Acts 11:19-30
Turn in your copy of God’s word
to the book of Acts chapter 11 verses 19 through 30 will be
our passage for today. I think. minus maybe Christmas
and Easter and a couple of breaks along the way, we’ve been making
our way through Acts for a year now. First, we studied Luke,
the gospel according to Luke, where he sought to write an orderly
account to Theophilus of all that Jesus began to do in his
life and ministry. And then Luke writes his sequel,
the book of Acts. He wrote again to Theophilus,
seeking to write an orderly account of all that Jesus’ disciples,
all his apostles sought to do for the risen, exalted Christ
had left them on earth to carry his gospel from Jerusalem to
Judea. through Sumeria and to the ends
of the earth. And now in our study of Acts,
we’re seeing that the gospel has left Jerusalem and Judea
and Sumeria. It’s making its way north into
Phoenicia today, Antioch, and then on it will go around the
Mediterranean Sea, possibly, we all believe it went all the
way to Spain before Paul’s death. And so before we read, let’s
ask for God’s help and blessing, pray with me. Lord, your word
is a lamp to our feet. It’s a light to our path. We
live in a world that is dark. We live in a world that tells
us all kinds of instructions, all kinds of directions. Lord,
those directions will lead us astray. We’ll go to the wrong
place. We come to you now by faith,
believing that your word will direct us, your voice will guide
us, and that you will land us safely on heaven’s shores. So,
Lord, unstop our ears, clean up the clutter in our hearts
that may distract us, and we pray that we would hear the voice
of the shepherd and follow him only. This we ask in the name
of Jesus, our great savior, amen. Hear the word of the living God. This is Acts chapter 11, beginning
at verse 19. Now those who were scattered
because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as
far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to
no one except Jews. But there were some of them,
the men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke
to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand
of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned
to the Lord. The report of this came to the
ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace
of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to
the Lord with steadfast purpose. For he was a good man, full of
the Holy Spirit and of faith, and a great many people were
added to the Lord. So Barnabas went to Tarsus to
look for Saul. And when he found him, he brought
him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with
the church, and they taught a great many people. And in Antioch,
the disciples were first called Christians. Now in these days,
prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named
Agabus stood up and foretold by the spirit that there would
be a great famine over all the world. This took place in the
days of Claudius. So the disciples determined everyone
according to his ability. to send relief to the brothers
living in Judea. And they did so, sending it to
the elders by the hands of Barnabas and Saul. Amen, the word of the
living God. In the life cycle of an organization,
I think it’s helpful to look at it three ways. An organization
gets formed, what it’s gonna be, what it’s gonna do, And then
it gets deformed. You know, the boss goes away,
things fall apart, right? They quit doing the things they
used to do. And then there’s what we call reformation. And
that’s a word you know so well from our church history. You
know this word well. We, back in 2017, remembered
Martin Luther’s nailing of his 95 theses or arguments to the
door of the chapel in Wittenberg where he lived in Germany, giving
his protest against the Roman Catholic church. So we’re part
of the Reformation heritage where we saw that God in Jesus Christ
formed his church. He gave to the church apostles
and pastors and teachers. He gave to the church her ordinances,
her worship, her ways, And then over the centuries of church
history, that formation was deformed. And thank the Lord for the reformers,
Wycliffe and Huss and Luther and many others who said, there’s
something wrong. Let’s read the Bible and put
the church back in order. What a wonderful thing that is. Well, in a couple of weeks, I
believe November or September the 4th, I don’t want to get
too far ahead into the year, September the 4th, we’ll begin
a new Sunday school series in our adult class on the history
of the church in the 20th century. Many of you will know that the
20th century, the 1900s were a major stretch of deformation
in the life of the American church. So the Protestant Reformation
took place in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s that came to America and
are founding through the Puritans. But quickly we saw maybe in the
late 1800s, definitely in the 1900s, a serious spiritual decline
in America. And we’re We’re really there. We’re becoming a post-Christian
nation now. And I think that Sunday school class that will
last 12 weeks or so will give you insight into why the church
is in the fix it’s in in the 21st century. That’s because
of the 20th century. So you’ve got a church that Christ
forms. You have a church that sinners
deform. And then thankfully, by God’s
grace, we read the Bible and we reform. the church according
to the scriptures. I think it’s so important for
us to understand the church is really a meat and potatoes institution. If you look at the American church
today, a church really is often no different than a carnival.
