Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:13] All right. Acts, chapter 14.
[00:00:16] So, Josh, read four verses. We're going to talk through a few more.
[00:00:22] So just to get a little bit of a broader context into what's going on here in the early church in the first century in the Mediterranean world, and what that means for our lives today. But I want to just start with a very brief story.
[00:00:38] So I was a college. I had the opportunity. I had the privilege of serving as a college pastor in West Texas for three and a half years.
[00:00:46] I loved it. I loved my. I loved what I got to do. I loved working with college students.
[00:00:53] And there was a particular weekend where our church was hosting what we called something like a revival. Now, this is a different sermon for a different day. My perspective on revivals. Revival, something God does, not something we do. Right? So that's a whole different sermon for a different day. But nonetheless, we were hosting somebody to come in and preach on a particular Sunday. And it was a packed Sunday. Thousand, literally thousands and thousands of people packed into this room listening to this speaker that we had hired from outside of our. Our town to come in and preach the gospel.
[00:01:27] Nice guy, seemed to love Jesus.
[00:01:31] Super, super gifted speaker. Okay? So, like, incredibly eloquent, very entertaining. Okay? The kind of message that, like, you're crying one second and then you're laughing in the next. Your emotions are all over the place, and you're like. You're just so enraptured into the eloquence of this particular speaker. He was a very gifted communicator. He could even sing.
[00:01:52] So at one point, like, in the middle of the sermon, he starts to sing. And I was just like, oh, my gosh.
[00:01:56] Crazy.
[00:01:58] So all of this is going on, and then it gets to the end where he's supposed to get up and give the gospel presentation with an invitation.
[00:02:08] And the baseline of the message, when he got up to the front of the stage and began to call, people to respond was simply this many of you. Hundreds, if not thousands of you come in this morning anxious, and I have an answer for you. Jesus is a solution to your anxiety.
[00:02:24] Who wants peace, right? Well, like, literally, I mean, thousands of hands shoot up in the air at this, right? It's a good thing to want. Who doesn't want peace? Can Jesus alleviate your anxiety? He absolutely can, right? My question, though, for us to consider is, is that the gospel?
[00:02:43] So lots of hands shoot up in the air. Lots of people respond. They do an altar call. So all sorts of people come up, and then all of a sudden it's like, hey, let's gather the staff in. So all of, I don't know how many staff we had at the time, but all of us g together. And we're basically given responsibility to go and pull some of these people aside, take them into our office and have a conversation about what they just responded to. So I end up with an old seminary, not seminary, wasn't in seminary at the time. I end up with an old college professor of mine. He was my criminal justice professor.
[00:03:15] So my criminal justice professor ends up in my office and he's there with his wife, whom at the time probably, though I don't know this for certain, suspected he's having an affair on. And so him and his wife are in my office and I just ask him this question. I say, hey, tell me what you just responded to.
[00:03:34] And he was like, well, I don't really know. And I said, okay, that's fair. That's an honest answer. And I said, do you mind if I share with you? Do you mind if I share the gospel with you? So the word gospel is used all throughout the messages. It just was never really clearly defined. I was like, do you mind if I share the gospel with you? And he said, yes. And so I began with the goodness of God and the creation of man to be in a relationship with God, but because of man's sin, we have been separated from go God and now we are born sinners. So I didn't make it further than that before he stopped me and he said, hey, I don't really like that you're calling me that.
[00:04:10] I was like, I'm sorry, calling you what?
[00:04:13] So I'm like retracing in my mind, like, what did I actually say?
[00:04:16] And he was like, I don't really like that you're calling me a sinner.
[00:04:20] I don't like that.
[00:04:22] And man, that was a really clarifying moment for me, one that leads me to want to pose to you this question is what is the gospel?
[00:04:37] Like, what is this word that we use all the time? Gospel centered this, gospel centered that, Gospel centered music, gospel music, gospel preaching, etc.
[00:04:47] What is that?
