Responding to the Call

SERMON: 2013-07-21--ac13103--responding-to-the-call SOURCE DURATION: 00:45:17.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: All candidates provided are part of a continuous theological exposition (narrative retelling and application of scripture). Candidate 15 is the final segment shown and represents the conclusion of the main biblical teaching point being discussed. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, we come this morning in our study of the book of Acts to Acts chapter 13, and the book of Acts, you might recall, is structured on the basis of the command of Jesus in Acts chapter 1 verse 8, when he says, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." "You'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Well, Acts chapters 2 through 7 deal with the expansion of the gospel throughout the area of Jerusalem. And then in Acts chapter 8, after the persecution on account of Stephen's death, the gospel expands to Samaria and to Judea, and then in chapter 10, we have the gospel reaching to the centurion Cornelius, who is the first real Gentile to come to Christ, and that leads to the revival in Antioch that we have been looking at in Acts chapter 12. And that sets the stage now for the first of three missionary journeys that Paul undertakes that take up the bulk of the rest of the book of Acts. The gospel goes now to the ends of the earth. So from Acts chapter 13, let's read together the first five verses as we start looking at this portion of scripture. In the church at Antioch, there were prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon, called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Minayan, who had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." Well after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off. The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the Jewish synagogues. John, that would be John Mark, the author of Mark's gospel, John was with them as their helper. Join me as we pray. Lord, we come to you this morning keenly aware that the gospel is never just for us, but is meant to flow through us to bring life and healing to the nations of the world. And what a day it will be when the leaves of the tree of life in the holy city will provide healing for all the nations, and how we look forward to deliverance totally from the curse and the restoration of all things that you've promised. Thank you that by the Holy Spirit you give us the foretaste of that in our own lives. And we pray, Lord, that we might be sensitive to the work of God and that yielding ourselves to him, spirit, soul, and body, we might be used of you in the furtherance of your word and in the coming of your kingdom. So bless us in this time together. Give me the words that I need in all of us hearts and lives to serve as fruitful soil so that your word isn't just talk, but Lord, leads to action and leads to obedience. We pray that in Jesus' name, amen. So as we look this morning at these verses that we have read together from Acts Chapter 13, there really are two main observations that I want to make. Unless you think this is going to be a real short sermon, each of those two has sub-points, so just relax and settle in. Point number one, this new phase of gospel expansion that we encounter here in Acts Chapter 13 is birth in worship and prayer. Listen again to the first two verses. In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers, Barnabas Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Minayan who had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul. Keep that verse up for just a moment. Let me pause there and point out the diversity of names that we find here in the Antioch Church. Barnabas and Saul we are acquainted with, of course. They have pastored this congregation as it has experienced the revival of God's Holy Spirit and the influx of Gentile believers. Simeon called Niger is an interesting person. The name Simeon would seem to indicate that he was Jewish, Niger means black, which makes me wonder, was he a black Jewish man? Lucius of Cyrene, interesting because it was people from Cyrene among others who brought the gospel first to the Gentiles in Antioch. Furthermore, later on in the book of Romans there is a Lucius who was a relative of Saul. We don't know if that is or is not the same person. But Minayan, he's an interesting one because he had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch. Now this Herod is Herod Antipas. He is the one who put John the Baptist to death, and he's also the one who took part in the trials of Jesus. He was a bad dude, but he was brought up at the same time in the same household as Minayan. In fact, the word that is used, the word brought up, the Greek word centrophos denotes one who is educated or nourished at the same time with another. And the image that comes to mind is that of a wet nurse, if you will, nursing two boys at the same time. And what you have here is two very different people following two very different destinies. Herod Antipas, an enemy of the gospel, Minayan, one of the leaders of this early Christian church. So Herod has an interesting way, does he not, of making certain points. But we continue. Verse two, because that's the one we want to get to, "While they were worshiping the Lord in fasting, the Holy Spirit said, 'Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.'" Four things in that verse alone that we need to reflect on. And the first is this, God has a work that he is doing in the world. Notice again how the verse puts it, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." All through scripture, God has an agenda in the world that he is pursuing. Jesus puts it this way in John chapter nine, fourth verse, "As long as it is day," he says, "We must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work." So here's the question, what is the work of God? If somebody were to ask you, what