil War, and I thought it was interesting to see they didn't just mother their own kids, but were mothers of the nation as well, trying to fight for liberty and freedom and to heal the wounds of a wounded nation. But I'm a little less interested in sort of preaching American history right now. I'm far more concerned with the history of the church, of the people of Jesus Christ and what we look like. And it's interesting, as you look through the Bible, there's so many moments where you see women who are a key part of the growth and the character shaping of the movement of Jesus Christ. And that's the text we're in today. We've been moving through the book of Acts. We took a break here in a couple weeks in May. We'll get back to it in June. But in the book of Acts, you saw in Acts chapter nine,

Saul, a persecutor of the church, come to faith in Jesus. And in Acts chapter 13 and following, we'll see a former persecutor of Jesus will become a preacher of Jesus to the ends of the earth. But before he does that, right in the middle, someone has to open the door for the good news of Jesus to go to the nations. And that someone is the apostle Peter, that God will lead him to jump the banks of his ethnic group and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to Cornelius so that the nations might know Jesus, who is Lord of all, right? And yet we had skipped this passage, and I wanted to come back to it on Mother's Day, because in this passage, it's here. And we'll see Peter perform two miracles as he's making his way to Cornelius' house. And he asked the question, why are these passages here? Well, they're here to show you how Peter got to Gentile areas, but they're really here to show you not just the movement of the cause of Jesus, but the character of the people of Jesus, what they were like. And we're gonna see it through Tabitha. Now, it never says if she's a mother, but in a sense, we're gonna watch her mother, the early Christian community, and we're gonna see what her character was like,

and Lord willing, ours will be the same. Before we jump in, it's interesting to note, I hear periodically in the culture, people say, yeah, but isn't Christianity kind of regressive for women? Doesn't Christianity hold women back? And for me, I always, when I hear that, it just kind of sounds like saying, I've never read the Bible or church history, right? Sounds the same. Because if you look at the history of the movement of Jesus, anywhere the gospel's been preached, the status of women has risen. And so you saw, actually, early in ancient Rome, women flocked to Christianity because they were so afforded higher status within the Christian culture. So many women were becoming Christians that actually in 370 AD, the emperor demanded the gospel of Jesus no longer be preached to women, because too many were saying yes, right? And the problem was, at the time in Rome, women were not seen in the broader Roman culture as having a great deal of value, that Roman families really only wanted one daughter because they were seen as absorption of wealth. And so if there was more, they would kill them. They would practice infanticide. Plato was a fan of infanticide, so was Aristotle. There's actually a letter we found years ago

from a soldier writing to his pregnant wife. And he says, I beg you, take care of our son. If you deliver a child before I come home, if it's a boy, keep it. If it's a girl, discard it. That was the idea. Girls were often married off at age 14 or so, really more about family status and money. And so men, if they wanted some entertainments, intellectually or physically, would often go to prostitutes, other women, family members, slaves. Women were seen as something to be used and of lower value. But when Christianity swept through Rome, it said something entirely different. It said, no, in Genesis, male and female are both made in the image of God. It says that men are meant to love their wives the same way Christ loved the church. So Christians said something crazy to the Roman, hey men, love your wives and be faithful to them. Treat them as a co-heir in the grace of life and love your kids. Have families, love that woman, and raise children together and care for these babies. And when the Roman culture would leave little babies out on the street to die of exposure, the Christian church would pick those little girls up and raise them as their own, right? And so if you and I went to some early church gatherings, we would hear the singing of little girls

because the church saw them as those possessing the image of God and therefore dignity. See it? So you see it in the New Testament. This came out as you read the songs of Mary and the songs of Elizabeth and we'll see later in Acts the contribution of Lydia and Priscilla who's a powerhouse in the faith. That Christianity loves to celebrate the contribution of women. And here in this passage, we're gonna see it through Tabitha as she encounters Peter. With all that, let's begin verse 32. Now as Peter went here and there among them all, he came down to the saints who lived at Lydda. He's traveling from Jerusalem to the north, but you always go down from Jerusalem because it's higher elevation. But he's going north and as he does so, he's visiting the saints. If you remember, there was persecution in Jerusalem, the Christians scattered. And so this is sort of a church visitation tour. And as he's making his way through these towns, he arrives at Lydda. And in verse 33, it says he found a man there named Aeneas, bedridden for eight years who was paralyzed. So he meets up with this guy and we don't know much about him other than he's paralyzed, he's been on the mat for eight years.

