I'd you to take your Bibles off your laps or out of the Purac and turn to the seventh chapter

of acts for a consideration of perhaps the most Christ-like deaths recorded anywhere in Scripture.

Acts Chapter 7, beginning at verse 54.

As Stephen has spoken this marvelous defense,

now the reaction to it, verse 54.

Now when they heard these things, they were enraged and they ground their teeth against him.

But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus

standing at the right hand of God, and he said, behold! I see the heavens opened, and the son of man standing at the right hand of God.

But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together upon him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And

the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. And as they were stoning Steve and he prayed, Lord Jesus receive my spirit.

And he knelt down and cried with a loud voice,

Lord, do not hold this sin against them.

And when he had said this, he fell asleep

and Saul was consenting to his death.

There was a man named Andrew Rivay, a Frenchman who spent most of his life in Holland, a theologian, a holy man filled with the Holy Spirit and with faith the same way Stephen was.

He taught at the University of Leiden and in 1650 on Christmas Day he preached when he was 77 years old and he became very, very ill and within two weeks he died.

And he tells the story of what happened between the day of his falling ill and the day of his death and how

God ministered to him in a mighty way.

And I want to read you what he said, and the way God, by his his spirit took death and turned death from an enemy into a servant

in this man's life.

Here's what he wrote.

The sense of divine favor increases in me every moment.

...