in the world is God about? How do you know where God is at work? Well, fortunately, Jesus in John's gospel also answers that question in a similar fashion, on 629, "The work of God is this, to believe in the one who has sent, in the one he has sent." In other words, the work of God is the proclamation of Jesus the Christ through whom we have redemption. As you know, graphically, I like to picture it this way, if this is the world where we are alienated from God under Satan's power, selfish, filled with conflict, confusion, and death, and if this is the world that God is remaking, a place of fellowship with God, a place where he meets all of our needs, and a place of perfect harmony with each other, then the message of scripture, as you know, is that there is no other name given under heaven among men by which we can be saved but the name of Jesus. The work of God is the proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah. And that's why later on, in this same chapter, Acts 13, Paul, preaching the gospel now on his first missionary journey, puts it this way. He says, "My brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him, everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses." It is through Jesus that our sins are forgiven. It is through Jesus that our old natures are put to death. It is through Jesus that we can be delivered from the curse and restored to the promised blessings of God. That is the work of the church, and that, of course, dovetails 100% with the Great Commission in Matthew chapter 28, "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." God has a work that he is doing in the world, and that work is the proclamation of the name of Jesus. Why do I belabor that? Because the church so easily loses sight of its primary mission. It is so easy to get caught up in the horizontal as opposed to the vertical. It is so easy to be overwhelmed by the brokenness of life and the needs of the poor and the social injustices of our day and age, all of which are important issues that, as Christians, we ought to be involved in and lend a helping hand to. But the horizontal is only meaningful in the context of the vertical. It must flow out of our desire to proclaim the name of Jesus. As Jesus said, "What is the profit of man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?" At the end of time, the question will be, are people in Christ and are they saved for eternity or are they outside of Christ? That's why you and I cannot remain nonchalant about people around us who do not know the Lord Jesus and have not committed their lives to him because Scripture says that at the end of time they're going to be lost forever. And if we understood that, we would do a lot more agonizing before God that people would come to faith and have their lives changed. Isn't that true? Isn't it true that often our hearts are strangely cold because we really don't love our neighbor the way that we love ourselves? God has a work that he is doing in the world. Second thing to note in that verse then is that God calls very specific people to a very specific task. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." It was back in the 1700s when William Carey, who is known as the father of modern missions, was burdened for world evangelization, something that interestingly enough had not been part of the burden of the Protestant Reformation. Somehow they were just busy with themselves, they didn't really care about the heathen. And so when he went to his hyper-Calvinistic Baptist board to inquire or to question whether it was the duty of all Christians to spread the Gospel throughout the world, one of his colleagues, a man of some significant standing, is said to have responded with the words, "Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your aid and mine." Interesting comment, undoubtedly God can convert the heathen without you or me. Sounds spiritually, you know, exalting God, but flies in the very face of the Great Commission because God in his wisdom and in his love has decided that you and I would be co-workers with him to accomplish his mission in the world. We are his hands and his feet, his mouthpiece. When Jesus returned to heaven, he left the mission in the hands of the church and he said, "You go and make disciples of all nations." And so Paul, in 1 Corinthians chapter 3 verse 9, puts it this way, "He understood how God works with us. We are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building." And then later on in 2 Corinthians 5 20, he says, "We are Christ's ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God." So in this passage, we have the Holy Spirit calling Barnabas and Saul to be co-workers with him in extending the gospel now in the next phase to the ends of the earth. And what's interesting about this is that this call, particularly in Saul's life here, is the repeat of a call that he had received earlier, you will remember, at his conversion. Because back in Acts chapter 9 verse 15, God sends Ananias to Saul, who has been struck blind on the road to Damascus, and he tells him to go. Ananias wasn't anxious to have anything to do with Saul because of Saul's reputation, and he was arguing with God, and God says, "Be quiet, go. This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel." So now it's maybe what, 10 years later? And the call comes to Saul a second time. And my question to you this morning is, why do you think this span of time, why maybe as much as 10 years, because he spent three years in the desert, and he did a lot of other work in the meantime, and Barnabas had to get him from Tarsus to bring him to Antioch, and they spent years in Antioch, why the delay in fulfilling his call? Just doesn't tell us, my strong suspicion is that it is for the sake of preparation. Preparation for the task that God was going to call him to, because it was a task that would take a lot of experience and was a task that