-We’re all called to be witnesses, but some of us will also be called to serve as missionaries in cross cultural contexts. There has been a growing trend to conflate those terms where people will say things like “we’re all missionaries,” or “we’re all supposed to be missionaries,” which I’ve even said previously! And then I married an MK (if you’re not in on all the secret lingo, an MK stands for “missionary kid”).
-One conjecture I have is that by labeling everything as “missions” we downplay the significance of true missions, which I think should be more narrow in focus than “everyone’s a missionary.” Missionaries are those called and commissioned to go to a different culture and place than they’re used to in order to make disciples, plant churches, and take the message of the gospel with them. And God might be calling some of you to that task!
-And you may be thinking: Mike, does this really matter? Who cares what we call them? But I think it does! Because we’re all called to something, but we’re not all called to the same thing. We’re all called to be witnesses, we’re not all called to be missionaries. In fact, I know someone who had their first fight post getting married about this very topic! Today’s text takes us in a new direction. We’ve seen some cross-cultural ministry taking place, but now that focuses moves us in a new direction where we’re now going to be looking at Paul’s first missionary journey.
READ/PRAY 13:42-52 (pg. 980)
-Overview of this first missionary journey. If you’re like me, reading it on the page doesn’t help me follow the journey, so I did both a map and an outline of the journey. And I post the slides on the website before I go home on Sundays, so you don’t need to take a picture of this.
-A normal pattern for Paul’s missionary journeys becomes evident in these chapters: show up at the synagogue, tell them about Jesus until they run him out, then start sharing it with the Greeks. (inspiration for Rom. 1:16)
-Antioch is the sending church, Salamis on the island of Cyprus is the first stop where they go to the synagogue and then work their way across the island of Cyprus until they get to Paphos where they come across a sorcerer who’s also described as a false prophet. Paul condemns the man and blinds him, which leads to the leaders of the city believing in Jesus. Then they sail up to Perga (where John Mark leaves them, which will later become a point of contention between Paul & Barnabas) work their way up to a different Antioch where they again go to the synagogue and this time Paul is invited to preach which he uses to talk about Jesus being the promised descendant of David, they’re invited to come back the next week and talk more, so they do, but the Jews get upset and eventually stir up enough people to run them out of the city.
-Their next stop is Iconium (do you see this area is called ‘Galatia,’ this is where Paul’s first letter called Galatians is sent). Once again, they go to the synagogue where they talk about Jesus and the Jews get upset and hatch a plot to stone them, but Paul and Barnabas hear about it and run away to Lystra. In Lystra Paul heals a cripple (just like Jesus and Peter), which leads to the people thinking this is the Greek gods coming down to them (if you’ve seen the new Odyssey movie, “Zeus’s rule” mandates hospitality to strangers in case the person is a god in human form). But in a turn of events, instead of being worshipped as gods, Jews followed Paul and Barnabas from their previous stops and stir up the crowd enough to stone Paul, leaving him outside the city since they thought he was dead. But God preserved Paul, and they continue their journey to Derbe, preach the gospel there, and then backtrack (with 1 additional stop) before going back home to Antioch and sharing all that God had done in their travels.
-There’s the overview! But there’s some things I think we could benefit from looking in more detail from this missionary trip.
-And one quick note – Paul wasn’t his post-conversion name, it’s the Greek form of his Jewish name, and from this point forward, Luke will refer to him as Paul, which signals the focus of this book is moving from Jewish centered to Greek centered (which will also come up in today’s chapters).
- Witnesses Require a Call
-One of the things that stood out to me in seminary is that some people who think they should be pastors really shouldn’t be, but the seminary isn’t going to tell them that (they need the money). I was even talking to Micah about it this week, some pastors are really mean people who really like arguing and debating, but haven’t grown in their love of others. It’s one thing to pass a seminary class, it’s a completely different thing to serve as a pastor in a church where all the idealism and “right theological answers” meet flesh and blood people.
-When I talk about requiring a call, there’s a difference between a general call vs. specific call. We’re all generally called to serve as witnesses to Jesus (I get that word from Jesus in Acts 1:8), but some people are called to a specific thing, and God gifts everyone differently so that we can all reach out into various areas with our unique gifts to be a blessing to others. And some people are called by God to serve in vocational ministry, but not everyone. But one key to this is it’s not enough to have an internal call, that internal call requires an external call or validation from a church. Which is what we see in this text, the church is the one who calls out and affirms the internal call of people.
-Starting back in Acts 11, the focus of the early church has shifted in this book from Jerusalem to Antioch. Barnabas was commissioned by the church in Jerusalem to visit the church in Antioch, which he does and goes on to encourage them to remain faithful. Then he gets Paul and brings him back to Antioch, and that became their sending church.
