“Why Religion Is Not the Problem” - A Sermon from Acts 7:38-60
Text: Acts 7:38-60 (ESV)
Have you ever felt the sting of being called "religious" derisively in a conversation, as if that one word explained why you're so narrow-minded, judgmental, bigoted, or maybe even dangerous? Many of us have.
One of the sharpest criticisms of people of faith today is that religion itself is the root of the world's evil. Push it to the margins, secularize everything, and intolerance and violence will finally fade. It's a tidy diagnosis. A lot of smart people believe it.
Acts 7 invites us to examine the claim a bit more closely.
Think about it for a second. Some of the most peaceful, generous people you know are deeply religious. And some of the most judgmental, small-hearted people you know are deeply religious too. If you've spent any real time in a church, you already knew that. Religion, by itself, doesn't sort people into good and bad. Something underneath it does.
Here, in one of the most dramatic scenes in the early church, two groups of deeply religious people face the same crisis. One group's faith fuels murderous rage. The other group's faith produces courage and forgiveness in the face of death. Everyone is in the same category: religious people. Even so, we see completely different results.
So religion can't be the real dividing line. Something else is going on, at a deeper level.
Look closely at both groups in this chapter and you'll find the same disease running underneath. Call it self-righteousness: the constant, mostly unconscious need to justify ourselves. This takes the form of proving we're respectable, even better than the person standing next to us. It doesn't need religion to survive. It just needs some standard to measure ourselves against, and then to measure everyone else against too. Hand it a Bible, and it turns pious. Hand it a career, a political cause, or some social media accounts, and it turns secular. Either way, it's the same disease underneath.
The Bible diagnoses this sickness, and it cures it, with two words: law and gospel.
By law, the Bible means God's good and holy commands. His standards for how we're supposed to live all of life, for his glory. The first job of God's law is to show us we don't measure up, and then to point us to the one person who does: Jesus.
But our culture runs on law too. It just doesn't call it that. Any moral code, religious or secular, that we use to prove ourselves in front of other people is functioning as law, whether or not it ever mentions God.
Think about what actually keeps you up at night, or what you scroll through Instagram hoping to feel. Chances are it's some version of significance, satisfaction, security, or superiority, and you've got a law for getting there. Maybe your law is professional. You measure your worth in title, salary, or how indispensable you are at the office, and a bad performance review doesn't just sting, it feels like a verdict on your soul. Maybe your law is political. You've decided which positions the good people hold, and you feel the quiet righteousness of being on the right side, especially compared to the people who aren't. Maybe your law is your body, your kids' report cards, your carbon footprint, or how many people liked your last post. It doesn't matter what the specific code is. What matters is that you're using it to prove you're one of the ones who's okay.
Self-righteousness is simply what happens when you take any of these laws, religious or secular, and use it to establish that you measure up.
By gospel, the Bible means something completely different: the news that Jesus has already done for you what you could never do for yourself. He fulfilled the law of God, and he suffered its condemnation, in your place. This is the only thing that actually cures self-righteousness, because it's the only thing that frees you to stop proving yourself at all.
Acts 7 shows us how the Sanhedrin took God's law and turned it into a weapon for their own self-righteousness. Stephen took the same law and it humbled him, which is what opened the door for him to receive the gospel of grace in Jesus, the only truly Righteous One. That one distinction explains everything that happens in the rest of this chapter. And it exposes the same choice sitting in front of every one of us this morning.
The Context: Why Is Stephen before the Sanhedrin?
At the end of Acts 6, the church in Jerusalem is growing fast, and Stephen (a man Luke describes as full of grace and power) is doing signs and wonders among the people. His opponents can't out-argue him, so they do what people do when they can't win an argument: they deflect from the original and manufacture a new one. False charges of blasphemy against Moses, against God, against the temple, against the law itself. They drag him in front of the Sanhedrin, the same council that had condemned Jesus a short time earlier.
Stephen's answer is a long walk through Israel's history — all the way back to Abraham and up through Joseph, Moses, David, and Solomon — building to one devastating point: God was never confined to a building, and Israel has a long history of resisting the very Spirit sent to lead them. It's a strange defensive strategy on the surface. Accused of dishonoring Moses and the temple, Stephen doesn't defend himself at all. He puts the council itself on trial, using their own history as the evidence. And then he brings it home.
God's Law Will Reveal a Hardened or Humble Heart
Stephen lands the point in verses 51 through 53, which you just heard read: you stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears. This is the same charge Israel's own prophets leveled at their ancestors, going all the way back to Moses.
"Stiff-necked" and "uncircumcised in heart" are Moses's own words for Israel, straight out of Deuteronomy, and Jeremiah picks up the same language centuries later. Stephen is telling the council, in their own Scriptures, that they are doing exactly what their ancestors always did with the law God gave them. He's not out-arguing them with a new idea. He's holding up a mirror made out of their own Bible and forcing them to look into it.
And here's what they were doing with it. The Sanhedrin were the most careful guardians of the law in the ancient world. Nobody studied it harder. But instead of letting the law do what it was designed to do — i.e., expose their sin and their need for mercy — they had turned it into proof of their own superiority. It became a badge, not a mirror. So when the Righteous One Himself stood in front of them and their whole system of self-justification, they wouldn’t even consider examining themselves. They covered their ears, ground their teeth, and picked up stones.
That's not a first-century problem. It's every century's problem. We do the same thing with whatever code we live by, religious or not. Some of us turn moral performance or theological correctness into proof we're better than the person next to us. Others do it with career success, or our social media portfolio, or which side of a cultural or political argument we're on.