[00:04:49] Because here's the thing, this thing called the gospel is the thing that Paul and Barnabas were willing to risk their lives for as we'll go into in the story in just a moment. But the kinds of the number of mileage that these guys put on foot to go from one place to another in the face of persecution and even probable death is astronomical.
[00:05:15] And the gospel is the reason they did it.
[00:05:19] So what, what is that? What is the gospel. If we don't understand what the gospel is, we don't understand what it means to be a Christian.
[00:05:27] So listen, and this is kind of a. We prayed about this in pre service prayer and it was already kind of a burden on my heart in preparation for the message today. I know that there are people in this room who think they're Christians and are not.
[00:05:39] I know that.
[00:05:41] Not because I can see in your heart, not because I know all these facts about you, but because statistically I just know that that's true. We live in Texas. It's not a hard thing here to be a Christian.
[00:05:55] So there are many. And listen, and here's my encouragement, my plea with you. If you hear me say this and you're like, yes, I can't wait for that person across the room to hear what Brad's about to say.
[00:06:06] I want to challenge you to think about this for you.
[00:06:11] This is for you. It's not for the person across the room.
[00:06:14] If you don't know what the gospel is, you do not know what it means to be a Christian.
[00:06:20] Doesn't matter how long you've been in church.
[00:06:22] It doesn't matter how much you've reordered the behavior of your life.
[00:06:28] Doesn't matter how much tithe money you give or how much you serve. It doesn't, it doesn't matter. Any of, none of those things make you a Christian.
[00:06:36] So we have to know what the gospel is in order to know what it means to be a Christian.
[00:06:41] And that's really what we're going to focus on as we look at this gospel that drove Paul and Barnabas to amazing lengths to risk their life.
[00:06:51] The gospel drove Paul and Barnabas to incredible risk because they were so captivated by it.
[00:06:58] They loved it so much, they're so changed, transformed by it that it drove them to incredible risk. So we'll talk about what the gospel is, we're going to talk about what it means to be a Christian. And then I just want to talk to you about the church for a few moments because again, the planting and establishing of healthy churches was in many ways Paul's mission. His mission. His mission wasn't just the evangelization of individual people.
[00:07:24] Paul's mission was the planting and establishing of churches. This is, this is how Paul understood what the Great Commission was all about.
[00:07:32] Go and make disciples of all nations. Baptizing them, Go and make disciples of all nations is typically where we stop, though Jesus doesn't stop there, does he? He says teaching them to obey all that I've commanded. Well, where does that teaching happen? It happens here in this. In the context of the gathered body of Christians, a local church. That's what Paul was after. Okay, so let's look at the text together, and we'll think about those questions. Gospel, what it means to be a Christian, and the church. Okay.
[00:07:59] All right, so chapter 14.
[00:08:01] I want to start in verse 19 to give us appropriate context before we get into the verses that Josh read. So starting in verse 19 says, but the Jews came from Antioch and Iconium, and having persuaded crowds, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing that he was dead.
[00:08:24] But when the disciples gathered about him, he rose up and entered the city.
[00:08:28] And on the next day, he went on with Barnabas and Derbe.
[00:08:32] When they had preached the Gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and Iconium and to Antioch. And so we'll just stop there for.
[00:08:43] For a quick moment. So this is many, many people. If you calculate the number of miles that Paul and Barnabas traveled, again, a lot of it was on foot, but a lot of it was also by sea.
[00:08:53] Would say that they traveled roughly miles total on land. Okay, so our passage today marks the end of Paul and Barnabas's first missionary journey. They're going to go on three throughout the Book of Acts. And this is the end of their first missionary journey. Okay, 700 miles on foot, and that's not on Flatland. We're not talking about West Texas. Okay. We're talking about the Mediterranean world with mountains and hills and valleys and robbers and sickness and not modern medicine and all sorts of crazy things that Paul and Barnabas would have had to endure in order to take this gospel that we're about to define in just a moment from where they were in Antioch overseas to Cyprus, and then overseas again to Iconium and Lystra and Derby and all of these places. 700 miles total on land and 500 miles total on sea. So this would be the total mileage from beginning to end. Okay, so where we pick up in verse 19 is Paul has just been stoned in the city of Derby. He's been dragged outside of the city. The disciples, the Christians, gather around him, and they assume him to be dead because that's typically the result of being stoned. So he was stoned, they gathered around him, and by a supernatural act of God. And it had to have been this because the amount of mileage that he was going to travel going back into the city, Paul hops up and he travels back into the city.