People like their cotton candy. People like their rides. They
like their amenities. And if you look across the American
landscape and you listen to what people are looking for in a church,
but you also look at what the church is offering, you have
to ask yourself, are these churches founded on the formation grounded
in the word of God by Jesus Christ? Or have we gotten so far this
way or that way that the church has deformed into doing whatever
works. James Montgomery Boyce, the Philadelphia
minister who I guess died 20 or so years ago, used to say
this very well, what you win people with, you win them too.
And so if it’s the cotton candies and the carnivals and all the
rest, if you win them with those things, you’re not gonna get
away with a bait and switch. And I think what we’ll see in
today’s passage from the gospel spreading in the life of the
church in the book of Acts is we’ll see there are some very
simple characteristics of the early church, and we would do
well to imitate them. For not only are they what Christ
put in place for the growth of his people and the advance of
his gospel to the ends of the earth, they are what God promised
to work in and through to nurture his people. And so sometimes
we say of our own church, we’re just meat and potatoes. You know
what you’re going to get every week. We don’t have seven menus.
We don’t have a short order chef. So when you complain about the
green beans, we cook you squash. Well, I suppose you wouldn’t
eat squash if you didn’t want the green beans, probably. But you get
the idea. We serve up the same old thing. God’s word, God’s worship, God’s
grace, God’s forgiveness. And that ought to be enough.
Sadly, it is not enough for the world. We want sparkles and glitter. We want big events. We want we want the wow factor. And I think the American church
has set itself up for putting that taste and appetite in people.
But there’s five things you notice in today’s passage. And we would
do well as a congregation, we would do well as a church in
America and a church in the world to imitate these five things.
I’ll go ahead and give the five things to you, then we’ll pick
our way through them one by one. There’s evangelism, there’s belief,
there’s discipleship, there’s a focus on Christ, and then there’s
mercy. First, let’s think of evangelism. Everyone agrees evangelism is
necessary. Everyone, without a doubt, will
say, oh, I believe that the church ought to evangelize. What does
evangelism mean? It simply means telling the good
news, the evangel, the good news, the gospel. Everybody believes
in the gospel in the church, and everybody wants the gospel
to go out. Just don’t ask me to be an evangelist, right? That’s
kind of the way it goes. It’s not my personality. It’s
not my gift set. Don’t know what to say. People might reject me.
We give all the kind of reasons for it. But on the other hand,
we also say, oh boy, wouldn’t it be nice if more people would
become Christians? Wouldn’t it be nice if our churches
in America were more full than they are today in the year 2022? If we want our churches to grow,
I think two things have to happen. Christians need to have children
and raise them in the fear of the Lord. That’s the way God’s
always perpetuated his people through generational church growth.
But there are plenty of people who have not heard the voice
of Jesus. And if the church would be faithful
in her evangelism and more men and women and boys and girls
came to love and to know Jesus and received him and rested in
him alone for their salvation, the church would naturally grow. Now, some of you in the room
have come up in the church the way I first described. Your parents
were Christians. They had you as a baby. They
brought you to Sunday school. They read the Bible to you. And
you could probably say, like many, I’ve never known a day
where I didn’t know about Jesus. I didn’t know about his ways
or his church. I always knew of it. And so you’ve
grown up in the church and in the Christian way. Others of
you say, my family were not Christians. We believed other things, other
gods, other false religions. And I heard the voice of Christ
and he called me to himself. God broke into my family and
my generation and maybe that has now continued. Your sons
and daughters are following Jesus and we bless the Lord both ways.