would take a broadly supporting community to walk this out with him, because in Acts chapter 9, the following verse, the Lord says to Ananias to tell Saul, "I will show him how much he must suffer for my name." And when God calls you to do great things for him, there is always a price to pay. I know a lot of people, they look with envy upon the great men and women of God historically, men and women who have been history changers, men and women who have accomplished great things for God, and sometimes we say in our hearts, "Oh, that God would use me in a mighty way," and that is a good prayer and a good longing. Understand though, there's always a price to pay, and that if God is going to send you into anything, whether that is the labor force or whether that is some kind of overt Christian ministry, he spends time preparing you and he wants to surround you with people who can be the kind of support that you need in order to send you out into that. So God calls very specific people to very specific tasks in his kingdom. It's not always clear, we'll talk about that in just a moment. So God has a work that he's doing in the world. God calls specific people to specific tasks, and that call to his work in the specific task comes in this story in the context of worship and prayer. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting. Now the text does not tell us why they were worshiping the Lord and why they were fasting. It may just have been part of their regular spiritual discipline, the early Christian church would often fast two days a week. And obviously they were engaged in the worship of God. And this may just have been part of their regular routine. Or maybe there was something brewing in their hearts, they sinned, they sensed the brewing of the Holy Spirit, if you will, and they decided to seek God to try to understand what the next phase of ministry ought to be. We don't know that from the text. We do know that they were worshiping the Lord and they were fasting. And it's in that context that comes the call of God to set apart Saul and Barnabas for the job that they are to do. What's really important about this is that if it is the work of God that we are to be engaged in, then it is God whom we need to seek to find out what it is that he wants us to do. Now let me be very clear about that. There's a lot of things we don't need to seek the Lord for because he has already revealed it to us in Scripture. And you can sit around waiting forever for the call of God when God has already said, love God above all, love your neighbor as you love yourself. But that said, there are moments when God has a specific thing that he wants us to accomplish and he wants us to seek his face. And in seeking his face, he promises to reveal to us what his plan and what his purpose is. I love the way Jesus puts it, John 5 verse 19, I tell you the truth, the son can do nothing by himself. He can only do what he sees his father doing because whatever the father does, the son does also. And it's very helpful for us to understand that because it is God's work that God wants us to seek him and give him input into what needs to be done and how it needs to be done. Because again, the danger in Christian community is that we're more interested in doing than in being. We're so filled with our own ideas of who God is and what God wants to do in the world that sometimes we just simply overlook the fact that God is keenly interested in directing our work so that it fulfills his plan and his purpose. You know, there isn't a week that goes by and I'll just share this with you from my own heart, that as I begin to prepare a message to share with you on a given Sunday, that I don't ask, "Lord, is this the message that you want me to deliver?" And more often than not, it's just part of the regular routine. We're going through the book of Acts and so whatever comes next, that's what we turn to. Every so often, the Lord will stop me dead in my tracks and he'll say, "It's not that, but rather it's this." I had that happen again this past week. I work ahead one or two or three weeks, a little bit, so that things have time to gestate a little bit and I was fully prepared to share a message with you this morning on Herod's untimely death because he was a bad dude. And if you read the concluding verses of Acts chapter 12, he doesn't die very happily. I mean, the story is an awesome story because he gave this great speech and people were praising him that this wasn't the voice of a man, this was the voice of God. And the Bible says that he refused to give God the glory and an angel of the Lord comes along and strikes him and he dies of a horrible disease eaten by worms as he dies. Confirmed in history, this is indeed how the man died. But the Lord said, "No." Time to move on. God is moving his church into the ends of the earth. It's not always clear. It won't always be clear in your life. A lot of times we just sort of stumble along and that's okay. We'll talk about that later on, Lord willing, when they start their missionary journey and we see where they go and the reasons for going where they're going. It doesn't always come as revelation. My point is we need to at least take the time, particularly when you make major decisions, we need to take the time and say, "Lord, is this what you have for me? Is this the direction where you want me to go? Is this the decision that you want me to make?" Yes or no. And sometimes it'll be clear as mud and you just go ahead and you make that decision as best as you know how, trusting that God is sovereign. But every so often you'll hear the nudging of the Holy Spirit and he'll say no to this and he'll say yes to that and that's how the church, as his body, becomes responsive to the head. You've often heard me say sometimes the church is like a paralyzed body. Jesus has all these ideas of what he wants the church to be and what he wants the church to do. And