In every case, the pattern is identical: the law is meant to humble us by showing us where we fall short. Misused, it does the opposite. It hardens the heart. It produces contempt for people who don't measure up to our standard. And perhaps most tragically, if you follow that far enough, eventually it produces deep-seated animosity or even violence.
You've felt this in smaller ways than a stoning, probably this week. Maybe you sat in traffic behind someone driving badly and felt a flash of genuine contempt, not just frustration. It was like their bad driving told you something about their character. Maybe you scrolled past someone's political post and felt that same flash. That little surge of superiority is the Sanhedrin’s spirit. It feels like conviction. It's usually just self-justification and, if we’re honest, a dash of self-glorification.
A Heart Softened by the Gospel Sets You Free
Stephen shows us the other way to hold the law.
He knew exactly what the law demanded, and he knew he hadn't kept it. But he had also knew the only one who had: Jesus, the Righteous One, who kept the law perfectly and then died bearing the penalty in the place of everyone who trusts Him. Stephen had stopped trusting his own record and started trusting Christ's. And in the middle of being murdered for it, Luke tells us Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up and saw heaven open, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
Some of you no doubt know this already, but that detail matters more than it might first appear. Most every other place in the New Testament where someone pictures Jesus at God's right hand, He's seated. He’s enthroned, at rest, with His work finished. Here, Jesus is standing. The most natural reading is that Jesus has risen from His throne to receive His servant, the way you'd stand up when someone you love walks into the room. The judge of the universe is on His feet for Stephen.
And then watch what Stephen says as the stones start falling: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." And then, on his knees: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." If those words sound familiar, they should. They're almost exactly what Jesus said from the cross. "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Stephen isn't just dying bravely. Luke is showing us a man so shaped by the gospel that his death starts to look like his Savior's death. That's not something Stephen worked up in the moment. That's what grace does to a person over time. It it starts to reproduce Christ's own character in them, not just in how they live, but also in how they die.
Only the gospel produces that. Not willpower. Not religious discipline. Not gritting your teeth and trying harder. When you actually know you're accepted by grace, in spite of your failure, the law stops being a ladder to climb or a weapon to wield. It also stops being a threat. It has no more condemnation to hold over you, because Christ already absorbed it. And a person who has truly stopped fearing condemnation is finally free to do the hardest thing in the world: forgive the people who are hurting them. They let go of what would otherwise entangle them because they’re focused on laying hold of what matters most.
One more detail, easy to miss, and you heard it too: the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul, who approved of the killing. That's the same Saul who, a few chapters later, meets the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. We know him as the apostle Paul, the man changed and commissioned to carry this gospel further than anyone else in the book of Acts. Stephen never sees that. As far as he knows, his death accomplishes nothing but his own suffering. But God is doing something in that watching, approving young man that Stephen couldn't see and we can. As we said last week, God’s plan doesn’t rest on us recognizing it. Your faithfulness in a hard moment is never wasted, even when you can't see where the seed lands.
Our Only Hope: The Righteous One in Our Place
Here's the truth underneath all of this. Every one of us misuses the law in some form, religious or not, turning good things (whether a moral code, a career, a cause, a relationship, or something else) into proof we're worth something — that we’re secure, superior, etc. And when that project gets threatened, it feels existential; we lash out. That's not just the Sanhedrin's story. It's the mechanism behind most of the anger and fear you carry, if you look closely enough.
Paul says it plainly: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The law's job is to show us that guilt, not to fix it. It can expose the disease. It can't cure it. Only the gospel can do that. The gospel is the good news that Jesus, the Righteous One, took the condemnation we earned, so that people like us could be accepted, not on the strength of our record, but on the strength of His.
So let me ask you two different questions, depending on where you are this morning.
If you're comfortable in your own righteousness — maybe you're the person who quietly judges anyone with a messier life than yours, or the professional who looks down on people who haven't achieved what you have, or the person who feels morally superior to whoever's on the wrong side of the latest argument — let the law do its good work on you. Self-righteousness takes many forms. It shows up as the parent who's a little too satisfied comparing their kids to someone else's. Maybe it's the church member who's kept every rule in the book and has quietly started to think that's what makes you acceptable to God. The forms are endless. Even so, for all the apparent diversity, that impulse to judge is the same impulse that fueled the Sanhedrin. Let the law humble you, and run to Christ.
And if you're not comfortable at all — if you're worn out trying to measure up and always coming up short, if you're carrying an addiction or a broken family or shame you haven't told anyone about — hear this. You’re ready. The gospel is for you. Only the weary know their need; only they will receive it. Maybe you've been staying away from church, or from God altogether, because you assume you'd need to get your life in order first. You don't. You do not have to clean yourself up before you come. Jesus stood up to receive Stephen in the middle of his weakest, most desperate moment, covered in his own blood, still trusting. He'll do the same for you, exactly as you are today.
Conclusion: Self-Righteousness or Christ's Righteousness?
Religion was never the real problem. Self-righteousness, fueled by misused law (the attempt to save ourselves, dressed up in whatever code we happen to live by) is the deeper issue and grim diagnosis. And the gospel is what delivers us from it.
The same Jesus who stood to receive Stephen is standing ready to receive you, right now. He offers a new identity through forgiveness that ends the exhausting work of proving yourself. We'll talk more about that in coming weeks.
Until then, may we be people humbled by the law, resting in the gospel, full of the Spirit, and overflowing with the same grace that freed Stephen to seek that grace on behalf of others. Amen.
These sermon notes were prepared in my capacity at First Evangelical Free Church of White Oak and McKeesport, PA and are shared here for the devotional use of our members and friends. They are neither a transcript nor a professionally-edited document. Please don't distribute without permission.