Dr Tim White

Alexander Whyte, the great preacher of Biblical character notes: “This Eutychus is the father of all such as fall asleep during sermons.” Eutychus will become the focus of Luke’s Easter service. If you are a preacher reading this, be encouraged. They fell asleep even under Paul’s preaching.

From our last study, we learned that because of the resurrection of Christ the people of God made the monumental change from worshiping on Saturday to Sunday. So when we meet on Sundays because of the Resurrection of Jesus what do we do?

1. We take offerings. This is Paul’s instruction in 1 Cor 16:1-5. He writes 1 Corinthians while at Ephesus. In 1 Corinthians 16:1-5, Paul refers to the church meeting on “the first day of the week” and receiving a love offering for the poor suffering believers at Jerusalem and of his plans to visit the Corinthians when he travels to Macedonian.

Jesus gave His life for us on the cross, and as Paul will elaborated on in 2 Cor 8-9, if we have received that unspeakable gift, we give when we come to church because we love God.

2. We worship God and Christ. The early church probably observed the church ordinances more often that we do according to 1 Cor. 11:24-26. This was a major reason these believers met on this Lord’s day according to Acts 20:7: They met “to break bread.” We practice the ordinances because of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.

a) The Lord’s Supper celebrates again what Easter is all about, Jesus dying for our sins. The broken bread symbolizes Jesus’ broken body on the tree. The fruit of the vine symbolizes His shed blood for the remission of sins.

b) Baptism by immersion reminds that after His resurrection. He was buried and three days later, He arose. Baptism by immersion pictures the resurrection of Christ from the dead.

3. We preach God’s Word. Luke really puts his narration in slow motion here. Now Luke doesn’t just focus on one Easter church service but on one church member at this Easter service. If you have watched a televised church service, the cameraman zooms in occasionally on one person in the congregation. The cameraman tries to focus on someone really listening to the preacher. Had this service at Troas been televised, the cameraman would not have drawn attention to the character Luke is about to focus on.

Notice, Paul preached until 12 o’clock midnight not 12 o’clock midday. The reason is because Sunday was not a holiday as it is today. The pagan Roman Empire did not allow believers off on Sunday to go to church. Believers, like all other Roman citizens had to work on Sunday. So probably all the people at this Easter service had put in a hard days work before coming to the evening service at 6 or 7 pm.

They did not have an Easter sunrise service they had an Easter sunset service. Again, so much for church tradition.

The one believer that Luke focuses on was named Eutychus. This was a common name for a slave. Eutychus had evidently put in a full day’s labor as a slave and rushed home, cleaned up and hurried to church.

Luke informs us about the atmosphere of this Easter service. Because it was late at night, torches were burning to supply light. But torches also suck up the oxygen. So it is midnight, Eutychus is tried from literally slaving all day at work, it is hot and stuffy in the service. He is sitting in the open window to feel a breeze and get some fresh air. He is fighting sleep. Luke records Eutychus’s battle in Acts 20:9: “Eutychus being fallen into a deep sleep, and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep.”

He is fighting, but Eutychus loses the battle and also his balance and falls three stories to his death. Dr. Luke gives his professional medical report in Acts 20:9: “dead.”

Paul rushes down three flights of stairs and much like Elijah in 1 Kings 17:21 with the dead son of the widow of Zarephath, Paul falls on Eutychus and embraces him. With this action, Paul raises Eutychus back to life from the dead in Acts 20:10.

Charles Spurgeon in a sermon on this Easter incident warned, “Remember, if we go to sleep during the sermon and die there are no apostles to restore us.”

When we preach God’s Word today an even greater resurrection can take place, a resurrection from spiritual death. Paul describes every unsaved person as “dead in trespasses and sins” in Ephesians 2:1. When we hear the Word of God which is living and powerful and receive Christ as our Savior, God quickens us or makes us alive.

Listen to the promise of Jesus in John 14:19: “Because I live, you shall live also.”

After raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus proclaimed, “I am the resurrection and the life, he that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25).

1. Eutychus fell from the third floor and died. You and I fell in Adam and also died. “Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12).

2. Eutychus needed life but could do nothing to get life. Dead people cannot produce life. God gives us eternal life when we trust Christ as our Savior. “I give unto them eternal life” Jesus said.

3. Eutychus raised back to life lived his new life for Christ. Acts 20:11 says they “talked” until the break of day. This is the same word used to describe the conversation Jesus had with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus where they talked of Jesus’ death and resurrection and the entire Old Testament. This must have been a great time of fellowship that Paul had with Eutychus and all the believers that evening.

I got saved on a Sunday evening. And the next several evenings I met with believers who were in that blessed service and all we talked about was how God blessed us with salvation. God changed our vocabulary and the subject of our conversation.

When we trust Christ, we walk in newness of life. There will be living proof of the resurrection for others to see in us.

I read the story of a man who was driving in very busy traffic and also was being tailgated by a very stressed-out woman.

Suddenly, the stoplight just in front of the man turned yellow and he had time to stop, so he stopped. He did the right thing, stopping at that crosswalk, even though he could have beaten the red light by accelerating.