sometimes his voice is the last voice we seek and his voice is the last voice we hear and we just sort of stumble along thinking that we know who God is and what God wants us to do without ever having really sought his face. Am I making any sense here? When I talk about this, it is in the context of worship and prayer, in humbling ourselves before God, that God reveals his purposes. You'll remember the little video clip of Brother Young that we showed last week. Just a clarification, the translator got some of his translation wrong and he made it sound as if his legs were cut off. He might have caught that. Those legs were not cut off, they were just crushed. And when the Lord Jesus came to him through the Spirit and told him to walk out of jail, he healed those legs and out he walked. But that church spent five days in prayer before the Holy Spirit gave them the assurance that Brother Young was going to be released from prison. And even then, as you know, they had a hard time believing it was him when, like Peter, he came knocking on their door. All right, moving on, the fourth thing to note in that verse is that this direction from the Holy Spirit to set apart Saul and Barnabas for the next phase of mission growth happens in the context of community. God's call comes in the context of community. "While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting," the Holy Spirit said, "set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." While they, who is they? Well, it's the five men gathered here in worship and prayer. It's in the context of this community in worship that God says, "Set apart for me Saul and Barnabas to the work that I have called them." Why is that important? Because when it comes to being led by the Holy Spirit, and we don't know from the text how the Spirit communicated this, whether through a prophetic word or through a divine impulse or if they just had this collective understanding. But when it comes to being led by the Spirit, people can be incredibly subjective. Have you ever noticed that? If you want to stop a conversation dead, then you just tell somebody, "Well, God told me." And how do you argue with, "God told me"? You've all heard the story of the young man goes to the girl and says, "God told me you got to marry me." And the girl was smart enough to say, "Well, if God wants me to marry you, He better tell me too, because I'm not going to take your word for it." And the world is filled with spiritual revelations, some of which are from God, some of which may be from the evil one, some of which may be from our own minds, and it's the job of the church collectively to discern the voice of the Lord. And so it's in the context of worship and prayer that this community of believers comes to the conclusion that this isn't the bad pizza that Paul and Barnabas had eaten the night before. They weren't bailing on their job in Antioch because it got too difficult or they wanted to do something else. No, no. This is the Lord saying collectively, "This is what I want you to do next." And so there is safety in the confirmation of other believers. Some of you know my story of how I came to this congregation. It was back in 1978, I think it was, first church that I pastored. There was a moment in time when I felt the Holy Spirit pull back the curtain of my future. It's only ever once happened in my life, told me a number of things that were going to happen, culminating in a call from the Maranatha congregation in Belleville. My wife will bear witness to the truth of this story. Congregation was pastorally vacant at the time. We were following in the manner, the calling process of this congregation, kept saying to each other, "Those silly people, why don't they just call me? I'm supposed to go there." Well, you didn't. You called Pastor Getkate instead, which in retrospect was a very good and wise thing because he did a lot of plowing in this congregation that we have built on today that we would not be able to do without the work that he did. I've told him not and I've honored him for that. But six years later, as I was minding my business in the second congregation that I served, all of a sudden here's the phone and here's Jake Birkhusen, chairman of council at the time, said, "Are you interested in considering a call from Maranatha in Belleville?" And of course that whole history came back and one thing led to another. But before I accepted that call, when you had extended it to me, though I had clearly, I thought, heard that word of the Lord six years earlier, I gathered around me a group of men and women in the congregation that I was serving at that time that knew the Lord, that had a heart for the Lord so that we could collectively discern the wisdom of that decision. And while it was a very painful moment for all of us because we were deeply knit together, by the time we had finished consulting and praying, the decision was unanimous that this was indeed the call of the Lord. And this wasn't just me trying to run away from a situation or following some fancy flight of dreams or inspiration that had come my way. And I'll tell you, honestly, that the certainty of having been called to this congregation by the Lord in the way that he did has stood me in incredibly good stead, if you consider some of the challenges and difficulties that we've gone through in recent years. The Lord speaks to his people, and he doesn't just speak to pastors and he doesn't just speak to apostles, he'll speak to you, and he'll speak to your children. I believe the Lord is far more interested in communicating to us his plan and his purpose and his will than we are ready to receive it. But it happens in the context of prayer and it happens in the context of community because that is our safety to know that it is truly the Lord who is really speaking. So to review, God has a work that he's doing in the world. God calls very specific people to a very specific