Acts 14:1-7
Amen. You can be seated and turn
in your copies of God’s word, if you will, to Acts chapter
14 verses one through seven. As you’re making your way there,
I just remind you that Paul and Barnabas are on what’s typically
called the first missionary journey. Um, most of your Bibles in the
back have maps and have little color coded arrows that show
the routes that, um, Paul took. That’s a helpful tool for understanding
where all these cities and towns are. He’s in what’s considered,
I guess today, modern day Turkey. There’s another helpful resource
if you’re interested down in the resource room. It’s called,
oh, I can’t remember what it’s called. Doesn’t help you, does
it? Anyway, it’s a book about the life of Paul. It takes all
the Bible verses about Paul and puts them in chronological order
so you can read through it. There’s one about Jesus, one
about Paul. They’re both by John MacArthur. It’s a big, thick
book. If you go down there and look, I think it’s on the table,
but that’s a helpful resource for understanding these things.
It’ll hit me about midway through the sermon and I’ll just blurt
it out. It’s probably how that will work. Before we read God’s
word, let’s look to him for help and blessing. Pray with me. Our
God, we thank you that you speak and we thank you that you bless
the reading and the preaching of your word and we ask for that
now. I’m just a human, I’ve got nothing
to say apart from you giving those words in your scripture
for me to say and you to bless it by your Holy Spirit. So I
ask that you do that now so that we might learn of your ways,
know of your will, and that we might know of your love in our
lives. Hear us now, so help us, we pray in Christ’s name, amen.
This is Acts chapter 14, verses one through seven. Now at Iconium,
they, that’s Paul and Barnabas, entered together into the Jewish
synagogue and spoke in such a way that a great number of both Jews
and Greeks believed. But the unbelieving Jews stirred
up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers.
So they remained for a long time speaking boldly for the Lord.
who bore witness to the word of his grace, granting signs
and wonders to be done by their hands. But the people of the
city were divided. Some sided with the Jews and
some with the apostles. When an attempt was made by both
Gentiles and Jews with their rulers to mistreat them and to
stone them, they learned of it and fled to Lystra and Derby,
cities of Lyconomia and the surrounding country. And they continued to
preach the gospel. Amen. We give thanks that our
God has preserved his gospel to this day. And it is now in
our hearing. Uh, some of you will know the great theologian,
uh, Yogi Berra, not to be confused with Yogi, the bear, uh, but
Yogi bear, uh, Barrow is known for, uh, well, both of them actually
were known for saying all kinds of funny things, but Yogi Berra,
the baseball player, um, said this, if you come to a fork in
the road, you should take it. And apparently in the original
conversation where his friend was present, he says, I will
if it’s silver. Paul and Barnabas have come to
a fork in the road in their ministry. Do they go left? Do they go right? Do they go north? Do they go
south on their first missionary journey? Remember Paul and Barnabas
being set apart and sent by the church at Antioch. Now, last
week we were at Antioch and Pisidia. And if you look at your map,
remember they left Antioch on the mainland. They sailed across
to Cyprus. They ministered across Cyprus.
That’s where The magician and all those people showed up and
Paul, you know, made him blind. Actually God did. And then they
sailed across to modern day Turkey and they’ve done ministry in
the other Antioch, which is Antioch at Pisidia. And so in chapter
14, as they go back to some of these cities, back to Antioch,
the second one, they’re going to sail back to the first one
and tell them how things are going. So you can get a little
confused. But Paul and Barnabas on missionary
journey number one have come to a fork in the road and Uh,
trouble, uh, at Antioch, uh, stirred up persecution, led them
out of the city. Remember they had a two Sabbath
ministry, two Sabbath day ministry. Uh, things got a little tough.