He grows his church. But the world needs to hear of
Jesus. The world is a sin sick world. It’s a dark world, a crooked
and depraved generation. And God in his wisdom has left
the church. He’s left you as Christians to
tell the good news. We sing so often the little song
I love. to tell the story about Jesus
and his love. But do we? Do we tell our coworkers? When appropriate, right? We’re
there to work, but maybe over lunch. Do we tell our children,
our grandchildren? Do we tell our neighbors? Do
we tell those we do business with, the doctor’s office we
sit in during the week? And I don’t mean be nutty evangelist,
you know, running everybody off, but opportunities come. And Peter says so well, always
be prepared to give an account of the hope that is within you.
You know, sometimes one of us will go on a diet and we’ll lose
a little weight and everybody comes up and says, oh, you look
so good, right? And the moral of the story is
I want what you’re having, right? I want whatever you did so that
I can lose the weight too. And it’s like that with the gospel.
Why do you smile? Why do you rejoice in suffering?
Why do you look ahead in this topsy-turvy world we live in
with confidence? What’s in you, dear person, dear
friend? And you say, it’s Christ. It’s the peace of God that passes
all understanding. And so you begin to tell them
about how your life was a wreck. until Jesus came and fixed it
and cleaned it up. He made you new. He made you
whole. And he, through the ministry
of the church, the ministry of the word is making you day by
day more into the image of Jesus Christ. That’s evangelism. And
it’s important for us to tell that good news. It’s important
for us to know that good news. We need to speak of sin. We need
to speak of Jesus. We need to speak of salvation.
We need to speak of God’s wrath and his judgment. All those.
It’s good for us to get the gospel right. But our passage says of
these Christians who were spread out of Jerusalem because of the
stoning of Stephen and the persecution that broke out as they spread
out of Jerusalem, Judea, and we’re going to the ends of the
earth. It says they spoke the word. It says they preached the
Lord Jesus Christ. And dear friends, what a great
message of hope we have as a church of the Lord Jesus Christ to go
and to speak. Every Sunday you leave with God’s
blessing, God’s benediction. The Lord bless you, keep you,
make his face shine upon you, be gracious. The Lord lift up
his countenance upon you and give you peace. And you leave
and say, oh, how wonderful, I got God’s blessing today. Read Psalm
68. Psalm 68 takes that blessing
that God places on Israel and says, Lord, you have blessed
us, your people. Now let us be a blessing to the
ends of the earth. Oh, God, you’ve shown mercy to
us. Let us now show mercy to the ends of the earth. And so
this early church. Had one of the great characteristic
traits that we ought to have as well, that of evangelism.
The second characteristic we ought to take note of is the
one of belief. The one of belief. Research in
America shows that the church is declining. Before COVID, church
attendance was declining at 7%. And you hear me say this a thousand
times, do the math, seven times, whatever, eventually gets to
zero. Right? The church can decline at 7%
and after so many 7% you get to zero and we are like Europe
post-Christian and our churches turn into nightclubs and apartment
buildings or they get raised and something else comes in their
place. And so research shows that true
belief in Jesus Christ, true belief in the scriptures, true
belief in the essentials of the Christian faith is ebbing And
the tide is going out quicker than it is coming in. And so
evangelism, yes, is important, but it’s also very important
for the church not to just push numbers. We don’t want to say,
well, for the sake of nickels and noses, let’s just get people
in the door. No, we want to be made up of people who truly believe
in Jesus Christ. And I tell you all over and over
again, one of the great joys I think of serving on the session
of elders of the church is interviewing new members. We get to hear people’s
professions of faith. You can’t join our church. It’s
not our rule. It’s our denominational rule. And it’s a good one. You can’t
join the church unless you profess faith in Jesus Christ. That’s
a wonderful thing. It keeps Christians in the church.