Well, the woman behind him was infuriated – she hit the roof, laid on the horn, screamed in frustration, and shook her fist at the man in front of her for making her miss her chance to get through the intersection.

As she was still in mid-rant, she heard a tap on her window and looked up into the face of a very serious police officer. The officer ordered her to exit her car with her hands up. He put her in the back of the police car and took her to the station, where she was searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a holding cell. After a couple of hours, the police officer opened the door to her cell and escorted her back to the booking desk where the arresting officer was waiting with her personal affects.

The officer was extremely apologetic, however, and said, “Ma’am I’m so sorry for my terrible mistake. You see, I was behind you when you were blowing your horn and cussing a blue streak at the man in front of you. I noticed all the stuff on the back of your car – the “Choose Life” license plate holder, the “What Would Jesus Do” bumper sticker, and the fish emblem on the trunk. So naturally, I assumed you had stolen the car” (Stephen Davey in Practicing the Truth of Easter, 1 Peter 1:13-16))

By her actions, there was no proof of her Christianity.

The living proof of the Jesus’ resurrection is the proof that others see in our lives that He lives.

There are, as Luke says in Acts 1:3, “many infallible proofs” of Jesus’ coming back to life after He died for our sins on the cross.

1. There is the empty tomb. Why was the tomb empty on the third day after Jesus was crucified for our sins? The tomb was empty because He arose and walked out.

2. There is the transformation of the disciples. After the crucifixion, the cowardly disciples were hiding for fear of the Jews. When the fearful disciples saw Christ in His resurrection body, they became fearless. They bolted out of their hiding behind locked doors into the streets of Jerusalem witnessing the resurrection to the unsaved Jews who put Jesus to death.

3. There is the change in the day of worship from the Sabbath or Saturday to Sunday. The Jews for 1000s of years had obeyed the Fourth Commandment in Exodus 20:8-11. Talk about breaking a tradition. You know how we are about traditions. Someone said, if a church does the same thing for three weeks in a row it becomes a tradition that we dare not break. The problem is so many traditions are as Jesus said, traditions of man and not commandments of God.

Here is a tradition that was a commandment of God but something of so much more importance happened that annulled the old traditions. What caused Jews to abandon 1500 years of religious tradition that was grounded in OT Scripture?

The resurrection of Christ is the only answer. In Acts 20 we find the first mention of the early church meeting on the First day of the week and not on the Sabbath.

In Acts 20, Luke is recording Paul’s third missionary journey.

Paul is leaving his controversial ministry at Ephesus. There was a riot and also a revival at Ephesus. Paul was almost killed there.

Luke picks up the story in Acts 20.

Luke fast forwards through Paul traveling from Ephesus to Troas to Philippi in Macedonian to Corinth and back to Philippi and also back to Troas in Acts 20:1-5. Luke wants to focus on what happened at Troas on the first day of the week in Acts 20:6-12.

Luke skims over Paul’s stopping at Troas to meet Titus as recorded in 2 Corinthians 2:12, 13. For some reason, Titus does not meet with Paul. There was a huge misunderstanding. It is possible that Paul started the church at Troas because Paul speaks of great open door for him at Troas. Eventually, Paul travels on to Macedonian or Philippi where he writes 2 Corinthians. Luke passes quickly over this in Acts 20:1. From Philippi, Paul travels south to Corinth or Greece as Luke states in Acts 20:2. Here Paul stays 3 months and writes his theological masterpiece, the book of Romans.

From Corinth, Paul was going to sail to Jerusalem so he could observe Passover but when he learned of a Jewish plot to kill him, he returned to Philippi and observed the Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread.

Paul had a large team of eight men with him whom Luke identifies in Acts 20:4. These men were carrying love offerings Paul had been collecting from the Gentile churches he had planted on his previous missionary trips. They were traveling with Paul to help protect him and this money in case of robbery. Again, the early church did things differently from the way we do ministry. The missionary churches were supporting the mother church not the other way around. So much for tradition.

Luke jumps over hundreds of miles and one year of significant ministry: one church planted, two NT letters written, and an incredible love offering for needy believers collected.

Now when Paul arrives at Troas, Luke zooms in on not just one day, but one Easter church service on the first day of the week.

In Acts 20:6, after Paul celebrated the Passover in Philippi, he celebrates Easter in Troas. This Easter service is the focus of Luke’s attention now. Why all the fuss about one church service? Because this is the first recorded church service on the first day of the week in the book of Acts.

The people of God are no longer meeting on the Sabbath. They are no longer obeying one of the 10 Commandments. This tradition breaking reality happened for two reasons:

1. Because we are no longer under the law. Paul recorded that life altering truth in Romans 6:14 when he was at Corinth. This is the entire message of Galatians.

2. Because Christ arose on the First Day of the week not the seventh. By the time John writes the Book of the Revelation, Sunday has become known as “The Lord’s Day” (Revelation 1:10).

In Part Two, we will learn what we do on the first day of the week as we celebrate the resurrection of Christ.