They shook the dust out of their robes. They kicked it off their
feet and they went on to where we are today in Iconium. So chapter
14, verses one through seven, where we are today, shows us
that Paul and Barnabas, when they left Antioch of Pisidia,
they could have, as they traveled eastward, taken a northern route,
a northeastern route, or at that fork in the road, they could
have taken a southeastern route. And in God’s providence, because
he wanted them to take the southeastern route, he wanted them to go and
preach and proclaim, the gospel at Iconium and Lystra and Derby,
we find Paul and Barnabas again at a synagogue. Remember the
gospel goes to the Jews first and then to the Greeks. But the
synagogue was also a strategic place. It was like a captive
audience, right? If you want to do ministry in
a city, you go to where the kids are playing sports. Maybe you
go to a, well, what they call overseas a pub, a public house
where people gather in the city to fellowship and you go and
you strike up a conversation. Well, that’s what Paul and Barnabas
do as they go to the synagogue. They are looking to minister
the gospel. to people who need to hear of
Jesus. So we want to think of this passage,
this ministry of theirs at the synagogue in Iconium. We want
to think of it in the three actions that are given in our passage.
The first action of the apostles as they minister the word of
God in the synagogue at Iconium is a speaking ministry. And one of the things we ought
to recognize as we look at this speaking ministry of Paul and
Barnabas is this is nothing new for God’s servants. Fast forward
a couple thousand years from Paul and Barnabas to today to
now, my ministry is a speaking ministry. We call our pastors
ministers of word and sacrament. My main job is to labor in the
ministry of the word. Reverse a couple thousand years
from Paul and Barnabas at Iconium, and see the speaking ministry
of Moses. Remember Moses was tending his
father-in-law’s sheep, Jethro out in the wilderness. And God
appeared to him in the burning bush and said, Moses, my people
are suffering under Pharaoh. They need to be freed and emancipated
from that condition and be brought out of Egypt and into the promised
land. You’re just the guy to do it. And Moses says, no, I’m
not. In fact, after complaining about
his lack of ability to speak, Remember, God wants him to go
speak to Pharaoh. He says, how about Aaron? Here I am, Lord, send Aaron.
That’s kind of the idea. So Moses’ call was a call to
speak. And so every time God sets apart
and sends someone into gospel ministry, It must be a speaking
ministry. And we must remember what God
said to Moses when he said, I’m not articulate, I’m not able
to speak. God says to him, who made your mouth? But we also
need to remember who made the gospel. Whose gospel is it that
we speak? We are emissaries or ambassadors
of God. That’s what Paul says a couple
of times in his ministry written down in his epistles. He says,
I am an ambassador for God. We know what an ambassador is.
They’re an emissary for a government. And so when we send an ambassador
to another country, it’s as if The president has gone or the
king has gone. He goes into his place. And when
he speaks, he speaks on behalf of that leader who has sent him.
Now, it’s not the same thing, right? We always want the king.
We always want the president. But sometimes our kings, our
presidents can’t be everywhere at once. Actually, all the time
they can’t be everywhere at once. But sometimes they must send
an emissary. And Christ, our risen and exalted savior, sits
on the throne of glory. And from his throne of glory,
He sends missionaries, he sends preachers with the gospel to
have a speaking ministry for the needy world. And so here
are Paul and Barnabas using words, speaking with the authority of
God. But I think one of the things we have to see in their ministry
of speaking is they have what we call a special unction, a
special blessing of the Holy Spirit. Now I can spend all week
long in my office studying books. I can crack every book. I can
write everything down. I learn and I can put it all in a pages
document, a word document, and I can have this wonderful document
and I could stand up here and read it and it might be orderly. It might be logical. It might
be true. It might be everything, but unless the Holy Spirit blesses
it, it’s just a speech. Now it may happen that because
it’s the word of God, it sounds wonderful to you, but if the
Holy Spirit is not in it, there’s something missing. And so our
passage tells us that Paul and Barnabas in their speaking ministry
at Iconium in the synagogue had a great blessing of almighty
God. It says in our passage that they
spoke in such a way that a great number of both Jews and Greeks
believed. Some were cut to the heart. Some
saw their sin and their misery. Some received Jesus and trusted
him that day alone for their salvation. What a great message. and ministry Paul and Barnabas
had at Iconium. And it’s the same way in the
church today. When we speak, our prayer is
that God will open our eyes. He will unstop our ears. He will
soften our hearts. And that when the word is read
and preached, it will be spoken in such a way that a great number
will believe or be comforted and built up in the faith they
already have in Christ Jesus. Now, there’s been all kinds of
training for pastors over the years. It used to be in the early
days of America before we had universities. Universities established
that if you wanted to be a minister, you often sat under another one.
And while he worked on his sermons and pastored his church, you
would sit there in his study side by side and you would learn
your languages, you’d learn your Bible. You’d ask him questions.