And if you give a credible profession of faith that you know you’re
a sinner in need of Jesus and you receive and rest in him alone
for your salvation, we take you at your word and you’re brought
into our fellowship. And it’s a wonderful thing. But
oh, the deformation of the church in America, easy believism. You
pray this prayer, you walk this aisle. You hold this certificate,
you’re going to heaven. We have assured so many people
of salvation when they in fact may not possess it. That’s a
rather scary thing. The church in America, I think
the decline is actually really a correction. COVID has really
proven, I think, who are his. We’re seeing a 7% decline in
church participation. Before COVID, COVID hits and
they say 33% of people who were going to church pre-COVID will
never go back. That tells you something. Because
what do God’s people do? They gather on the Lord’s day
in the Lord’s house with the Lord’s people to sing the Lord’s
praises. And then to go tell of the mighty
deeds of the Lord and the world who needs to know this Lord that
we have come to love. And so belief is important. And
so not allowing for the easy believism of the last century
and a half of the American church, but also discipling people well
into the Christian faith is a wonderful opportunity. Our passage tells
us a great number of people believed, a great number of people turned
to the Lord. A great number of people were
added to the Lord. That means the scattered disciples
from Jerusalem, because of the persecution of Stephen, as they
went north and south and east and west, they went with a personal
change. God the Spirit wrought a real
change in them. Remember last week, they repented
of their sins. They saw their need of salvation
and rested in Jesus alone. And they went and told everyone
they could. about that wonderful blessing in their lives. And
it brought belief, a great number believed and turned to the Lord
and were added to the Lord. Their minds and their hearts
and their lives turned from following Satan. And now in new obedience
to Christ, we’re walking with him and in him. And it says that
this word about all this belief got back to Jerusalem. And Jerusalem,
the church of the day, the mother of the church, Jerusalem decided
they needed to send somebody to see if this was so. Remember
they did that when, who was it? Philip went and evangelized towards
Samaria. They had to go check it out and
make sure it was legitimate. So it’s kind of the same thing here.
Let’s run up to Antioch and see if this ministry is of the Lord,
and so they send Barnabas. Now remember Barney, we’ve met
Barney before. Name means son of encouragement.
Our passage tells us he is a good man, not in the Southern sense. Oh, he’s a good man, he goes
to church and he doesn’t kick his cat. That’s kind of, no,
he’s good in the eyes of the Lord. Takes his trash out on
Tuesdays too. Barnabas is a good man in God’s
sight. Made good by faith in Jesus,
the goodness of Christ in him. But he’s a man full of faith,
a man full of the Holy Spirit. That kind of sounds familiar,
doesn’t it? Remember when they needed deacons? You know, choose
the influential men in the church. You know, remember the doctors,
lawyers, professionals, that’s who you choose. Oh, men full
of faith. They got proper belief, men full
of the Holy Spirit. God is resting upon them and
he will bless their work. Well, that’s what we know of
Barnabas here. And Barnabas comes to these who
have been evangelized. He comes to these who have belief
in the Lord Jesus Christ. And it says he exhorts them to
remain faithful to the Lord and steadfast. in their purpose,
which would be to walk in newness of life in Jesus Christ, no longer
going backwards, but looking to heaven, following Jesus in
this world. And so this church as it’s being
formed, this church as God is shaping it into what he would
like his church to be in this new era of ministry from the
throne of glory to the ends of the earth. God is showing us
evangelism as a key trait. Belief is a key trait. And the
third key trait we want to see in the life of the church, one
we would do well to imitate ourselves as discipleship. It says that
Barnabas got so excited about the grace of God at work in Antioch
that he went up across the ocean over to Tarsus. Remember, said
Paul is going to be gone for 10 years. Well, this is 10 years