[00:10:21] So he doesn't flee from the persecution. He actually run, he runs toward it. He's like a, he's like a courageous first responder. He's the one running toward the chaos instead of away from it. Goes back into the city.
[00:10:33] And it says that when he does, he preaches the gospel. He preaches the gospel to that city.
[00:10:43] So if you remember last week, this is verses 15 through 17 when, when Paul first goes into the city, he doesn't even make it to the gospel before they begin to worship him as if he's a God, him and Barnabas, okay?
[00:10:56] What he does preach is the idea, the reality that God is creator.
[00:11:03] So he doesn't get to Jesus. He begins with God as creator. He says essentially like, look at all of the goodness and beauty of creation and ask yourself this question, what is the source of all of it?
[00:11:16] It's a question I would pose to you if you're here and you're not yet a Christian or you're thinking about wrestling with these things, is you see the beauty and goodness of creation. Yes, creation is marred, it's fractured because of human sin, all of those kinds of things. But you have taste buds, you see a laughing child, you know, the pleasures of sex within the confines of marriage. All of these amazing things are intended to pose the question to you, what's the source of it? What's the source of that enjoyment and beauty? It's God.
[00:11:46] And so that's the message that Paul is preaching in Derby.
[00:11:51] God as creator. They begin to try to worship him and it gets real crazy and messy. And then that worship goes into persecution, wild time. And then he's stoned, he's, he's sent outside of the city. And then by a miraculous act of God, he ends up coming back into the city. But he doesn't come back in preaching that message of natural revelation, which is that God is the creator, he comes in preaching the gospel.
[00:12:14] So another way to understand the gospel is God's special revelation.
[00:12:20] So if natural revelation is that you can walk outside and see the beauty of creation and say there must be a God, special revelation is God's unique and specific way of speaking to mankind.
[00:12:36] As Francis Schaeffer said, old Presbyterian theologian, God is there and he has spoken.
[00:12:43] There is a God. He really does exist.
[00:12:47] But amazingly, he's spoken. He's made himself known.
[00:12:51] Well, how, how did God make himself known?
[00:12:53] Hebrews 1:1:2 says, long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.
[00:13:01] But in these last days, he has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.
[00:13:12] God's special revelation is His Word.
[00:13:16] Hey. This book that you and I hold in our hand, this is God's special revelation to us about Himself.
[00:13:24] We can know the God of the universe, the Creator of all good, true and beautiful things, the One who's in control, who's holding all things together by the word of his power.
[00:13:34] We can know him through His Word. But even more specifically than that, the One to whom His Word testifies to, which is the Word personified, that is the person of Jesus Christ.
[00:13:45] When you and I look at the person of Jesus Christ, we know who the Father is. If you want to know what the Father, what God the Father is like, you can't measure him on the basis of your experience with your Father or lack thereof.
[00:13:59] You have to understand who the Father is like through the perspective of Jesus.
[00:14:05] What's Jesus like? What did Jesus say about God the Father?
[00:14:10] Jesus said, I and the Father are one. When you look at the person of Jesus Christ, you see the fullness of who God is in the person of Jesus Christ. This is God's special revelation. So when. Paul.
[00:14:23] This is really random. I'm sorry. Could somebody get me a water?
[00:14:28] Anybody? Thank you. Jess. Jess has it. Okay.
[00:14:31] All right. I'm like, maybe I'm coming off being sick. I don't know. I don't know what it is. Um, don't want to pass out in front of you if I do. Matt's going to come back and play and we're going to be fine.
[00:14:41] All right, so.
[00:14:44] So Paul. Paul goes back into Derby and he preaches the gospel. What is that?