You might tag along on a pastoral visit and see him do a funeral.
And you’d sit in the church services with him. And over a period of
time, when he felt you were ready for ministry, that was when you
graduated. And then we had seminaries pop
up and, you know, seminaries come and they go, they get liberal,
they get weak. But we have a very good education
system for ministers now in America, if you go to the right place.
And all that education, all that studying you can do sitting in
your office, looking at books won’t help you a bit unless God
makes his word work. Unless God helps you speak in
such a way that a great number believe or are encouraged. It’s
not in the mastery of your study. It’s not in the mastery of your
writing. It’s not in the mastery of your rhetoric or your logic
or whatever. It’s in the blessing of almighty
God. But notice also their speaking
ministry, while it brought blessing to some, it stirred up the hearts
of some of the Jews and the Gentiles. In fact, our passage says that
some were so against the ministry of Paul and Barnabas, they stirred
up others, and it even uses a word, they poisoned their minds against
the brothers. Now, generally speaking, when
we come to church and we get together and we have a worship
service and we open the Bible and we talk about it, we generally
have pretty good agreement because we’re in the company of saints
or we’re good, respectable people and we’re not going to raise
a fuss in public. But Paul and Barnabas were ministering in
a more public place. Yes, it was a Jewish synagogue
and that’s full of all kinds of things that probably need
explanation. But understand, they were not teaching and preaching
in a church context, where there was a pastor and elders and an
established ministry, and there was a membership and a process
and a understanding of who people are and where they are in the
faith. Now, this is just really a public proclamation of the
gospel. And so generally, in our church
setting, we don’t expect anybody to get upset and poison minds
and be rabble-rousers, though that happens a little bit in
the life of the church. But here, those against Almighty
God, they poison the minds against the brothers. And doesn’t this
give a little echo back to what God told Adam and Eve and Satan
in the garden. After Adam and Eve had sinned
and God is dealing out the curses on each of them. He tells Adam,
you’re gonna work hard, you’re gonna sweat your brow, ground’s
gonna produce nothing. Eve, you’re gonna have babies
and it’s gonna hurt real bad. And Satan, you’re gonna lose
your legs, crawl on your belly, you’re gonna eat the dust of
the earth, and she’s gonna have a baby, and you’re gonna fight
against that baby, that’s Jesus. And you’re gonna nip at his heels,
and he’s gonna stomp your head. Now that’s an oversimplified
Brian version of Genesis chapter three, but you get the picture.
When we see antagonism when the gospel is preached, it is the
little serpents nipping at God’s servants. And so that leads us
to the next thing we ought to see from this passage. As Paul
and Barnabas have a speaking ministry at Iconium, they also
are persisting in ministry. The average minister, if you
look at statistics in today’s American church culture, the
average stay of a minister is not very long. The word on the
street is that the first year a pastor gets to a church, he’s
just figuring out the lay of the land. The people are just
figuring him out. The second year, he spends most of that
year saying, Oh Lord, what did I get myself into? How do I get
myself out of here? If it’s a hard place. But if
he stays the third year, the hearts of the people, the minds
of the people may come together in the unity of Christ. And they
may say, this is what the church is. We want to do this together.
And so they have a long relationship together. But many ministers
don’t often get that privilege. And I think this passage shows
us why. This passage shows us that a
ministry needs to be persistent. It needs to be going and going
and going against all odds. You know, a pastor gets to a
church, he goes through a little honeymoon period. Oh, everybody
loves you. You know, they take you out to eat, they give you
gift cards. And then there’s the disillusionment. Well, he
didn’t say hello to me on Sunday. He doesn’t know I’m a gold member
of the tithing club. you know, just go down the list.