later. Paul’s back. He goes and gets Paul or Saul
out of Tarsus and brings him to Antioch. And for one year,
for one year, there is this school of discipleship. Could you imagine
if I said to y’all, this would be cool, actually. Y’all pick
your favorite theologian in America, you know, Derek Thomas, Sinclair
Ferguson, if we could get R.C. Sproul, he’s in glory. You pick
your theologian. If we could get that theologian
and they’re going to come just live here for a year and you’re
not going to have to hear from me. You’re going to get to hear
from them. Y’all, y’all would come man,
Sunday night, Wednesday night, Sunday school. Y’all, y’all would
be here. Uh, I’ve got friends who, uh, are members of a, of
a certain church and they, when they need a pastor, they get,
they get the home run hitters. And at one time they had two
of them. One was the morning preacher and one was the night
preacher. And I’d tell my friends, you better be growing because
y’all got it really good there. But could you imagine discipleship
on steroids? The apostle of Paul. Barnabas,
the son of encouragement. What a blessed church they were
at Antioch. And so one of the key traits
of a church is a discipleship program. Remember the Great Commission,
God says to his church, go into all the world. And as you go,
you’re going to preach the gospel, which will necessitate baptizing
people. and making them disciples. And
so Christian discipleship is vital for the growth and the
health of the church. Christian discipleship, it happens
during sermons. Yes, it does happen through the
hymns and the creeds and the other parts of our worship service,
but it, for us, is really The nitty gritty of discipleship
comes during Sunday school, during Sunday evening sermons, the Wednesday
night Bible study, the ladies Wednesday Bible study that we’ll
pick up soon in a few weeks, the men’s fellowship that we’ll
meet tomorrow. When we gather around the word
together, around our confession, our catechism, our theology,
our beliefs, we grow in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. And
Paul says somewhere, I think it’s in one of the letters to
Timothy, he says that we need to grow into the measure or the
stature of our big brother, the Lord Jesus. We have this competition
in our house to see how tall we are. And there’s somebody
in our house that wants to be taller than me, and it hasn’t
happened yet. And we stand back to back. Do you stand back to
back to Christ? Do you measure up? That’s the
key to discipleship. You are being filled full of
the knowledge and the wisdom of Almighty God until you grow
into the measure of the stature of Jesus. Remember when God made
man, he made man in his image and in his likeness. And when
man chose his own path and sinned against God, that image was bent.
It was broken. It was mangled by the fall. And
so we are being made, remade in our salvation into the image
of Jesus. We flunked, we failed in the
image of God and Adam. Adam brutally messed that up
for us. But in Christ Jesus, we are being
conformed into the image and the likeness of God through his
dear son. And that happens through discipleship.
Well, there’s a fourth thing, a fourth trait of this church.
They were focused on Christ. They evangelized, they believed,
they were in discipleship, but they were focused on Christ.
Did you catch the name at the end of our passage? At Antioch,
they were first called Christians. They weren’t called heretics.
They weren’t called Unitarians. They weren’t called Presbyterians.
They weren’t called Methodists. They weren’t called Baptists.
They weren’t called Pentecostal. They weren’t called the church
that split off the church that split off over the carpet and
the air conditioning units and all the rest like we get today.
No, they were just simply called Christians. They were children
of the living God in Christ. They were Christ centered. They
were focused. They were zeroed in on Jesus. And if you ask, I think in America
today, our church that’s largely deformed across America and in
great need of reformation, what is a Christian? Well, it’s, this
is not what it is. It’s, it’s somebody who embodies
the meekness of Jesus or the kindness of Jesus. You hear,
you hear this stuff, right? You hear it at the water cooler
at work. It’s somebody who just loves everybody unconditionally.