The eight years has given us to show us it's a long time, deep seated, it's meant to suggest there's no hope, right? And yet it's interesting, all through this passage as we look at these stories, there's parallels linguistically in what Peter's gonna do and what he saw Jesus do. And early in Jesus's ministry, Jesus was preaching and do you remember they ripped a hole in a roof and lowered down a paralyzed man on the mat? Same language. Actually, if you read in the Gospel of Mark, as Peter told his stories to Mark, the roof they ripped off was Peter's roof. Peter's the only one who mentions that fact because he was like, man, they tore up my roof. And they brought a paralyzed man down on the mat and put him before Jesus and Jesus said two things to him, arise and take your mat and go home. And so Peter, who's a disciple of Jesus, just does what Jesus does. He sees a paralyzed man and he does the same thing. Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you, rise and make your bed and immediately he rose. And we see three things. Jesus is the agent of the cure, not Peter. Jesus heals, right? And Peter gives him the credit. And that healing's immediate. It's a miracle.

The guy didn't just walk it off. God is on the move. And he tells him, make your bed for yourself. That's our first Mother's Day point, by the way. way, children, make your bed for yourself. Did not start with your mother. Did not start with Admiral McRaven. Didn't even start with the Apostle Peter. It came from Jesus. So in the name of Jesus, for the sake of your mother, make your bed. Amen? Any amens? Oh, there we are, Second Gathering. Okay, yeah. All right, in verse 35, we see the result. And all the residents of Lydda and Sharon saw him. Sharon being a region. There might have been a lady named Sharon, but a region named Sharon. They all saw the miracle, and they turned to the Lord. You're gonna see this throughout Acts. Miracles serve the message. I can heal your body, but you will still eventually die. I'm here for your soul. And as they see the power of God at work, they hear about the God who can save, not just heal. And they turn to Jesus and put their faith in him, right? We celebrated baptisms last Sunday. And that's a great part of it.

Why we do it on stage, why we do it on Sundays, is so you would see people saying, my life has changed because I've encountered Jesus. And as you see that life change, it helps authenticate the message. Life change is possible for you, too. And when people see God on the move in Aeneas' life, they say, I want to turn to a Lord like that. Amen? Now, as we move on, we get to another one, Tabitha. And we get a lot more detail about her. Verse 36, now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which translated means Dorcas. And she was full of good works and acts of charity. Luke breathes through Aeneas' healing. We don't know anything about the guy other than he was paralyzed and on a mat, right? He slows down to show us the character of this remarkable woman because he wants us to be like her. And we see a couple things. Number one is he focuses in on her name. Why? He won't name other people, he'll blow right by them. Well, I think there's two reasons he zooms in on her name. The first one is is that she's loved. What do you mean by that? Well, the name Tabitha is the Aramaic word for gazelle. Aramaic was the language that Jews spoke in that day. Why would someone name their daughter gazelle?

Well, because if you read Song of Solomon, the book of Romance in the Old Testament about the beloved woman, the beloved woman in the Song of Solomon is often called a gazelle. That this dearly loved woman is gracious and graceful because she's been loved. And so it was a cool thing to call your daughter, to call them gazelle. It kind of pulled up that idea from Song of Solomon. You are someone who's beloved, right? You are someone who's cared for, and you're graceful like a deer, right? And so her mama, her family named her Tabitha. And it's interesting that he focuses on her name because I think it is a demonstration of her character. You see that Tabitha is loved, dearly loved. You'll see it by her community later, but you know it comes from the Lord first. She's loved, right? And let me preach for a minute here. This is where healthy living begins. Healthy living begins in knowing that you're loved. You have to have a source to be a source. If you wanna be a source of love to others, you can't give what you do not have. So you must receive before you can give. And for the Christian, our love is always an effect, not a cause. We have been loved by God,