[00:14:49] Okay.
[00:14:51] The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ.
[00:14:54] It's the good news of Jesus Christ.
[00:14:57] The gospel is the good news of God reconciling and restoring all things that went wrong in the fall through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Thank you, Jess.
[00:15:08] Thank you.
[00:15:10] It's the good news of Jesus. Perfect life. Jesus Christ, God the Son took on human flesh over 2000 years ago and took on the form. He. He became human, fully human. Born as a baby in a manger, lived a perfect life, empowered by the Holy Spirit, totally fulfilling the law of God, the law of Moses on our behalf. Jesus Christ came as the second and better Adam.
[00:15:37] Jesus is the full, imperfect human that you and I were created to be, but would never become. Would never be.
[00:15:43] He lived a life that you and I could not live. He was without Sin, totally without sin. Jesus is the better Passover lamb.
[00:15:50] He's blameless and spotless and holy. Nobody lived a life of love like the person of Jesus, who is love personified, perfect in every way, every conceivable way. The most. The most glorious, beautiful, wonderful person to ever live.
[00:16:10] Jesus without sin. And then he goes to a cross.
[00:16:14] He's condemned to die under Pontius Pilate.
[00:16:16] He goes to a cross.
[00:16:20] And on the cross, 2 Corinthians 5 says he becomes sin.
[00:16:30] All of our sin, past, present, future. Sin, by the way, is that you and I are born with this heart orientation that is opposed to God. Sin is not just your actions.
[00:16:45] Sin is your heart and mind. It is a heart that is opposed to God. And all of us are born opposed to God with hearts bent inward.
[00:16:56] Life is about me.
[00:16:59] All of us are born into that. You wouldn't argue with this? Yes.
[00:17:02] So if I call you a sinner, you're not going to be offended and run me off the stage? We're all sinners by nature.
[00:17:10] Okay.
[00:17:11] Jesus, though he knew no sin, became sin on our behalf. On the cross. He was buried first. Corinthians 15 says he was buried. And on the third day, by the power of God, he walked out of the grave.
[00:17:28] He walked out of the grave with a glorified body mark still in his hands.
[00:17:33] He appeared to his disciples and then he appeared to 400 others who went on to tell of his appearance. I saw him alive.
[00:17:43] I mean, Thomas puts his fingers in the holes that are still in Jesus wrists from the crucifixion.
[00:17:49] This is why they were willing to die, by the way, because they saw him alive.
[00:17:54] Not an apparition, not hearsay.
[00:17:58] I saw his body. I saw him walking. I ate with him, I dined with him, I spoke with him, I listened to his voice resurrected.
[00:18:09] That's the gospel. It's the good news of Jesus Christ. The gospel is not its consequences. Meaning this. The Gospel. The message of the gospel is not that your sins are forgiven. That is a consequence of the message. It's a wonderful consequence of the message.
[00:18:26] The gospel is not that you get to go to heaven if you believe in Jesus. Wonderful consequence, wonderful reward. But it's not the gospel. And the reason I bring this up to you is I think many of us unintentionally circumvent what the gospel is actually about for the sake of its consequences. Namely, we circumvent the person of Jesus. The gospel is Jesus.
[00:18:49] When you become a Christian, you are committing to a person, not just reaping his benefits.
[00:18:59] And so I've listened to hundreds, literally hundreds of baptismal testimonies that do not mention his name, Nothing about his person.
[00:19:13] I get to go to heaven now because I prayed a prayer.
[00:19:18] That's. That's not. You haven't received the right message.
[00:19:24] That's not the message.
[00:19:27] The message is that you are alienated from God and you can't do anything to fix that.
[00:19:34] Not a single thing. You can't even believe on your own.
[00:19:38] You are dead in your sins and transgressions. And God is holy and he's good and he's just.
[00:19:45] And your condemnation and mine is deserved.
[00:19:50] That's the bad news.
[00:19:52] But God is love.
[00:19:55] The Bible doesn't say God is wrath.