And so the minister all of a sudden is this wonderful guy and then
everything he does is wrong. And then you get yourself in
a fix because you can’t hear from him as he reads God’s word
and preaches. And so church life can get very
difficult just like ministry life got here in this synagogue. And so we have to decide, are
we going to keep covenant or break covenant? Are we going
to stay and work it out or are we going to take our marbles
down the street, somewhere else. And this goes both for the pastor
and the people. You know, people, church hop
these days. One pastor and I were talking
recently in the 1990s, the pews became Teflon. You know what
Teflon is? That’s that nonstick stuff that
supposedly keeps your egg from sticking to the pan. Now, if
you turn your heat up too high, Teflon will do you no good. You’ll
need a Brillo pad, but The pews became Teflon, we just church
hop, we get mad, we don’t like the songs, we don’t like the
coffee, we don’t like the preacher, we don’t like, you name it, I
want different friends, so we just church hop. But that can
also be true of ministers. The heat turns up. Oh, I don’t
like ministry anymore, these people aren’t nice to me, nobody
loves me, everybody hates me, I guess I’ll take my marbles
and go elsewhere. So it goes both ways. But what
Paul and Barnabas give an example of here is persistence in ministry. So as they have a speaking ministry,
they have a persisting in their ministry that we ought to take
great example of. They persist. Our passage tells
us they remain for a long time. How did they do that? Why did
they do that? There’s a lot of hard things going on, but it
says they speak boldly. It says the Lord bore witness
to the word of his grace, and he granted them signs and wonders. So as Paul and Barnabas at Iconium
have a speaking ministry that God is blessing, God is making
his word alive to his people. It’s not Paul’s eloquence or
Barnabas’s eloquence. In fact, You know, in today’s
culture, I wouldn’t fit in ministry. You know, you go to some of the
cool churches. We’re not a cool church, right? But you go to
some of the cool churches, you gotta have hair to have a hairdo,
right? You can’t have a potbelly and
look middle-aged. There is one description of the
Apostle Paul, and it’s written from an outside source other
than the Bible, and it’s actually from a source that supposedly
was an eyewitness here at Iconium. Paul supposedly had a unibrow. You know, we have people on Church
Street that can take care of unibrows, right? Paul was short. You know, we like a pastor to
be tall and good looking. We like for him to have played
ball somewhere so we can say, our pastor played ball at so
and so. We like these worldly activities. Paul was short. He
was bowlegged. He was nearsighted. He was not
a good looking man. He probably was a cross between,
you know, a five foot two wrestler and Groucho Marx and with those
big eyebrows. And yet he was the instrument
God used. to have a speaking ministry and
he was able by God’s grace to have a persistent ministry so
that as he spoke and as Barnabas spoke and they persisted under
the poisoning of the minds of the brothers by the hostile Jews
and Greeks and the Gentiles, God bore witness to the people. And I assume Paul and Barnabas
felt this as well, that when they spoke, God gave unction
to their ministry and their bold witness was blessed by God saying,
this is my word of grace. And as occurred during apostolic
times, he gave them the ability to give signs and wonders. Now
we aren’t told in this passage what signs and wonders they did,
but we can assume they healed people. We can assume that There
were some lame people walking. There were some blind people
saying we can assume that there was probably some strong rebukes
towards those who were poisoning others against these brothers. You can imagine that from the
other things we’ve learned from the book of Acts, that Paul and
Barnabas were filled with the spirit and God was blessing everything
they said and did and so that they could not uh, the enemies
could not prevail against them. And so their ministry is persistent. And, you know, just think about
this as church members. Think about this as a, got a
couple of elders in here. Think about this. Me as pastor,
the going does get tough, right? It does get hot in the kitchen.
And our tendency is just to run and say, I’ve had enough of this.
I’ve done my time, I’ll go somewhere else. Dad and I talk from time
to time about churches and ministries we know, and there’s a certain
church, a certain ministry, where the last couple of pastors have
had wives who were medical doctors. So I don’t have the privilege,
if I get mad and sick and tired of y’all on a Monday morning,
I say, you know, my wife’s a medical doctor, I’m gonna just quit,
because she makes six figures. You don’t get to persist in ministry.
A minister shouldn’t work for a paycheck, that’s, I mean, Part
of it, but that’s wrong if that’s just your motivation. But don’t
we need ministers and congregational members and elders and deacons
who persist in ministry no matter what? They work through the hard
things. They overcome the naysayers.
