September 6, 2026
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Discussion Questions
If you asked Luke, “How’s it going?” he wouldn’t pretend, saying “Fine.” What does he do instead? Are Christians at our church able to do the same?
What are some of the hindrances you feel right now in your life? Our church?
Will it be harder for our church to make room in our building for people or will it be harder for us to make room in our hearts? (To be pointed, will your community group make room for new people? Will that be hard or easy?)
When you think about all the challenges in front of our church with growth over the next three years, what excites you? What discourages you?
How is the book of Acts a story about what Jesus continued to do?
As you stand back from our summary of the book of Acts, what stood out to you the most? What felt new? What encouragement most blessed you?
Scripture Reading
Acts 28:30-31
30 He lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, 31 proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.
Today we finish the sermon series we started six weeks ago, a series we’re calling “More People to Love (Part II): How God Built and Is Still Building a Humble, Holy, Hungry, and Happy Church.” As we come to the end, it took just thirty- or forty-some days. But to have lived the book of Acts in real time, from the beginning of the book to the end, took something like thirty years. A lot happened in these thirty years.
If we described these thirty years as “one hindrance after another hindrance,” this would not be a wrong way to describe the book of Acts. The book of Acts is one hindrance after another. There is one persecution beating after another persecution killing; there’s one riot after another jailing, one famine after some other drain of resources, one leadership change after another leadership change, one struggle of the heart with greed after one struggle of the heart with pride, one demonic oppression after one religious controversy. So it’s true: “One hindrance after another hindrance” would be a right way to describe the book and our lives. But to only describe the book this way would be very, very wrong. Let’s pray together; then I’ll explain why.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
This morning, we come to the last summary passage in the book. We’ve been saying we’re looking at the summary verses, noticing all the chaos and craziness that happen around them, both before and after the summary. With these verses, it’s harder to tell what happens after this summary passage because the summary ends the book. There are no more verses after this summary. But I don’t think Luke intends for us to believe that the story is over when the story of Acts ends. Quite the opposite, actually.
If you have the book of Acts open, let me read those verses again. It’s Acts 28:30–31.
30 He lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, 31 proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.
I want you to notice the last two words in the book. In the Greek, the last words are actually just one word. It reads, “without hindrance.” Strange, right? Luke, the author, says the word of God is going ahead without hindrance. We talked about this at the dinner table last night and mentioned that a hindrance is something that gets in the way of something else. This is what defense does in sports. Defense hinders the offense from scoring as well as it can. Luke says there were no hindrances to the Word spreading; there was no defense. Is that how the book feels to you? Hmmm.
Imagine you have friends who live in California and say tell you that they are road-tripping to Pennsylvania this summer to see you for Labor Day weekend. But they don’t fly. They don’t take a train. They drive. Okay, but it’s like almost three thousand miles. So they started about a week ago, and all week you’ve been getting updates.
They get rerouted about twelve times because of construction. They drive around a wildfire in one state and a tornado in another. At one point, they swerve to miss a deer, hit a ditch, and a farmer has to pull them out with a winch. Your friends have to start rationing food to save gas money. The air conditioning dies near Dallas. At one point, police confuse your friends with other people, and your friends spend the night in jail. I mean, it’s the worst, most hindered road trip you could imagine.
This morning you get a text that they’ll finally be here after church today, so on the way home you grab Chipotle, bring it to your house, sit on the porch, and wait. Then you hear their muffler rumble a mile away; it sounds awful. They coast into your driveway, park the car, and a hubcap falls off and rolls into your neighbor’s yard. Your friends jump out of the car with huge smiles on their faces, despite one person hobbling on crutches and another wearing a neck brace. You mumble, What in the world happened.
“How was the trip?” you ask. “Oh,” they say, “That was the best week of our lives!”
“What?” you say, “I’m not sure I understand.” Then one of them says with a twinkle in his eye, “On our way here, there was not a single hindrance; let me tell you of all the people we told about Jesus.”
That’s what Luke is doing as he finishes his book. Luke writes to those in the early church—and to those like us in the modern church—to people afraid that the hard hindrances in our lives will squelch the flame of the gospel from spreading. Luke writes to people who feel all creation groaning. Luke writes to people who fear that all the darkness will stop the light from getting through. Luke writes Acts to say, “It won’t.” He wants to encourage us that if our church buys land and builds a building, then great. But if we keep growing by fifty people each year and yet this building we do have burns to the ground, leaving us nowhere to worship except standing in the parking lot, Luke wants us to know that all these hindrances can’t hinder Christ.
And that’s how I want to structure the sermon. I want us to first look at what Luke says about hindered Christians. Then we’ll look at what he says about the unhindered Christ.