[00:20:00] He's provoked to wrath because of evil and wickedness, rightly so. But he is love in his nature. For. For all of eternity, God has been love. He. He'll always be loved. The Father loves the Son, who loves the Spirit, God. God is love. And in love, he gave everything by sending his Son.
[00:20:21] That's the good news.
[00:20:23] He sent his son to take your punishment in mind so that you and I, through faith alone in him, might be reconciled to God.
[00:20:31] That's the good news. The good news is that your reward is Jesus. He's not just the means of your salvation. He is the point of it. He's the reward of it. As John Piper would say, like, what is heaven without Jesus?
[00:20:44] It's hell.
[00:20:49] It says, have you? Have you? Here's the question I want you to. To reckon with this morning. Have you received him, his person?
[00:21:00] Have you received him? Or have you merely been convincing yourself that you're a Christian because you've received some kind of promised reward that came as a result of a prayer? You prayed one time.
[00:21:10] That's more witchcraft than it is Christianity.
[00:21:15] Have you received Christ?
[00:21:18] Is Christ your reward?
[00:21:20] Is he your treasure?
[00:21:22] Is he the reason you wake up in the morning?
[00:21:24] Is he the reason you keep going?
[00:21:27] Is he the reason you stay in the marriage?
[00:21:29] Christ.
[00:21:31] Christ is the reward. Christ is the gospel.
[00:21:36] The gospel is the good news of Jesus. That's what Paul went to proclaim. That's the reason he got back up. And he dusts himself off. And he was like, wow, that was painful. And then he goes back into the city of Derby.
[00:21:48] He went back in, preaching that message, the good news of Christ. That gospel, by the way, friends, is available to all of you.
[00:21:57] It really isn't about what you do. It is, however, about who you receive and what message you receive.
[00:22:06] Christ crucified and risen from the dead. For the reconciliation of sinners is the only gospel. There is no other.
[00:22:15] It's the only hope for mankind.
[00:22:18] Legislation matters. Voting matters. I know it's election week.
[00:22:23] All of those things are important.
[00:22:26] Do those things through prayer and in your Bible, okay?
[00:22:32] But none of those things are the hope of the world.
[00:22:38] So Paul goes back in and he preaches Christ.
[00:22:43] He preaches the gospel, and let's see, let's see what happens.
[00:22:49] Says, preach the gospel to that city. And made many disciples. He made many disciples. So we've defined the gospel. What does it mean to be a Christian? To be a Christian is to be a disciple.
[00:23:02] A disciple is a Christian, a Christian is a disciple. And a disciple is a student.
[00:23:06] It's a pupil.
[00:23:08] That's not all it means to be a Christian. To be a Christian also means to be a son and daughter of God.
[00:23:13] God becomes your father.
[00:23:15] No longer an orphan, you're no longer alienated. To be a Christian is to be an ambassador of the gospel, a minister of reconciliation, the bride of Christ, the temple of the living God. Right? All of these things are labels given to the people of God in the Bible. But disciple, he made many disciples. They heard the message of the good news of Jesus. And by the grace of God, by a working of the Holy Spirit, many disciples were made.
[00:23:45] Many disciples were made. And here's what I think is interesting about the.
[00:23:52] The label disciple or student is it implies learner. Implies learner. So I, I think I've said this, I've told this story before here, but there was a point a couple of years ago, several years ago, when we were, like, in the thick of church planting and life was busy and parenting was crazy and like, all these things. And. And I went into a mentor of mine.
[00:24:16] He and I met and. And I said. He was like, hey, what's on your mind? And I was like, I'm a bad dad.
[00:24:22] Just like, blurted. I was just like, I'm a bad dad. And he was, he, he did a very, like, therapist thing. He was like, well, tell me about that.
[00:24:30] I was like, I don't really want to do that. I don't want to tell you about it. I just want to tell you what I believe to be true. And he said, well, what's an alternative belief to that? And I was like, I don't know. I'm a good dad. Which felt really cheap and untrue at the time. And he gave me language that was very helpful for me. And the reason I share it with you is I hope it'll be helpful for you, too. He said, how about I'm a learning dad?