-One other note about this church, this is where they’re first called Christians (trendy in college to not use that term). If it’s good enough for the early church, it’s good enough for me!
-One of the important notes about this church is we see the diversity of leadership. This has been the direction God has been moving. It started with 1 nation, but as the Word has gone out, it’s drawn in people from every tribe and tongue and nation, and here the leadership of the church reflects that reality.
-Prayer is connected to fasting in the decisions the church makes (which is why I sent out an email in June asking the church to pray & fast before our annual business meeting)
-We’ll look at aspects of their journey in the next section, but their focus is on the church at Antioch. At the end of their missionary journey, they backtrack through all the places they’d previously visited to “strengthen” the disciples.
-And now they appointed elders in every church (seems to be the practice: get the church started, let them grow and mature, and appoint elders WITH prayer and fasting again)
-They continue preaching even on their return journey
-And then they go back home to give a report back to their sending church.
-The Bible knows nothing of a solo, rogue missionary. There always needs to be a group who’s sending the missionary out for support and accountability.
-Knowing your call requires you to be in relationship in a church with others who can affirm and clarify your giftings (which is why membership is so important: a commitment to a specific people in a specific place).
- Witnesses Must Contextualize
-This one requires some clarifying, because we can at times over contextualize to the point that we abandon the gospel! But I think it’s interesting the way Paul meets the people where they are and then moves them towards Jesus. And he’s going to do it over and over again throughout the rest of this book!
-But it doesn’t start with Paul’s contextualization, I think it starts with Barnabas! Do you remember the first time Barnabas showed up in the book what he was described as? Acts 4 says he’s a Levite and born in Cyprus. Where is the first place they stop? Barnabas’s island of Cyprus. Don’t miss the opportunities for you to witness in the places that you’re from! God has created and designed all of us uniquely to serve as His witnesses.
-But also, don’t miss who’s initiating this missionary trip: the Holy Spirit. God is the initiator, the sustainer, the beginning and the end of it all.
-And Paul starts with what they know: the history of their people that God repeatedly tells them to remember.
-Includes “God fearing” Greeks, they’ve come up repeatedly throughout the book, those non-Jews who believed in the one true God. And I love the way Paul describes God’s relationship to Israel in the wilderness in vs. 18 “he put up with them.” That’s probably a good description of all of God’s children!
-Then he goes to David, then David’s descendant Jesus, and points out how the OT pointed forward to that eventual descendent, but it’s all centered on the stories the people know.
-And then in a new city in 14, they start in the synagogue until they’re run out, and then in Lystra, the people think they’re gods because of the healing of a cripple. And look how Paul talks to them:
-He quotes the OT (it’s in bold), but you don’t need to know it’s in the Bible to understand what he’s saying. And he talks about God’s kindness and provision towards even these other nations.
-I find it incredibly ironic that the city thinks these are gods come down to visit when the message they’re trying to share is that God did come down to visit as the man Jesus! The people had the right idea; it was just aimed in the wrong direction!
-Desires of the heart can lead to a great witnessing opportunity. Think of the way God designed us, we get hungry because there is a thing called food. We get thirsty, and God has provided a thing called “water.”
-CS Lewis on desires:
-Friends, we see here that not every gospel presentation has to start with Scripture. Take advantage of normal, everyday conversations and bring them back to Jesus. Since God created everything, we can find some way to bring it back to Him if we just spend time thinking about it.
-I was thinking about this in terms of a certain style of church that protests and pickets at various places. There’s even one “church” that has the website “God hates fags.com” Do you think Paul would approve of something like that today? There are ways of witnessing that can actually push people further away from God instead of closer to Him, that’s not what we’re called to do! In our evangelism we look to carefully steward the situation we’re in. Point people to Jesus, love them and honor them as humans created as the image of God, and then help them understand that apart from Jesus there is no hope.
-But even as we work to serve as faithful witnesses who are working to contextualize the gospel, at the same time we have to admit that we’ll also experience persecution.
- Witnesses Will Experience Persecution
-If you were here in 2024, we went through Revelation together, and one of the key themes that came out of that book was this picture: What we see in the Bible is increasing polarization: people are being saved while simultaneously we see evil growing. And guess what we see in Acts? That exact same reality! The gospel is going out, the Holy Spirit is moving in power, and persecution is growing.
-Which is a good time to remind us to be praying for our church! When things seem to be going well, when there’s unity on staff and in leadership, Satan would love nothing more than to find some way to bring dissension and division. Don’t give in!
-The initial response to Paul’s first sermon is rejoicing and honoring the word of the Lord.