Hindered Christians
I don’t think it’s wrong to see the story of the birth of the early church as one hindrance after another. In some ways, you might even be in a season where your life feels like that, one hindrance after another. Some of us feel that way, not only in our individual lives but in our life together in this local church.
Luke doesn’t hide the hindrances in the early church. If you asked Luke, “How’s it going?” he wouldn’t just say, “Fine.” Over and over, Luke shows us Christians facing one hindrance or another. Indeed, Luke appears in chapter sixteen and begins using “we” to suggest he was there for almost half the book (see 16:10).
Consider at first just the end of the book. It’s hard to know where to start because the last ten chapters are really one continuous narrative of how Paul got to Rome. But for the sake of picking somewhere not too far back, I’ll mention the events of the last two chapters. The entire twenty-seventh chapter is a long narrative of sailing to Rome but getting caught in a storm. Even the professional fishermen think they are going to die.
Anyway, they crash-land on an island called Malta. Paul gets bitten by a poisonous snake, and he heals some people. It’s all quite wild. Eventually they can sail again to Rome, where he lives for two years.
Oh, by the way, I haven’t told you one important detail yet. For most of the last ten chapters, including everything I just said, Paul is in Roman custody; he’s been in one jail or another, either on trial or waiting for trial, with assassination attempts on his life. And even here in Rome, at first he lives chained to a Roman guard. As time went on, as we read in the summary, Paul gets more freedom, something more like house arrest.
In other words, when Paul’s car pulls into the driveway of his Roman apartment, and the hubcap falls off, that’s when Luke tells us with a twinkle in his eye…
30 [Paul] lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, 31 proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.
“Without hindrance? What? I don’t understand,” you say.
And that is just to capture the hindrances of the last two chapters. When we take the wide-angle, there are so, so many more.
As the start of the book we see the challenge of rapid growth. A few times, thousands of believers get converted after a single sermon. Awesome, right? But as I said in the first week, where do you put all those believers on the Christmas Eve service? How do you celebrate Easter with two thousand people when your church only has room for two hundred? And who will pastor and disciple them when their marriages get hard?
The church also faced the challenge of the collision of differing ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds. Yes, the gospel of Jesus Christ knocks down every wall of hostility between believers—and that’s wonderful. But that now means people with very different life experiences come to the same communion table.
There is also the hindrance of leadership transitions.
There were challenging theological conundrums.
There was poverty and famine.
There was demonic opposition.
And these are only the hindrances recorded. They had more hindrances than this, just as we do too. We’re not told about the marriages where one person starts following Jesus and the other doesn’t. We’re not told about when people lost their jobs because a company reorganized. We’re not told about how believers handled false accusations about them. We’re not told about mothers with cancer who have double mastectomies. We’re not told about infertility. We’re not told about the heartache of singles who felt like they didn’t fit in. We’re not told about Christians who struggle to stop sinful, hurtful patterns. We’re not told about a struggling family because some uncle might go to jail, and in fact might actually need to go to jail for his own good and the good of society. We’re not told about the believers who start out seemingly following Jesus but deconstruct their faith. At times, hindrances can feel so thick and constant to God’s people that we think the hindrances are the only part of the story we’ll ever know.
But that would be to see the book of Acts and the Christian life wrongly.
Unhindered Christ
When our hearts ask the questions we sang in Andrew Peterson’s song—Is anyone worthy? Is anyone whole? Is anyone able to break the seal and open the scroll?—Luke answers back, “The Lion of Judah who conquered the grave; He is David’s root and the Lamb who died to ransom the slave.”
In other words, Luke mainly wants us to read his book and see the unhindered Christ, both then and now. This is why Luke has strategically placed his summary verses in the book to signal that not all is as it seems, or not all is as you would suspect. Luke wants us to see God advancing his kingdom through his witnessing church despite these hindrances. Let me read the summary verses to you.
And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. (Acts 2:47)
And more than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women (Acts 5:14)
And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly . . . , and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith. (Acts 6:7)
So the church . . . was being built up. And . . . it multiplied. (Acts 9:31)
But the word of God increased and multiplied. (Acts 12:24)
So the churches . . . increased in numbers daily. (Acts 16:5)
So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily. (Acts 19:20)
As I stand back from the full list, so many thoughts come to mind. But one of them is this: there are a lot of miles and hardship and trials and hindrances from the second-to-last summary verse to the last summary verse. I know I read them quickly, but let me make this point clear: The second-to-last summary verse is 19:20. The last is 28:30–31.