[00:24:50] And I was like, oh, I really thought about that as a category before.
[00:24:54] Here's the reason it applies to you. If you're a Christian, you are a learner, you're a learner, you're a student.
[00:25:02] You are and have been by the grace of God and by the blood of Jesus, redeemed and cleansed of all of your unrighteousness, clothed in the righteousness of Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit. But you have yet to arrive, and you're not going to arrive on this side of heaven.
[00:25:16] That's no excuse for living a life of unrepentant sin. Okay, so how do you identify a Christian from a non Christian? I think one of the most clear ways is where, what direction is the orientation of your heart?
[00:25:34] Okay, a non Christian, the orientation of a non Christian's heart is going to be away from Christ and away from his Word.
[00:25:43] But the orientation of a Christian's heart is going to be a movement toward the person of Jesus Christ. The orientation now has changed from I'm a God haters who I love him, but nonetheless, we are, we are and will be, continue to be students, learners until the day we die. And this is true of the people that Paul was preaching to here in Derby. It says he made many disciples.
[00:26:09] And then it goes on to say they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch. So again, this is a lot of travel going upward. Remember, we're on the Mediterranean coast. We're going upward into Antioch, not the Antioch that sent them out originally, which is where we're going to end in our text. But they go back up to Antioch. And the reason he went up, it says this in verse 22, he went up to strengthen the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.
[00:26:47] And when they had appointed elders for them in every church with prayer and fasting, they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.
[00:26:55] So the Gospel is the good news of Jesus. A Christian is a sinner who's been born again by the Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ.
[00:27:02] And now we're disciples. And what do disciples need? What do learners need? We need strengthening and we need encouragement.
[00:27:13] So again, if the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news is the thing that's compelling Paul to go into the face of persecution, probable death, says this in Second Corinthians. He says that the Love of Christ compels me.
[00:27:30] Then Paul's mission was the planting and establishing of churches. Because Paul knew that the plan of God was for us to never do this alone.
[00:27:43] But we live friends in a hyper individualistic age, don't we?
[00:27:49] Everything is about your personal relationship with God, my personal relationship with God. Everything is communicated that way. It's tailored that way. So it's not infrequent that I, and I'm learning this too much of this in real time.
[00:28:03] It's not infrequent that I have conversations with people who really don't understand why being a member of a local church is a necessary thing.
[00:28:11] Like. Well, the Bible doesn't say. It doesn't say those words. It's implied all throughout the New Testament.
[00:28:17] But I think here in our text we have a wonderful picture of something that the Apostle Paul knew was so embedded in the plan of God that he was willing to risk his life for it, to travel hundreds of miles to go back into these cities, not for the purpose of evangelizing the lost here, but to go back and revisit the Christians who were already there so that they might be strengthened and encour encouraged.
[00:28:44] Why? Why did they need to be strengthened and encouraged?
[00:28:47] Well, if you really. And if you think about these first century disciples, they were under persecution. Many of them had experienced familial distance or even rejection. Some were probably being threatened with death.
[00:29:05] They lived in a pluralistic society. There are all sorts of crazy things going on. And so Paul is reminding them, he's saying, listen, through many tribulations and trials, we must enter the kingdom of God. They were experiencing many tribulations and trials. And probably as a result of that, not probably as a result of it, needed to be strengthened and encouraged.
[00:29:29] They needed to be strengthened and encouraged. And Paul knew that the means to do that. There are a couple of things here in the passage I just want us to think and talk about before we kind of landed our application at the end.
[00:29:41] But one was he goes back into these local churches and he says, hey, it's not good for you not to have elders.
[00:29:48] And so one of the first things that the Apostle Paul does is he goes back and he visits these local congregations, these local bodies of Christians who had begun to gather after they had put their faith in Jesus.
[00:29:59] And in light of all of the persecutions and all the tribulations and all of the difficulties of life that they were experiencing, one of the first things the Apostle Paul and Barnabas did was appoint elders.