and from that inexhaustible resource, we love other people, right? If you don't have that source, then when you step out to your family or step out on the streets or in your office, wherever you go, you will be a drain, not a fountain. You'll be looking for affirmation from a boy. You'll be looking for compliments from your kids. You'll be looking to gain from others because you feel like you're empty. But if you can know that you are dearly and profoundly loved, then you have an overflow spilling out to eternal life. That's what a Christian is supposed to be, someone who knows they're loved by God, and that love spills the banks to love others. Now, you may say that and go, well, Ben, that's all great, but I didn't grow up with loving parents. I didn't grow up in a house of love. Well, in the Old Testament song of Solomon, we don't know if the beloved there did either. She was raised by her brothers. But you can know that you are loved by God as a father, by Jesus Christ as a brother, that the love of God can change you from the inside out. That's what we learned from Beauty and the Beast. My daughter was just in the play. She sang the title song, right? And as she sang it,

that beast who was so mean and ugly and isolated and alone transformed in our play by throwing his hat off stage and became something lovely, right? And what happened? He had to be loved to become something lovely, right? Not good dating advice, ladies, but it was never meant to be a picture of dating anyway. It was meant to be a picture of the gospel, right? That when we are dearly loved, even when we don't deserve it, love makes us lovely. Love makes us someone who can love. And you see beasts are turned to beauties by the grace of a loved one, right? And here, Tabitha, we will see loved people generously. How? She had a source, so she could be a source. She's loved, Tabitha, right? And she loves, it's interesting that he tells us not only her name, he tells us which translated means Dorcas, right? And what does that mean? Well, Tabitha is the Aramaic which Jews spoke of translation of the word gazelle. Dorcas is the Greek word for gazelle, okay? And so they're not calling her Dorcas to bully her. Some people go like, oh, are they calling her a dork? No, dork did not become an insult until the 1960s and 70s in America for a socially awkward person.

This was a compliment. This was just the Greek way of calling her gazelle, right? But why does he mention that? Why even say that? Some people don't even get their name mentioned at all. And he was saying, here's her name in Aramaic, here's her name in Greek. Why does he say that? Because she loved people who were both Jewish and Greek. What that shows you is, is she didn't have a tiny little world where I only loved people who looked like me. Her love wasn't this little thimble of love just for her family. That she so loved, it spilled the banks of her ethnic group, spilled the lengths of the cultural us's versus them's that you see that she loved like Christ. That Jesus' love spills over the expected boundaries in a culture. That's how you know God sized love. Jesus said, and if you love just your friends, what good is that? Even the pagans do that. He said, but I tell you, love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Then you'll be called sons of God in heaven that when you are loved by God, that love that came to us while we were sinners, while we were enemies, means that we now have

a resource to love even our enemies, even people who aren't like us, even people who are different than us. And Tabitha, who knew she was loved, loved. Loved Jews, loved Greeks. Loved across the expected boundaries. That Peter, who's gonna take the gospel to the ends of the earth, sees a woman with a multicultural, multi-ethnic circle of love. Why? Because that's God sized love, that it moves like that. She's beloved, and so she loves. That's the category. My mom, one of my clearest memories from childhood, I would go down the hall to find my mom. I would often find her kneeling by the bed and praying. And then she had a little room in our house where in a corner there was a globe and maps and punctuated on all of them were pins showing where the missionaries were that our church supported. Now, I was raised by a single mom. We didn't have a lot of money, and so she couldn't really necessarily give to them financially, but she would kind of set up this prayer room where she would pray for the missionaries of our church, and she would do little things to take care of them, like send one of them his favorite coffee, or once she took care of his dog, right?