They don’t listen to the voice of the serpent hissing in their
ears, but they listen to the voice of the shepherd and lead
their people forward. There is something here about
persisting in ministry that’s not just about Paul and Barnabas,
but it’s for us as well. Now, I just said all that. And
the third characteristic of our passage, there’s a speaking ministry,
there’s a persisting in ministry, but there’s also a fleeing. And
I just said, don’t cut and run, right? But there’s a time where
in ministry you do cut and run. In our last study from last week,
they shook the dust from their feet. They knew when they weren’t
wanted, they shook the dust out of their folds of their cloaks
and they went on to Iconium where they are ministering today. but
there’s a fleeing of the ministry here. They move on to Lystra
and to Derby and to other places in Galatia. Several years ago,
I think it was maybe back in 2006, I had a friend who was
about 20 miles from me in ministry and he was at a really hard place
and they were really mistreating him. Now, in all fairness, he
did some really boneheaded things. He would lose his temper. He
would say things to people, you know, he’d stomp off and storm
off. He did some things to deserve some of the guff he got from
that congregation. But at the end of the day, that
congregation did not deserve a pastor. They did not deserve
a pastor because of how they treated him. And I think that’s
the case sometimes. It ought to be determined by
the church. Y’all don’t deserve a pastor until you can learn
to respect him and take care of him and listen to what he
has to say. And I think that’s the point where the synagogue
is. They don’t deserve the presence
of God’s emissaries. They don’t deserve a speaking
ministry. because they have rejected the
word of God. Now, yes, some have become Christians here and they’ll
leave that synagogue and they’ll form a church and Paul will go
on to write letters to the Galatians and that sort of business. But
the large group of people that persist in poisoning the others
against the brothers, those who persist in speaking ill of God’s
servants, don’t deserve the speaking ministry of God. And that’s why
Paul and Barnabas shake the dust, move on to the next place. And
they have to do that again here. They have to leave Iconium because
our passage tells us some stirred up against them and they were
even going to stone them. Now, in a handful of verses in
a couple of Sundays, we’re going to get to a place where Paul
is stoned. And they stone him with so many
stones, they walk away from him thinking, job done, he’s dead. And his friends come and rouse
him and Paul with bloody face and wounds and bruises that probably
take months and years to handle. He goes to his grave with some
of these wounds, I’m sure. They pick him up and he carries
on in ministry so that he will get stoned. But there’s a point
in time where you can’t put lipstick on a pig, right? It’s time to
move on. It’s time to go somewhere else
and minister in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so this
synagogue, which had been a forum where they could speak about
Jesus Christ, has become so hostile. Some have been converted, yes,
but many others haven’t. They can no longer minister there. And so it’s time for them to
move on, to sneak out under the dark of night to another place.
We said earlier something about the great theologian, Yogi Berra.
When you come to a fork in the road, you take it. Now he was,
Sort of doing the play on words thing, you know, fork in the
road is you got to go left or right. But he was playing a joke
about a real fork. There’s a fork in the road we
all face as human beings. We will either continue living
at enmity with God. Or we will come to faith in Jesus
and receive his pardon and his forgiveness. And we will change
the trajectory of our life, living for him, serving him and not
poisoning others in the way, but preaching the fragrance of
Jesus Christ. Perhaps some of you are at a
fork in the road today. You’ve not yet trusted Jesus
Christ. Don’t be like the folks in this passage who continue
in enmity with God, but but but be a joyful Christian like like
Paul, like Barnabas, who under the great duress preach in their
message. It is not without tribulation
and hardship that we enter the kingdom of God and enter his
eternal glory forever. One of the things we’ll see in
just a few moments as we come to the Lord’s table is even Jesus
faced hardships. Before he rose up to glory, he
first had to go down to the grave. And so in our Christian life,
in our Christian service, in our life together in the church,
it will be difficult as we speak the word. We’ll have to persist
against some hardships. And yes, there’s a time to flee,
But more often than not, it’s time to dig in and commit ourselves
to the work that God has given us, putting aside our preferences
and even some of our quibbles and saying, you know, Jesus Christ
is worth it. He left the riches of heaven
and for our sakes became poor in order that we might become
rich. And so may we have the same attitude as Christ as we
look to serve the world that needs to know of him so well.
Let’s look to him in prayer now. Our God, we thank you for your
word and how it shows us of Paul and Barnabas’s persistence in
speaking the word of grace, but knowing when to move on and to
speak the words of grace to others who will listen and hear. Give
us that wisdom, but help us now in this hour to persist by faith
and in the strength of almighty God, we pray in his name, amen.