You know, you got to wag your head and look up far off when
you say it, because it’s really pietistic sounding. No, a Christian
is a person who knows they’re a sinner. and knows they are
lost and without hope in this world and that they are under
God’s wrath and his curse and face his sure and future judgment
unless they come to Jesus by faith, receiving his forgiveness
and salvation and resting in him alone in his work of salvation. That’s what a Christian is. The
world has it all mixed up these days. It doesn’t, the whole Bible,
through our evangelism, the whole Bible through our belief, the
whole Bible through our discipleship show us Jesus on every page. The son of God for sinners on
every page of the scripture, his blood, his obedience, his
life, his hope, his building up his church. Each
of you is building blocks of a temple not made with human
hands, where God dwells and he possesses you. And his name is
exalted. We want to be a church like this
one focused on Christ. We want people all around the
world, all around this community to say they love their Bible
and they love their Christ. That would be probably critical
in today’s culture, wouldn’t it? But we would say you got
that right. Amen. That’s us. Well, the last
thing we want to think about is their mercy. There was a need
in Jerusalem because of a famine and there was a new Testament
prophet. You probably hadn’t thought of
that before, but yes, there were prophets in the new Testament.
They don’t write books and their names aren’t as big as Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Daniel, and all the rest, but Agabus would have been
a prophet of the new Testament. Um, God let him know through
the spirit, there’s going to be a famine. And so what did
they want to do? Let’s take care of the church where there’s a
famine. You know, today in our culture, when there’s a material
need that’s met, we usually say, go to social services. You go
here, you go here, you go here, you go here. But for centuries,
until government got involved, who did the helping? It was the
church. I can remember several years
ago, we had somebody in our congregation who didn’t, they were underemployed
or unemployed or something. So I went to the deacons we had
at the time, and I said, hey, so-and-so in our church needs
some help. Well, have they gone down to the unemployment office? And I stared at him. Have you
forgotten who we are? We are the church. We are the
first line of defense for our own people when they need help
and assistance. We don’t run to the government
for help. Yes, there are programs in place and we should take advantage
of them because we’ve paid in and that’s sort of our social
structure in America. But the church ought to be the
first line of defense when there are needs of mercy. We ought
to be thinking about Kentucky. How can the church of Jesus Christ
help? And you know, the church up the road here that has the
Baptist on mission, those trailers will probably be gone tomorrow
morning if they’re not gone already. Samaritan’s Purse will be up
there. And on and on, we see in the life of God’s people,
them wanting to be merciful. And so the people of God at Antioch
said, hey, let’s help out. They raised some funds and they
send Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem with relief for this great famine. Friends, this is what it’s like
to be in the body of Christ in a church that believes the Bible,
practices the Bible, and doesn’t let itself get all cluttered
up with all the trappings of the world. You know, we could
hire a massive staff. We could offer every little thing
that every church offers. But Christ would be obscured.
Discipleship would turn into playtime. and on and on we go. And so why would we contribute
to the deformation of the church? Yes, there’s time and place for
some of the fun things in the life of God’s people. We don’t
wanna say it’s all wrong, but we need to keep our focused on
these things. And we need to expect that God
will grow our church, the church, as he did back in the days. Remember
whose church it is, it is Christ. Remember who gives the marching
orders, it’s Christ. And remember who we are. We are
Christians. We are Christ followers. And may God give us the grace
to be the biblical church, the faithful church, the fruitful
church. Pray with me. Our great God,
we thank you so much that in eternity past, you set your affection
upon a people. The father gave to your son a
people that he would call and redeem and save to himself. and
one day bring into his glorious presence where they might worship
him forever. We thank you that we’re a part
of that glorious gospel call, that wonderful eternal hope.
But Lord, until you call us home to heaven, you’ve left us on
earth to be a witness. You’ve left us on earth to be
an outpost of heaven. And so we want the fragrance
of our fellowship to be the fragrance of heaven. We want the things
that we do here to be, because you’ve commanded them. We want
the things that we do here to be a foretaste of glory divine. So Lord, help us to always be
thinking what’s biblical, what’s faithful, what’s true, what’s
good, what’s beautiful, and help us to do it all to the glory
of God with the best of our energies, remaining steadfast to the Lord
and in our purpose. We need your help because we
get sidetracked, we get bored, we want to change things up,
but remind us The simplicity, the meat and the potatoes are
just fine, because that’s what you choose to give your servants. So hear us and help us now, we
pray in the name of Christ, amen.