-I haven’t stirred the theological pot up in a while, so to spice up the conversation, is salvation God’s responsibility or human’s responsibility? The answer is yes! We see that in 48 here, as many were appointed, believed. God appointed which is His responsibility, humans believe which is our responsibility. There’s more that could be said about both sides of that, that’s a topic for a different time, just wanted to point out what this text says.
-As I said previously, we see the Word going out and people responding in faith, and at the same time increasing evil and persecution. This section doesn’t tell us what the persecution is, but it does say the outcome of it:
–51 shake the dust off: this is something Jesus commanded the disciples to do in Luke when they were taking the gospel to a town that didn’t receive their message. It’s a way of signifying that they want nothing to do with that city.
-And once again, what’s the outcome of this? Disciples are filled with joy. Even the persecution that’s happening is leading to the spreading of the gospel.
-A similar thing happens later in Iconium: increasing persecution at the same time the gospel is effectively going out.
-It isn’t necessarily a virtue to grimace and bear persecution all the time. You can see at times the early disciples endure and persevere under persecution, but other times they do what they can to escape. Paul’s already been put down outside a city wall in a basket, here apparently, they just run away. But look at what they continue doing along the way: preaching the gospel. Nothing can stop them, nothing can get in their way, it’s almost like a postal worker: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…”
-But we also see that the persecution gets worse the further along they go, and it almost reads as if each time they escape persecution, the persecutors aren’t too far behind them. So once again, as the gospel effectively spreads, the persecution increases. And in Lystra it reaches its peak in stoning Paul to the point where they thought they’d killed him. Paul is beginning to learn exactly what God meant when He told Paul that he would suffer for the name of Jesus! Now either getting knocked out wasn’t as severe as it appeared, or God miraculously healed Paul, because after being stoned and left for dead, he spends the next day walking 60 miles to another city!
-Just to remind you where we’ve been: this is the journey we’ve been tracing over the course of this book. Walking, talking, sailing across the eastern side of the Mediterranean, preaching the gospel everywhere they go as they chase down the way the Holy Spirit is working and moving.
-What about you? If you’re a Christian, you’ve been called to be a witness as well! You’ve been called to preach the gospel everywhere you go in your life!
-I think we all need the reminder that our role is to intentionally be reaching out with the hope of the gospel to others. Here’s the crazy reality: God’s plan to reach others with this message is you and me. That’s it. It’s normal people who are working to faithfully follow Jesus with their lives and then telling others about it and inviting them to join them in that pursuit.
-I listened to a podcast this week with Michael Keller, son of Tim Keller who’s a pastor in NYC. Part of his testimony is that he didn’t become a Christian until he went to college. Even though he grew up with the best gospel presentation in the world from his dad! Because the reality is a gospel presentation doesn’t save you, the gospel itself saves you. So friends, trust the gospel, and tell others to trust that same gospel!
-My hope for this series is that we grow in our awareness and ability to talk about the gospel in our normal every lives. One of my prayers for our church is that every one of us serves as a faithful witness that points others to Jesus in our everyday conversations. I grew up in the church, my dad is a pastor, which means I’m one of the least likely people to be up here (or maybe the most likely depending on what you’ve seen of pastor’s kids!). One of the things that I always struggled with was how easy it is to get so busy with church events that it didn’t leave any time to be engaged in the community. Growing up we had Sunday morning service (with Sunday school), Sunday evening prayer gathering, Wednesday night kids’ ministry, small group another night, Bible study another night, music practice another night, it’s so easy to become so busy that you don’t have any time to be a witness to others.
-Once again, don’t take this to the extreme and say, “Pastor Mike told me to not do any church things!” That’s NOT what I’m saying! What I am saying is we need both the gathering and the scattering, we need to meet together for encouragement and support, and then we need to spend time in the community to shine as salt and light: salt was a preservative in the 1st century, and we all know how much we need light. I’ve shared this story before, but I think it bears repeating for us on a regular basis. We did the zoo lights our first year after we moved here. They set up a bunch of Christmas lights and then you drive around in your vehicle and look at them. This was 2020, so it worked really well at that time! What was really cool to me as we were driving around the zoo parking lot was off in the distance I could see the lights in a steeple. Can anyone guess what that was? The lights right above me. Church – our building every night is shining as a light into Apple Valley, that’s a picture of what each one of us is supposed to be doing in our lives. Wherever we go, we’re bringing the message of God with us. We are God’s salvation plan to bring the hope of the gospel to the areas that we live, work, and play. Wherever you go, you bring God with you. Whatever you do, you do with God. There’s a reason the Bible calls us the body of Christ, we are meant to live as the hands and feet of Jesus, carrying out the various ministries Jesus has commissioned us all to pursue. So church: as you leave here today, remember that you are sent and commissioned by Jesus Christ to be His visible witnesses in the world.