Which doesn't sound like much, but the dog was like missing an eye and had a crooked leg, and it was a lot. Sending cash would have been easier. But I watched my mom say, you know what? I don't have a lot, but I'm gonna give what I have, and it expanded her kids' view of the world, of what we're a part of, of what God is doing in the world, because we saw my mom knew the love of God, and that love extended beyond the expected boundaries, right, and it affected the lives of her kids. We see with Tabitha, not only did she know she was loved and did she love, she's a learner. Notice she was called a disciple. A disciple is learning with an action orientation, that she would sit at the feet of Jesus, learn from Jesus, that here she would, we're told by John, Jesus was full of grace and truth. He was full of love and he was full of truth, and you see Tabitha's the same way, that she is sitting at the feet of the disciples, learning from them, and it's overflowing into the labor that she has for others. My wife Donna, when we got married, she was in a band and they would play late at night, and so she would be in worship sets late at night, and then she would wake up at the crack of noon, or some such, right, and early in our marriage, she would just say, I'm just a night person, that's how it is, but many of you know,

when you have children, the kids don't take that seriously, they don't respect it, right, and so suddenly, cries are waking her up at the crack of nine or something insane like that, and she realized, I've gotta make some adjustments, and if our kids have gotten older, she realized what many of you have, that if the first thing that wakes you up is having to wake up the kids, it's out of the overflow of the heart the mouth will speak, and if you're kind of woken up in a rush, sometimes the overflow is not uplifting, and so Donna now wakes up at 5.30 every morning, and she goes and just in a quiet place, sits with her Bible open with a devotional, just drinking in from the word of God, drinking in from these devotional sources, she's filling up her mind with truth and filling up her heart with love, because she knows when the kids wake up, I don't want them to get a reactive mom, I want them to get a resourceful mom, that I receive the love of God, and I've got something to give my kids, as we pray together. at breakfast as I drive them to school and we listen to worship. She kind of has a source so she can be a source. She looks like Tabitha in that way and we're meant to as well, amen?

So here we see Tabitha is loved and she's a learner so she labors. Did you notice she was full of good works, acts of charity, acts of mercy or compassion. That means I am doing acts of mercy. Mercy is love towards someone who can't pay you back. What I love about that is she's not doing what so many people do in the modern world saying like, oh, I love everybody. I love humanity. And you go, okay, how? In what way? With how much time or money? Let's get specific. You go, no, no, no, I just mean hypothetically, propositionally, sometimes emotionally. I love the world. And you go, okay, but what good does it do? And you see Tabitha isn't just reading devotional books for her own self-enhancement. You see that here she is at the feet of Jesus, loved dearly by him and that love becomes labor, right? That I'm going to move and do physical things that help other people, right? And so I wanna challenge you, church, what do you fill your heart with? What do you fill your mind with? If you wake up every morning and just fill your mind with the anxiety and chaos of the world, out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth will speak.

And many of you are offering so little to the world around you because you've put so little in. And here she is a good learner and she knows she's loved. And those who learn and those who are loved now have something to offer to the world. And she is overflowing with good works and compassion. We need people like this, right? And then something tragic happens. Verse 37, in those days she became ill and she died. And when they had washed her, they laid her in an upper room. Now this is sad because she's the best of us. She's like a truly wonderful person and you don't wanna see a person like that in a sentence anywhere near the word death. Because death's an enemy, death is a taker. And yet here it is, and death comes for all, right? Which is a tragic reality for all of us. Forrest Gump's mom was wrong. Death's just a part of life, Forrest. No, death is not a part of life. Death is the absence of life. Death is the taking of life. Death is the enemy of life. It's an antithesis, not a part of it. That's why when you die, we will put a picture of you at the front of the church, right? It will not be of you in your last days in the hospital with tubes sticking out of you, right? What picture will we put up? You when you were the most brimming with life.

Mid to late 20s. Early parenthood, right? We put a picture of you when you were most alive because we love life. Death is not a part of life, it's a taker of it. In the Bible, death's an enemy. The Stoics faced death with a resignation. Oh, well, it's coming. You might as well smile as the wave hits you. That's not Christianity. Christians see death as an enemy. We hate it, and yet we don't despair. Why? Because our guy that we're keying off of faced death for us, and we saw the gears of death roll over him, and then he emerged on the other side and said, follow me. And we realize he punched a hole through the back of the cave of death. So I can hate death and yet grieve with hope because I follow a hero who made it out the other side. So Christians may weep at a funeral, but we do not despair. We grieve, but we have hope. And you watch this early church do that. As she dies, there is grief, and yet there's hope. And you go, where do you see the hope? Well, it's in that word upper room. You go, where? I don't understand that. Well, it says they washed her body.