task. That call often comes in the context of worship and prayer, and that call also comes in the context of community. That's all my first point if you're taking notes, just to keep it straight. One other point, much shorter, and that is this, from verse 2, they were commissioned by the church. Verse 3, "After they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off." Three things very quickly in that verse that are significant for us to note. The first is that they prayed and fasted some more. They prayed and fasted some more. It seems like they did a lot of that, and that might account for some of their spiritual power and their ability to hear from God. Again, the text doesn't say why they prayed and fasted some more, but I think it's pretty safe to speculate. They really wanted to make sure that this was God that they were hearing because the implications for their future were profound. The implication for the church at Antioch was profound because it meant sending off Barnabas and Saul who were the spiritual fathers, and I could say mothers, of this congregation. They were pillars of the church, so the big question would be can the church survive? Can the church survive their departure? Is it strong enough? Has it grown enough? Can it stand at its own two feet? Not only that, remember what the Lord Jesus had told Saul when he called him, "How much he must suffer for my name." The job to which they were called was an incredibly difficult job. Imagine leaving your home without significant resources and stepping out into a hostile culture where you're going to proclaim the name of Jesus at the risk of your own life. The rest of the book of Acts, the Lord willing, we will see how much trouble these people got into because they engaged hostile kingdoms with a proclamation that Jesus was Lord. Understand the world does not like the authority of Jesus. The church has a hard enough time understanding the authority of Jesus, let alone the nations of the world. So they are setting these people on a path that could readily cost them their lives. That's not a decision that you make lightly without counting the cost. And so they prayed to make sure that they would be able to endure. Jesus says in Matthew 10-16, "I'm sending you out like sheep among wolves." Second thing to note in that verse is they placed their hands on them. After they fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them. Now the laying on of hands, we know, is symbolic of at least two things. It's symbolic of ordination. That is to say they are being set apart for their missionary work. They are being ordained to this particular task as an apostle. And it's very interesting in the book of Acts, they're never called apostles now until after this. When you get to Acts chapter 14, Barnabas and Saul, whose name is changed of course to Paul then, they're both called apostles. This becomes their job. More than that, the laying on of hands is also an empowerment by the Holy Spirit. Because remember, who is sufficient for these things? Who knows what God is doing? Who has the power and the authority to break through old belief systems that people have held onto for generations? How do you loosen the power of Satan off people's lives so that they can in fact choose to serve the true and the living God only the power of God's Holy Spirit? And that is why earlier we quoted that Acts chapter 1 verse 8, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. You'll be my witnesses, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth." That word power, you know, is the Greek word dunamis from which we get the word dynamite. And so the laying on of hands is an infusion of divine grace and power. When God calls you to a task, he will also empower you for that task with a supernatural anointing of God's Holy Spirit. And that is why in 2 Timothy 1 verse 6, Paul writing to young Timothy at the end of his own life says, "For this reason, I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands." I would never want to step into Christian service or Christian ministry without the church laying hands on me to anoint me with God's Holy Spirit for the job that he's given me to do. And I would encourage you to do the same thing, because without the fire of the Holy Spirit, you end up burning the wick rather than the wax, and you'll burn out, which is precisely what a lot of people do. All right, very quickly on the last one, they are sent off. After they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off. And what this means is that they are representatives of the church. They are sent out on behalf of the church. The Antioch Congregation, if you will, is their sponsoring congregation. They pray for them. They probably generate support for them. And they also provide a base of accountability. And so it is very interesting that when they have completed their missionary journey, what they do is they come back to where they started, and they share what God has done through them. From Atalia, they sailed back to Antioch, where they had been committed to the grace of God for the work they had now completed on arriving there. They gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles. Because the church had sent them off, the church had an interest in their ministry. And so when they came back and they celebrated what God had done, the church rejoiced because even though they had not been able themselves to go out into the mission field, they shared in the benefits of that mission by virtue of having supported and backed Saul and Barnabas. And Jesus puts it this way, I don't have the verse up to quote it for you, but whoever [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:45:16.600; remove through 00:45:17.000] gives a prophet a cup of cold water in my name, says Jesus, will get a prophet's reward. [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:45:17.000; resume after this marked segment]