[00:30:10] Okay, he didn't Just willy nilly, go in there and appoint anybody.
[00:30:15] He writes in First Timothy 3 and Titus 1 about the kind of man that ought to be an elder of a local church.
[00:30:25] He goes in and he appoints elders.
[00:30:28] What do elders do?
[00:30:30] Why are elders important?
[00:30:32] On a practical note, many of you know this. Anytime there's a gathering of people, what voice is going to rise to the top?
[00:30:40] Typically, it's a talk back moment for you if you know the strongest voice, okay?
[00:30:47] Sometimes that strong voice is a good actor, and that's awesome.
[00:30:51] Sometimes they aren't.
[00:30:54] Okay? And in a way that you and I live in a very individualistic society, we also live in a culture that hates authority of any kind of we despise authority. And sometimes that despising of authority comes as a result of trauma that you've experienced from bad authority.
[00:31:11] And I hate that I've experienced some of that as well. And so our natural tendency then, when that happens is to turn away from any authority. We want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
[00:31:25] But God institutes authority within his local church. He institutes elders within his local church. And then he gives a list of qualifications in First Timothy 3 and Titus 1 to say, these are the kinds of men. They're imperfect. They're sheep too, by the way, right? But these are the kinds of men who ought to be doing this thing called eldering or shepherding or pastoring for the good of my local church. First Peter 5:2 says, this is what elders are to do, to be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, watching over them, not because you must, but because you are willing as God wants you to be, not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve. That's what elders are called to do. And it is good and healthy for the flourishing of the body of Christ for elders to be established. And so Paul and Barnabas risk their lives to go back into these cities, into these churches, in order to, by prayer and fasting, install elders within these local congregations.
[00:32:28] He goes on, so pray for us.
[00:32:31] I didn't write that application in my notes. Pray for the elders of rhc. For those of you who are members of the church, we pray for you. We pray for you every week by name.
[00:32:41] Pray for the elders, okay? We too are Christians who are. We have our own sin and suffering, right? Like one pastor told me before we planted the church, or he said this, he said, their problems become your problems and you have your own problems.
[00:32:57] Welcome to pastoral ministry. It was like, oh, that's a great that's true, yes.
[00:33:02] Pray for, Pray for us. Pray for me. Pray for my family. Pray for Pastor Sean, Pastor Matt. Pray for their families.
[00:33:08] Pray for the salvation of our kids. Pray that by the grace of God, we would follow Jesus with all of our heart.
[00:33:15] Pray that the Lord Jesus would keep us from stumbling.
[00:33:18] Pray for our eyes. Pray for our mind.
[00:33:23] Pray against the enemy. We, we need your prayers just like you need ours.
[00:33:28] Let's look at what the text goes on to say in verse 24 and then we'll, we'll wrap it up with this. Verse 24 says.
[00:33:33] Then they passed through Pisidia and came to Pamphylia. And when they had spoken the word in Perga, they went down to Attalia. So they're traveling south now toward the Mediterranean Sea. And from there they sailed to Antioch. So this is their sending church.
[00:33:49] This brings an end to their first missionary journey.
[00:33:53] 320 miles by sea and you can look up a map online and you can actually see their travels.
[00:33:58] But they stayed near the coastline of the Mediterranean, traveled through the Mediterranean Sea all the way back to their original sending church in Antioch. 320 miles.
[00:34:09] That is a, that's a long ways. 320 miles would have taken them three to four days to get back to their sending church in Antioch.
[00:34:19] And it says this, they sailed to Antioch where they had been committed, commended to the grace of God for the work that they had fulfilled. And when they arrived and gathered the church together, they declared all that God had done with them and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. And they remained no little time with the disciples. So here's my closing application for you that I want to encourage you to really consider if you're a member of rhc.
[00:34:46] If you're a member of rhc, you have a glorious job description.
[00:34:53] You are not merely a, you're not a spectator.
[00:34:59] You have a job description.
[00:35:02] So Paul and Barnabas travel back to Antioch, the original sinning church, and it says that they gather the church together.