That's kind of standard ops when somebody dies. Taking it into the upper room, not standard ops. Actually, it doesn't make any sense. If someone dies, you take them down because you're gonna bury them. You don't take them up. Why are we carrying this body upstairs, right? Well, there's something to this. In the New Testament, the last supper that Jesus had with his disciples, the one where he told them, I will see you after the resurrection, he held that supper in an upper room. And so after he died and rose from the grave, when the believers are waiting for him, they're praying in the upper room. And you see in the New Testament, sort of upper room becomes this language for the place of prayer and expectation. And there's an Old Testament precedent to it, too. It's interesting. The two prophets who did the most miracles in the Old Testament are Elijah and Elisha. And each of them raised a dead child to life. And they both, when the child died, took their body and took them to the upper room and prayed over them, and they came back to life. And so here, in a very simple way, this community sees Tabitha gone and they don't want her gone.

And so they take her and just carry her body to the upper room, right? You also see their hope in the next verse. Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, and that Peter was there, sent two men to him, urging him, please come to us without delay. They hear that Peter's about 10 miles away, and they send to the boys, go fast, and tell them, please hurry and come back. Now, why hurry? Maybe because they were afraid people would bury her, right, before they'd get back. Maybe it's because there was sort of a widespread belief that your spirit sort of hovered around for three days and then left. Could have been that kind of cultural belief. And so here, they were like, hey, we gotta hurry while there's still a chance, right? And in verse 39, it says, so Peter rose and went with them. And when he arrived, they took him to the upper room. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other garments that Dorcas made while she was with them. That is how you wanna go out. That when Peter shows up, the widows, back then, most work was physical in its nature, and for a widow, particularly an older widow, was the most likely to be very vulnerable in a society. And here, you see some of the most vulnerable in the community are waiting for Peter when he arrives,

and they walk in and they show him the tunics and the garments that Tabitha made for them, the physical evidence of her love, shown by the garments she sewed to clothe the widow, right, that she was full of acts of compassion. And they could show him the physical, tangible evidence of her love. That's how you wanna die. You wanna die with people weeping, showing us the physical, tangible evidence of your love. Here's the thing. All of us want people to say nice things about us at our funeral. And here's some good news. We will. But you want us to mean it. You don't want a funeral where they're standing up there and going, oh, she never knew a stranger. She gave you the shirt off her back, and your family member's going, huh, do you remember that? Are we at the right funeral? You want a room full of people that are like, I can tell you another story, I can tell you 10 stories. Let me show you right now what she made from what she gave, when she showed up when I was hurting. Let me show you the tangible evidence of her love. You want that. You don't want a eulogy like Lernal. I won't read you the whole thing. Her daughter took out half a page in the newspaper.

But she ended this way. Lernal passed away on December 12th, 2023 in Three Rivers, Michigan, and will now face judgment. Gail, her daughter, and her family forgive Lernal and hope that she has found peace. They also hope to find peace within themselves. Lernal will not be missed by Gail or her family. They all understand that the world is a much better place without her. You don't want that. John Steinbeck said, we should remember our dying and try to so live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. That's what you want. You want us to be able to stand there and show the physical evidence of your love for us. But let me tell you something, that doesn't start when you're dying. It starts now. So let me ask you something. Is your life full of good works and compassion? And you go, of course it is, I love everyone. Think about last week. Did all of your time and all of your money terminate on what benefits you? Or did you do any act of mercy or compassion for the widow? Did any of your time or money go towards those who aren't like you, who don't benefit you, who can't advance your career? Did any of that happen?

Those who know grace, show grace. Do you? You're gonna want it to be true when you're dead. So start now. If that's the kind of life we wanna live, this is who we wanna be like. And when someone loves you like this, tell them. That's what Mother's Day is for. It's a day to remind us to stop and thank our moms for the physical, tangible things she did to keep us alive, right? I wrote a card to Donna, a store-bought one, I'm sorry, Anne, and just said, you know, thank you for feeding these kids every single day and driving them to school. And she is right now building shelves from scratch to build them a little library, to buy them books that we can fill so they can read and be educated children that are a gift to the world. Physical, tangible things our kids will look to and say we're loved by our mom. Let me encourage you. If you haven't encouraged your mom, do that today and be specific. And some of you may say, well, Ben, my mom was the farthest from Tabitha that you could imagine. Steve Jobs tracked down his biological mom and when asked why, he said, I just wanna thank her for not aborting me.