In this hard but wonderful way, God is telling you this morning that he not only has the power to push back evil in an instant, that he not has only has the power to convert thousands of people in a moment, and not only the power to overcome leadership hindrances that come with growth. God is telling you that he can sustain you through ten chapters, ten seasons, ten trials of hindrances. And to be clear, I’m not mainly trying to tell you how to read the book of Acts. I’m telling you what God wants your heart to know today. God is telling you that the unhindered Christ has power to hold you, preserve you, carry you through the shipwreck and storm, and get you exactly where he wants you to be. It might not be the path you expected. But he will get you home.
And that is pretty encouraging. But there’s more.
Speaking of those two years when Paul is under house arrest, from ad 60–62, did you know that Paul wrote several letters to churches? We call these four the letters the “prison letters”: Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, and Philippians. In them, he’s not anxious and angry and worried. Quite the opposite. Few places in any of his letters exalt the sovereignty and goodness and power of Christ more highly than these letters.
Consider this from Philippians: “I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear” (Phil. 1:12–14).
He closes that letter saying, “Greet every saint in Christ Jesus. The brothers who are with me greet you. All the saints greet you, especially those of Caesar’s household. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit” (Phil. 4:21–23).
Did you catch that? “Oh, by the way,” Paul says, “the Roman guards are getting saved.” And, “Oh, by the way, Caesar—you know, that guy who is the most powerful man in the world—well, his family is getting saved, and the new believers say hello.”
Conclusion
If you ask the question, “How do these warm, encouraging summary verses exist?” what would you say? The answer can’t just be that Paul was great and Peter was great and the women of the early church are great—so selfish, so sacrificial, so loving. Or how does our church come out of Covid with so many people and dollars we have to plant as soon as we can? We’re we great?
Now, at times they were and we were. But why were the men and women so great at times? How could what started as a little group of believers in Jerusalem end up in Rome, the capital of the world, preaching the gospel to Caesar, the most powerful man in the world?
You have to realize that at the start, there was no mere linear progression that made a Jerusalem-to-Rome gospel plausible. It’s not like the disciples in Jerusalem sat in the upper room, and one of them had stood up and said, “I have a PowerPoint presentation about the steps we’ll take to get to Rome and the ends of the earth with the message of Jesus. First slide, please.”
This last week I was talking with a pastor in our area, a great man and pastor. He’s nearing retirement. And he knows something about what we’re going through as a church, looking for land, considering a move and considering raising funds, all of that.
He looked at me and said something like, “At times in the next few years it won’t make any sense; you’ll feel stuck; you won’t always be able to do the math in a way that solves the growth problem with plans and programs and dollars. But, Benjamin,” he said, “I’ve seen time and time again when God supplied what was needed out of nowhere.” Then he told me stories for ten minutes of their hindrances and of the unhindered Christ.
And that’s Luke’s answer too. If we asked Luke why these summary verses exist, he’d say it’s because Jesus is unhindered, then and now.
Jesus came to earth, lived a perfect life, and suffered on the cross for sins. He rose again on the third day; he looked at his disciples and promised them, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Then he ascended to the throne of the universe, poured out his Holy Spirit, and this Jesus promises to come again. In the meantime, he promises to build his church and says that the gates of hell will not stand against it.
When you read the book of Acts, you’re supposed to feel that the church isn’t supposed to grow in this environment. Just as bananas and coconuts and pineapples and oranges and lemons are not supposed to grow in Nova Scotia. I mean, Nova Scotia is a nice place, I’m sure. The pictures I’ve seen of the eastern edge of northern Canada look pretty. But there’s a lot of snow for about ten months of the year. The fruit of the Spirit shouldn’t grow in the Roman Empire or Harrisburg. But it did and it does.
With the growth at our church—with the start of a new, third fellowship service next week, with a small team looking and praying for land, with over-and-above fundraising planned for 2027, with the challenges of making room for more people to love, not only room in our building but in our hearts… with all this—I felt as though we would need a book, we would need preaching, we would need a series, we would need a gospel displayed in the stories of real Christians with real hindrances that could carry our church through hard times.
In short, I felt we needed to look at the book of Acts, not from the safety of the shore looking out on calm water but rather as crew members on a ship on the edge of a storm.
And that’s just what might be ahead as we sail together. Who can know what will happen in the next five years of your life? You might expect, perhaps, to graduate high school or college or retire or see kids married or get this or that role in your career.
But with all the known and unknown parts of our life, what we most need to know is that Christ is unhindered, exalted now to the right hand of the Father, building his church, and making his name great among the nations. All authority has been given to him, and he will be with us to the end of the age.
Pray with me as the music team returns to lead us in closing songs. Let’s pray . . .