[00:35:07] They gather the assembly, the Ecclesia, they gather them together and they begin to tell them all that God had done.
[00:35:14] Think about all that God had done through their first missionary journey.
[00:35:18] Okay, Several weeks ago we talked about the Roman officer Sergius Paulus, who the Lord was already working in his heart, but he was associated by a false prophet named Bar Jesus who kept disrupting things. And then Paul comes in and he rebukes Bar Jesus, calls him a son of the devil and preaches the Gospel to Sergius. Paulus. And the Spirit awakens his heart to new life in Jesus Christ. He's saved.
[00:35:43] Scales fall over bar Jesus's eyes. Paul probably shared that with the church.
[00:35:49] Think about all the Gentiles who came to faith. Paul, for much of the time, most commentators would say, was sick. During his travels, the Lord sustained him and strengthened him through all of that.
[00:36:00] Time after time after time. Again, Paul's stoned and he's left for dead. And God miraculously physically heals him and brings him back and sends him back into the city to continue to preach the gospel. And he sees elders installed in these local churches that he's planted and by the grace of God, begin to thrive as local congregations. Like all of these things, Paul is celebrating in his heart. And he gathers the church together in Antioch and he begins to declare all that God has done. This is simply proclaiming the faithfulness of God, which is what you and I are supposed to do as a church.
[00:36:32] We remind one another of the faithfulness of God. And this is the means, friends, by which you and I are strengthened and encouraged. Because it's through many tribulations and trials that we must enter the kingdom of God.
[00:36:46] Life will be hard.
[00:36:47] And so God, in his grace and in his providence, doesn't just give us himself, he gives us one another to strengthen and encourage somebody. The Greek words that Luke uses here in the text is literally just means to come alongside somebody.
[00:37:06] So I know if I were to ask you, how do you need to be encouraged today?
[00:37:13] How do you need to be strengthened today in your faith, in your love for Jesus? You probably have answers, I assume, but I want you to consider that on behalf of your brother or sister in the room, how might they need to be strengthened and encouraged today?
[00:37:29] As a member of Redemption Hill, you have a job description.
[00:37:32] You're not merely a spectator.
[00:37:35] You're a part of the body of Christ. And our call in one another's lives by the grace of God is to help strengthen and encourage one another. Because through many tribulations, we must enter the kingdom of God.
[00:37:49] We need. We need to be encouraged. I suspect that most Christians in the room are under encouraged, not over encouraged.
[00:37:59] And I think sometimes the temptation maybe is for us to think. I don't want to flatter them. I don't. And you shouldn't. Right. So if you need to know, like, what's driving flattery, it's the fear of man.
[00:38:10] You're fearful of a person and you're saying nice things to them. That's flattery. You shouldn't do that.
[00:38:15] But honoring somebody is motivated by the fear of the Lord, which drives out the fear of man.
[00:38:21] It's about loving the other person and looking for ways to see Jesus in the lives of your brothers and sisters and then communicating that with your mouth.
[00:38:29] We need encouragement.
[00:38:32] We are mostly discouraged.
[00:38:36] We need encouragement.
[00:38:38] Look for ways to see look for Jesus in one another and then tell each other about that.
[00:38:46] I mean, I can't tell you how many times, like, I pulled out an old letter from, like, a college student from, like, 10 years ago that said something specific about a difficult season in their life and how God used me to.
[00:38:57] To encourage them during that. And it keeps me going.
[00:39:03] So Paul and Barnabas planted churches. They established churches. They installed elders who could be under shepherds to the chief shepherd, Jesus. Preach and teach the word of God. Pray, care for the flock of God among them and those Christians within those local congregations.
[00:39:22] Paul and Barnabas give us a model to follow that we come in week after week and we commit by the grace of God to strengthen and encourage one another and to remind one another of the faithfulness of God. This is what we do.
[00:39:36] So let's commit to this together by the grace of God. Amen.
[00:39:40] Amen. Let's pray.
[00:39:50] Sa.
[00:40:16] Sam.