And I know that's a touchy subject and a tragic thing and a difficult thing, but he just realized, I know she was young and scared and being pressured to turn me loose and I'm grateful to be alive. And so he said, I. can thank her for that. Some of you may not have much gratitude to express for your mom, but you can be grateful you're here, and that's a good place to start. This crowd is devastated at the loss of Tabitha. They're not ready to let her go. So they asked Peter for help, and in verse 40, Peter put them all outside, and he knelt down and prayed. Now, why did he put them all outside? Well, it might've meant he needed some privacy to do miracles, but that didn't really work. He did some miracles in public, and maybe you go, yeah, but raising the dead's a bigger deal. Maybe he was like, I don't know if I can pull this one off. Everyone give me a beat. Probably not. Jesus did something just like this, and Peter was there. Again, Peter is just keying off of Jesus. Peter was invited into a home of Jairus, whose little daughter had died, and when Jesus showed up,

women were mourning and weeping so loudly, he made them all leave the room, like, everyone, get out, and he just kept the little girl's parents and Peter and James and John. Peter's just keying off of Jesus. He shows up, they bring him to this body, and he's like, everybody out, and then you see he does what Jesus did not have to do. He knelt down and prayed. Jesus could just heal with his own power. Peter has to pray, because only God can do this, right? And yet, after he prays, he again does what he saw his king Jesus do. It's interesting, Jesus, when he healed this little girl, actually raised her from the dead, he said in Aramaic, talitha kum, which means little girl, rise. Peter looks, and it's a one-letter difference. He says, talitha kum, gazelle, rise, right? That he just looks like Jesus. It's Jesus who saves. It's Jesus who gives life. That's who's gonna do this. And here in this moment, a miracle happens, and she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter, she sat up, and he gave her his hand and raised her up. Then calling the saints and widows,

he presented her alive. And it became known through all Joppa, and many believed in the Lord. Again, the miracles serve the message. And he stayed in Joppa many days with one Simon, a tanner. So as we close, what's the point? Let me say this. I do wanna encourage us to be people who know that we're loved, and so love generously and labor to show that to the world. But let me tell you something. You can be the best person in the world. You can sew all of us garments, but death's still coming for you, right? Death takes all, right? And your power and your goodness will not be sufficient to save. But I wanna show you the parallels we see in these two miracle passages that are so important. Number one is they follow the pattern of Jesus. Jesus heals, Jesus gives life. The way Jesus did it back then is what Peter relies on now. Only Jesus can do it. So he follows the pattern of Jesus and does these miracles by the power of Jesus. Jesus heals you, Aeneas, and he prays, God, would you raise her to life, right? That God is the one who saves. Jesus is the one with the power to raise you from the dead.

And you see, both miracles end with the praise of Jesus, right, because ultimately, he's the one who can raise the dead. Our good works, as good as they are, can't beat death, but his good works did, that he lived the perfect life we could not, and then he died for our sin on the cross, and he beat death and rose again. And when we put our faith in Jesus, now death, though an enemy, is not our end, but we will pass through it to the other side, right? And so all of our hope is in Jesus. And because he loved us, we love others. Because he was gracious to us, we show grace. Because we're loved, we love. Because of what he did, we do. We act like him. We manifest his character like Tabitha did, because all our hope is in him. So if you're here today and have never put your faith in Jesus, let me tell you, this is where it starts. This message is not do a bunch of good stuff and we'll cry when you're dead. This message is all our hope is in Jesus, who lived the perfect life we could not, died for us, rose, and gives hope to those who turn to him and believe. And when you turn and believe out of the overflow of your heart, the mouth speaks.

You will have a source of love to love us, and you'll have a source of life even on the other side of death. All our hope is in him. So let me end with this story. If you've studied church history, then you know the name the Cappadocian Fathers. Basil and Gregory were brothers and they had a buddy named Gregory. Basil, Gregory, and Gregory, the Cappadocian Fathers, are famous in church history because they helped put some language to what's revealed in the scripture but we didn't always know how to explain, the language of the Trinity. That you see in the Bible, we have one God, but he's God the Father, and then you see God the Son, and then you see God the Holy Spirit. How do you explain that? And these Cappadocian Fathers were great at theology, which theology is articulating revelation. What's revealed in God's word. And they helped with that language of God as one common set of attributes, but three distinct persons. So he's not one and three in the same way. One what, but three who's is the idea. And so they were great theologians in their day who we live in the wake of their beautiful and brilliant. articulation.

What many people don't know is that Basil and Gregory's hero was their older sister, Macrina. She was called Macrina the Younger because she was named after her grandma, her grandma who had to flee and live in the woods for seven years when the Emperor Diocletian was killing Christians. But her and her husband survived, exited the woods, actually became very successful in Cappadocia, modern day Turkey, and so Macrina and her family were raised in wealth around 327 A.D. Macrina was engaged to be married, but the young man died. And so she decided, that's it, one and done, I'm not gonna get married again. Her father died not long before that, or after that, and so she told her mom, I'm just gonna help raise all these kids. And so Macrina helped raise her little brothers. Basil showed great potential, and so they shipped him off to the best school in the day in Athens. And there he got a superior learning, and when he came back, as can happen with many, knowledge puffs up, and he became insufferably arrogant. And Macrina, like a good big sister, put him in his place. Amen? And she told him, you are obnoxious, and it's intolerable. And she chided him on it. He didn't really listen to her until his brother died, and he realized, all my learning and success means nothing in the face of death. And so he resigned his teaching position,

knelt down at the knees of his sister Macrina, and said, show me what it is to really live a spiritual life. She taught him about Jesus, taught him about a life committed to Jesus, and then she said, what if we took our family's estate and just gave it to Jesus, and we'll use this house as a sanctuary where people can come learn about Jesus and be loved by us. And so she took all the servants in their house and set them free. You're not servants anymore, you're brothers and sisters, and most stayed. And there in that home, they would teach the Bible, they would draw people in, they would care for the sick. When famines hit in Rome and people were on the roadside, because you would just leave a starving loved one to die on the road, Macrina and the sisters would take these people and bring them to their estate, their sanctuary, to care for them. When Basil came to learn at her feet, she said, you know what, people are doing this in Egypt that have been doing it longer, maybe you can go learn from them. So he went to do that, and he came back, and he had learned from the monastics. And so the whole idea of Greek monasteries came from Basil at the encouragement of his sister Macrina, who led the first one in modern day Turkey. Meanwhile, her brother Gregory became a bishop

and was away for a long, long time. But after they articulated the Trinity and were so critical in Christian theology, Gregory said, I had to go home to see the teacher, is what he called the sister. And when he got there, she was dying. And he knelt at her bedside, and she comforted him in her last moments. Gregory would go on to write two books about her, one called The Life of St. Macrina, and the other On the Soul and Resurrection. But in The Life of St. Macrina, he ends the book with her final prayer, and this is where we'll end today. He said, Macrina prayed, you have released us, O Lord, from the fear of death. You've made the end of life here on earth a beginning of true life for us. You redeemed us from the curse and from sin, having become both on our behalf. You have crushed the head of the serpent who has seized man in his jaws because of the abyss of our disobedience. But you opened up for us a path to the resurrection, having broken down the gates of hell and reduced to impotence the one who had power over death. You have cut through the flame of the fiery sword and brought us to paradise. The man who was crucified with you, who entreated your pity,

remember me also in your kingdom, for I too have been crucified with him. When mankind sinned in Genesis 3, we were blocked from paradise by a flaming sword, and I love the way her prayer ends. You have cut through that flaming sword through the man who was crucified for us, and I've been crucified with him. That all her good works did not earn her a place in heaven, they were a result of her faith in Jesus. You made a way through death. You made a way to paradise. You came for me. I give all to you. And let me tell you, friend, that's where life begins. I'm beloved, and then I love. I receive grace, and then I show grace. Do you know him? That's where it starts. And if you do, then we live like him. We live like the Macrinas and the Tabithas and the great mothers of old who manifested to us his character for his glory and our good.